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The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism

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

H. Aram Veeser

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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.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction

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The First Wave 1. Stanley Eugene Fish

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2. Richard Allen Macksey

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3. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-​Graff

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4. Vincent Barry Leitch

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The Second Wave 5. Walter Benn Michaels

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6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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7. Jane Gallop

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8. Homi K. Bhabha

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9. William John Thomas Mitchell

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10. William Germano

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11. Steven Mailloux

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The Third Wave 12. Wai Chee Dimock

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13. Rita Felski

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14. Kenneth W. Warren

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15. Cary Wolfe

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16. Martin Puchner

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17. Michael Bérubé

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18. Jeffrey Nealon

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Afterword by Heather Love

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Index

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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.

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INTRODUCTION  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

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The Rebirth of American Literary Theory & Criticism

Image 1. “Hostile to Theory”

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

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INTRODUCTION

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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”

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THE FIRST WAVE

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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 Catechizing (1978), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980), Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1999), The Trouble with Principle (1999), How Milton Works (2001), Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show (2010), How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (2011), Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (2014), Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn’t Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the

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Courtroom, and the Classroom (2016), and Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education (2015). Also influential were his articles in Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999. Stanley Fish was interviewed in his New  York apartment on February 27, 2015, by Veeser HAV: Can you describe your personal history with theory? SF: There was something new going on. The emergence of journals that were focused on theory contrasts to all those stalwarts, like the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, which is a name that tells its own story. But it was a question of which people were attending to which journals. I used to be asked at the time, “Who do you think will win out, the theory people or the traditionalists?” And I would just answer simply, “Who’s going to die first?” [laughter] That was it. It’s not a matter of philosophical weight. It’s a matter of actuarial tables. And it turned out to be so. But in 1976, American scholars of distinction, people who had long publication records, five books, chaired professorships at major universities, were attending the School of Criticism and Theory. They knew that there was something developing so they felt they had to play catch-​up ball, which is what they did; they came to the School of Criticism and Theory and they got the crash course from some of the people who were identified as writing the essays and books that crystallized the movement, at least in the United States. And the level of excitement in the classes and social interaction which I must say spilled over into sexual attraction. It was a heady combination of intellectual excitement and adventure which could not help but have an erotic component to it. HAV: Wait. Were they just going to get laid? SF: No, no. Of course not. Not at all. It was just that everything was happening in a way that, shall we say, accentuated excitement on all levels. How’s that? HAV: What is your history, the development of your relationship to theory? Your own personal epiphanies, revelations, shifts, breakthroughs, your thinking about professionalism. SF: It starts with an accident, as most things do. The exchange [of our] house in Berkeley for a penthouse apartment in Paris introduced [me] to a whole bunch of things, like Barthes’s S/​Z and Todorov’s The Fantastic in addition to the Derrida and Foucault texts that were already quite well established and discussed. So, and some of the members of that seminar [in Paris] were distinguished people, Robbe Grillet’s biographer, other people were coming in and

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STANLEY EUGENE FISH

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Image 3. “Absolutely senior people”

out. So I’m thinking to myself, When I get back to Berkeley, you know in the Fall, I’m going to have to teach a course in this stuff, which I only knew, even after the summer, of course, in a rudimentary way. But what better way to move into a territory that was hitherto unfamiliar to you than to teach a course in it. So that’s what I did, went back and taught a course in literary theory and organized it in a way that, in fact, I taught that course for seven years.

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HAV: What was your first theory book? SF:  Surprised by Sin ’69, my reading of Paradise Lost in my Milton book, was written before I  ever read a word of any theorists. I  hadn’t read anything. The explanation for that is my training in graduate school and my subsequent interest in, and lifelong interest in, still today, the history of classical rhetoric. De Man among others always saw that classical rhetorical theory was rich, not just, you know, a set of terms and dull definitions and stuff like that. A couple of years after the publication of Surprised by Sin, I got a note from Ralph Cohen, whom I had never met, and who had started New Literary History, and the note said in effect, “Well we hear that you believe something of general import about literary studies and literary interpretation. Would you share it with us in an essay?” And that is when I wrote the essay, “Literature in the Reader,” which was the first theoretical essay that I wrote directly in response to that nice query from Ralph Cohen. And that’s when I got into the theory business. When I said maybe it is the case that I’m developing something that has more application and scope than the attempt to elucidate a major literary work. So that’s how it all started. HAV: One could mention also that theories seem to roll off your tongue or your pen. SF:  They’re all different. Let’s take Self-​Consuming Artifacts. Self-​consuming artifacts resulted from my observation when teaching seventeenth-​century prose, which is one of the courses I  regularly taught along with Milton, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and the rest of those guys. I  began to notice this pattern, in which you’re supposed to realize, at the height of your self-​congratulation, the fact that any good deed that you ever do perform is not the result of your own efforts but of the spirit of God working in you. And so then the idea of a self-​consuming artifact in two senses. That is, the structure of the work folds in on itself and its assumptions are shown finally to be valuable or trustworthy, but the effort that’s being made by the author is for the reader’s self, in the bad sense of self, in the sense of pride of self, to be consumed by the experience. HAV: This book wears its theoretical armour lightly. SF: There was no theory. And when I published this all together in a book, ’cause I had written the essays over a number of years, I put in “Literature in the Reader” as an appendix, making the point that I had not written the book so to speak at the instruction of that theoretical essay but that I could now see that there was some relationship between that theoretical essay and the way that I was arguing or analyzing. HAV: But the balance tips toward theory in Is There a Text in This Class? SF:  Absolutely, absolutely. Is There a Text in This Class? is 1980. So one of the important components of my theoretical work, in 1980, was speech-​act

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theory. Austin’s star pupil John Searle was a colleague of mine at Berkeley, and he would come to my classes and give little talks on speech-​act theory. So no one would mistake Searle or Austin for a French theorist. So that was one tradition that I was working in. I was also working in the tradition that was embodied in Don Hirsch’s book, Validity in Interpretation, whose title nicely names the theoretical: How do you go about asserting or assuming or demonstrating validity for your interpretation or for anyone else’s. So I would think of myself as being a theorist more in the company of people like Don Hirsch, or even Searle, who wouldn’t have thought of himself as a theorist at all. Or Jerry Graff. Jerry came out of still another tradition; he came out of the tradition in Stanford, where he studied with the poet Ivor Winters. I’m a great fan. Jerry Graff was, from the very beginning, somewhat skeptical of all this new theoretical stuff, but he knew it, and he learned it, and he wrote about it. I would think of Jerry as somebody who is with me, as opposed to people who were obviously continental from the very beginning, because they indeed were continental; that is, they had been educated on the continent, people like Geoffrey Hartman, or Ralph Friedman, or Riffaterre, obviously. So, those people. HAV:  But then why does Professor Benn Michaels draw such a firm line between you and Professor Graff? SF: I don’t know. What is his firm line? I’ve never heard of  that. HAV:  He thinks you are part of the theory generation, but that Jerry is an unparalleled genius of historicism. SF: I don’t know. There’s an early piece by Jerry, relatively early now it’s 35 years ago, University of Texas Law Review, 1982, a series of essays on legal interpretation. And Walter has a piece in there. And so do Dworkin and a whole bunch of other people. And Jerry has a brief piece in response to an essay by a man named Sandy Levinson. Read that piece. It’s really smart, and it’s very theoretical. It’s really good. So, then there are the French theorists. But I would think that I was more as I said the side of Jerry, of Searle, of Don Hirsch, of Wayne Booth in a way, ’cause Wayne Booth is invested in a rhetorical worldview. That is where I would see the distinction. HAV: Professionalism runs as an important touchstone throughout your career. In 1982 in Texas they were giving away TLSs with your defense of professionalism and the attacks on that by Edward Said and Walter Jackson Bate. SF: Ah, right, so that might have been in Is There a Text in This Class? HAV: The essay “Anti-​Professionalism”—​ SF: —​That’s in Doing What Comes Naturally. HAV:  But the debate itself was in 1981 or ’82, and it was fought out in  TLS.

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SF: In Doing What Comes Naturally the key essay was “No Bias, No Merit: The Case Against Blind Submission.” And what I was interested in is, What is it that the idea of blind submission presupposes? That is, clearly the assertion is that there is something valuable about this practice; that there is something that it safeguards or protects or enhances; that in the absence of that practice, something bad happens. So I was trying to figure what it is. It wasn’t too hard. What was being defended and supposedly furthered by the practice of blind submission was intrinsic merit. As opposed to extrinsic merit. And I’m trying to think to myself, What’s extrinsic merit? That’s the way the essay started, where I point out that no one bothers to define intrinsic merit except negatively, and there follows a list of things that are merely extrinsic to intrinsic merit, and I  give that list:  rank, affiliation, professional status, past achievement, ideological identification at least in terms of the ideologies of the academy, gender, and then I  quote someone who says, “And anything that might be known about the author.” And I’m thinking, What does this mean? What kind of notion of merit emerges from this? And I  quickly saw that, if you take away all that stuff, what you have left is not extrinsic merit but nothing, nothing at all. And that, in fact merit, rather than being a standard independent of professional achievements and the history of professional efforts, was the product of professional achievements and the history of professional efforts. Now that’s—​although I wouldn’t have named it at that point, probably—​an anti-​foundationalist insight. Right? So that the defense of professionalism is also an anti-​foundationalist assertion because the opposite of professionalism, the school of intrinsic merit, assumes that the value of things, that the identity of things, can be specified independently of any of the cultural, sociological, historical, ideological surroundings. When you think about it it’s really kind of bizarre. HAV:  Walter said, Well, this professionalism was our defense against the public, against intrusions on our judgment, a defense of our right to make our own judgments about the field and define it. SF:  I don’t think that’s right. I  don’t think it’s exactly right. Because that defense had already been mounted by the American Association of University Professors, in the 1915 statement, declaration on principles of academic freedom and academic tenure. So there was a very strong sense from 1915 onward, and then the iteration of 1940, a very strong sense that the business of the universities and the associations that grew out of universities was to protect academic work from interference by external constituencies, whether those be as in the nineteenth-​century religious constituencies or later industrial and business constituencies, or frankly political constituencies when we come to the era of political correctness, and stuff like that. So I’m not so sure I would agree with Walter here. When those of us who were writing about

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professionalism put forward those ideas, the objection didn’t come from the general public’s always dyspeptic view of higher education. The objections came from theorists! Especially theorists like Gayatri [Chakravorty Spivak], I  remember, and others, theorists who had an investment in what they felt to be the political payoff of theory. And here were people like Fish, perhaps Michaels, and a couple of others just saying, “Well, you know, this is the way business is done here, you know, this is a professional project, it’s not an exercise of virtue, or anything like that.” So professionalism was resisted by these theorists who believed that these new accounts were an important part of their political hopes for various kinds of reformations and consciousness raisings and all the rest of that stuff. The professionalism argument that I made in ’79 is the one that I am making in this academic freedom book. The professionalism argument is the “It’s just a job” argument. It’s important to know what the job is like and how you go about doing it, and what are the ways and routines and protocols and goals and obstacles and dangers and so forth and so on. But that’s what it is. It’s a job. I never thought that professionalism needed a defense. That’s why I wrote this essay against Bush—​Douglas Bush—​“Profession, Despise Thyself,” which led to the later essay, much more comprehensive, “Anti-​professionalism.” Nobody else has ever done anything like that, actually—​anatomize what antiprofessionalism is and how it works, and how in the end I say antiprofessionalism is a component of professionalism. But it can’t be taken seriously, in its own terms. If you deny that value exists objectively in the world, given either by God or by the material structure of nature, where does value emerge? And the answer is, to my mind, through institutions, through the institutions that are, as we now say, so easily socially constructed. But so what. They’re socially constructed, but that doesn’t take away from the reality of their operation. And so what you want to do is study the institutions which give rise to the activities that we all routinely perform. That was to my mind the contribution of the professionalism argument. HAV: Did the move to interdisciplinarity come out of the imperial ambitions of English departments? SF: No, I don’t think so. I think the move to interdisciplinarity came out of a desire to escape what was thought to be a set of false structures of authority and organization, located in departments. HAV: Now, how did you come to these various breakthroughs or insights? Did they just come to you? SF: No, no, no, no. See, the way I work is that I start with a problem. That is, some problem interests me. And I start to think about it. That’s it. You think harder and harder and harder about it. That’s all. But it’s hard. So I was saying at the end of Is There a Text in This Class? that all this theoretical stuff was really fun, but you couldn’t draw a straight line from it to

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any kind of interpretive theory or methodology for distinguishing the good interpretations from the bad ones. So, I’m trying to think, “Well, why is that so? How is this so?” I  always think in terms of “What are the people who command the field and occupy various positions that are thought to be important positions, what are they thinking? And how can I  respond to each of them?” And then I work it all out with examples and look for examples that will make my point. So it just doesn’t come to me. It’s a process of working through a problem. HAV: The sense that I got from Walter Benn Michaels was that over years, you and he and other people in the conversation were working through some specific problems—​ SF: That’s true. That’s true. That’s true. And they were problems of interpretation and the relationship of theory to anything else, professionalism, that is true. HAV: Were those problems historically determined? You said about the Milton book; if you hadn’t written it, someone else would have. SF: Yeah, I know that to be true because three or four people who wrote to me afterward told me that they were about to make the same kind of argument. And I knew those people. And I knew that they were fully capable of doing it. So I just got there first. HAV: So were these things, like professionalism and anti-​foundationalism and anti-​interdisciplinarity, historically determined? If you hadn’t come up with them, would somebody else have come up with them? SF: Yes. I think so. Yes. If you’re asking me do I think that I came upon these notions simply independently, no, I don’t believe that at all. No. HAV: What has been the impact of theory on prose? Has it all been detrimental? SF: These styles are all doing jobs of work, different jobs of work, different rhetorical jobs of work. And so Derrida would never want to write, although he can write, and could have written, as I do. He occasionally throughout the years would write me a note about something. But he wrote, when he was writing that way, in a style which was in no way, would be in no way recognizable to those who had puzzled over Grammatology or Glas or whatever it might be. I, on the other hand, have always thought of myself as having one talent, and that is the talent of being able to explain things, and being able to take somewhat complicated and layered concepts and introduce them to readers unfamiliar with them in ways that would render them accessible. That’s what I can do. So that’s what I do. That’s my view of my task. My task is to bring this news, whatever it is, to people who would perhaps not receive it were it not delivered in a style that in some ways is a betrayal of the insight that I’m delivering. You see what I mean? Judith Butler can write essays or books in which the vocabulary being deployed is fairly internal to the discourse. So that

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Image 4. “Wimsatt was ten feet tall”

in order for you to break into the discourse, you have to fight your way into and acculturate yourself to it. But on the other hand, she can write clear and limpid essays, especially, let’s say, when she is writing about the Palestinian-​ Israeli conflict, or issues of boycott, or issues of disciplinarity, she can be very, you know not straightforward in the simpleminded way, but straightforward. So I don’t think there’s any necessary relationship or consistent relationship

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between the purveying of theory and a certain set of prose styles. You’ve got Derrida, who refuses to allow himself to lapse into clarity of a certain kind. In many of my law classes I teach is the 1990 essay “The Force of Law,” a brilliant essay, but it’s an essay in which he deliberately teases the reader with the promise of a clear argument, even with the promise of actually beginning to make a point. And [crow’s caw laughter] he never does. Now, that would drive somebody crazy. Right? But one of the questions I ask my students to consider when we examine Derrida’s essay is, What’s the relationship between this mannered and almost baroque refusal by Derrida to afford a straight line of argument and his calling attention again and again to the fact that he hasn’t delivered his promise even to begin discourse? What’s the relationship between that and the point that he wants finally to leave you with? And it turns out to be an absolutely homologous relationship. Because the point of that essay is that you can never apprehend justice in the strong sense with a capital “J”—​directly. It’s impossible. It’s a kind of theological argument. You can’t apprehend justice directly. You can only apprehend justice through our provisional attempts in particular legal systems to approximate it. But those attempts are always going to be inadequate. They are always going to be, in Derridean terms, a trace. So, instead, he says what you have to realize is his version of one of his writing-​under-​erasure kinds of things. You have to realize that even as you necessarily go through the systems of law that have been produced by human agency, you cannot rest in them. You can neither discard them—​because there’s nothing else we have right now—​nor can you feel, consider them sufficient and totally complete, ’cause that would be a form, actually, of idolatry. So, as he says, we cannot address justice directly. It would be wrong to address justice directly. So that’s what he’s doing in his essay, not providing a direct address. So that if he were to just come out and say, Well, this is my point and here’s why, it would be in his mind a betrayal of the point. So that’s a style which will be absolutely maddening and defeating to many people, although I find it just terrific. But it’s not obfuscation for its own sake, or for the sake of retreating behind a special, mannered vocabulary. It’s not that. It’s doing a certain kind of  work. HAV: Have you ever read a theorist who writes so well that you might have wished to duplicate or plagiarize his or her style? SF: I can answer easily, the question of who would I plagiarize as far as prose styles went, because I did. The two would be C. S. Lewis and J. L. Austin. HAV: Well, this is a good point for me to ask you about your own sense of your own big interventions, contributions, breakthroughs—​ SF:  My theoretical interventions were more often than not on particular points. “No,” I  would say, “that’s not the right way to think about it.” Or

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“that’s not the right characterization of and/​or solution to the problem. This is the right one,” and for whatever reason. And then I would stop! That’s the end of that essay. And then there would be another one. I don’t know whether this makes any sense to you. HAV: Yes, it makes sense. SF: It’s not that I don’t think that the work that I’ve done was important. And it may have been that I would have done better professionally, or at least in some way, if I had produced a magnum opus of the kind that Michael Robertson has now produced for me. This is really nice. HAV: Now, how about your reflections on the legacy of theory? SF: I think the French theoretical renaissance and the ideas that came along with it, notions of anti-​foundationalism and deconstruction, postmodernism, and all of that, all of that stuff is really what fashioned the sinews of what we were doing. Though again I  would still affirm that there was a certain kind of Anglo-​American cohort of people who were continuing questions that had been asked in Anglo-​American philosophy by Wittgenstein and later by people like Jonathan Bennett and Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and so forth and so on. HAV: Is theory responsible for adjunctification? SF: So if you are an administrator, faced with this set of circumstances, again that the funds that you need have been withdrawn but the obligations to serve and to provide service have not decreased but in fact increased, what are you going to do? This is one of the things you’re going to do? Is it a good idea? Of course not. Does it produce inequities? Of course it does. Is it exploitative? Of course it is. But it’s the fault of theorists? Are you out of your fucking mind? That’s nutty. I hope it is. And I think it’s absolutely true. Has anyone said it’s the fault of theorists? HAV: Let’s go back to sex. Did the theory generation have more sex than the preceding one? SF: Well, I don’t know. I mean, there is always erotic energy in the academy because the relationship between teacher and student is easily and understandably eroticized. You can read the campus novels of Allison Lurie, or David Lodge’s novels, or Kingsley Amis’s. Academic work and erotics have gone together for a long time. It was when I was teaching that [first theory] course as a moonlighter, that is, teaching it once a week at Temple University, that Jane [Tompkins] took the course, or sat in on the course, because she was already a faculty member at Temple, and that’s how the relationship between the two of us began. So you might say that that Theory course which I thought up after my summer in Paris in 1969, led directly to my relationship with Jane and a marriage now approaching 37 years.

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HAV: Can you comment on a current trend against critique. Rita Felski has led the attack on reading suspiciously or reading for symptoms. She feels this style of unmasking or negative critique has run its course. SF:  That’s good, I  certainly feel that is true. I  felt it had run its course the first time it appeared. That’s the big debate I have with Judith Butler in my Academic Freedom book. Judith is still holding out for critique. HAV: Thank you, Stanley Fish.

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Chapter 2 RICHARD ALLEN MACKSEY  You can seem to master a subject that appeals to you. You have to be good at it. That is what I suspect drew some people to literary theory, because we don’t have to work so hard. Born: 1931; Died: 2019. Education: Johns Hopkins University, BA, 1953; PhD, Comparative Literature, 1959. Macksey received a doctorate in comparative literature from Hopkins in 1957 and joined the faculty a year later. He had joint appointments in Johns Hopkins’s School of Arts and Sciences and the medical school, where he helped design a curriculum that included writing and the humanities. As director for the Humanities Center, Macksey, joined by French literary theorist and philosopher of social sciences René Girard, then associate professor of French at Hopkins, and deconstructionist and literary critic Eugenio Donato (both of whom co-​founded the Humanities Center with Macksey), and with funding from the Ford Foundation, organized the influential international literary theory symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which featured prominent academics, such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and where Derrida presented his lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” credited with “tear[ing] down the temple of structuralism.” These lectures were collected as The Structuralist Controversy, the most recent version of which was published in 2005.

Publications The Structuralist Controversy:  The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970), Velocities of Change: Critical Essays from Modern Language Notes (1974), and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, ed. (2005). He was book review editor for MLN.

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Macksey at home

Veeser conducted this interview at Macksey’s home in Baltimore on August 7 and 8, 2015. HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory, the turning points, the confrontations, the defining moments? RM:  Eugenio [Donato] and I  kept revising our introductions because the book was changing and we could see in the moment itself there was a kind of Hegelian—​I won’t call it a haze, which sounds pejorative, but there was a penumbra of Hegel in much, and of course Jean Hyppolite was at the center of the French Hegel, the revival. The presiding spirit

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seemed to be Hegel. But then as we talk about the years between, we realize that there was a Nietzschean displacement of Hegelian readings, possible readings. Hyppolite suggested as someone to add to the agenda Jacques Derrida, who had been a student of his. We’ll probably come back to Jacques in various forms. But it was a great gift from Hyppolite. Hyppolite was one of the few people who could talk to a number of people from different tents, or camps. I almost think of it as a tribal thing. The book is dedicated to Hyppolite. The French participants already knew Derrida. Lacan, for one. Upon his arrival, I  met him down at the hotel where everybody was staying, The Belvedere. He’d come in from the airport. He wanted to know about the participants. Well, he knew; I  mean if you put it in baseball terms, he had the book on most of the folks there. But when Derrida’s name came up, it was on the last day, this was a Monday-​to-​Friday event or series of events; it was just a little cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand. But you knew this was a stormy relationship. Because Derrida had already published his book on Freud’s writing tablet. Lacan knew his enemies well. Of course, he saw it in terms of a critique of his own position. And what Derrida did here was a critique more generally of a conference like this. So although it seemed from an American perspective as a launching moment, it could be seen rather as a funeral moment or as a memorial. Because what followed, followed in the wake of Derrida’s work. But also [the title of the symposium] “the sciences of man” is enough to ruffle rhetoricians of the present, to say, “This is sexism again.” Well, you can’t dismiss that, because where are the women scholars in this thing? The thing that amused me was they’re not just ambiguities but they’re really conflicts implicit both in the title and in the sponsoring institution. Because the center itself got rather a pounding by the time we get to Derrida’s paper. The assumption of centrality. HAV:  I’ve noticed in your writing and speech a preference for humorous tropes. What about the pun? What service does that do? RM: In college I used to visit a friend who lived with his mother near campus. So we arrived at the house and his mother let us in, said, “I don’t know where that son of mine is. Sit down.” We talked for a couple of minutes. He came along. He came from the back of the house. And she said, “George, what were you doing?” He said, “I was out in the garden.” She said, “What were you doing in the garden?” “I was weeding.” And then I  make my unfortunate pun. She said, “What were you weeding.” And he said nothing because I interposed, “Pwoust.” Now is that a pun or not? I’m not sure. I think it’s a paran—​what do you call wordplay? HAV: Paranomasia. Yes. Like, “Brutus is a harsh man.”

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RM: That’s right. But there was a generation or two, probably two generations; it was very hard to find a philosopher who didn’t at some point bring in an allusion or two to Lewis Carroll. HAV:  So humorous wordplay had a humanizing effect on readers and hearers. RM: I wonder, however, since Lewis Carroll is by trade a mathematician and also did games of one sort or another, even coin counters. It might be quite natural for philosophers to turn to a mathematician at play. HAV:  But, Professor Macksey, where did you go to high school? Were you good at math? Were you known as a math major kid in high school, or junior high, or elementary school? RM: I had a teacher who was very articulate about the things that he couldn’t do. He didn’t have a three-​dimensional imagination, so solid geometry was tough for him. I found it very stimulating if one could see a solution before he could. Because it gave you a sense that you could do something original or do it faster in a profession. Competitive instinct in schools is maybe in too many ways and too many places over-​fostered. But if I’m not mistaken, this is a little different. It’s just knowing that you can grasp something that the teacher knows, but it takes him a longer to see the specific application or at all. HAV: And you’d make a distinction from competition. RM: Yes, which is just like, Will I get a higher grade than people in the next classroom. HAV: That’s an issue that has come up in a lot of interviews, the element of competitiveness. The Renaissance term would be “emulation.” But you seem to be making a slight difference. RM:  Yeah. Sheer competition is kind of a mug’s game. Well, this is partly because when I was young, one of the things we were being encouraged to do, partially by example, was to go after sprezzatura, in other words doing something very tough and making it look easy. Manny at third base. Do you know the Baltimore Orioles at all? HAV:  But to return to your kind of genealogy of humorists—​people who couldn’t beat up on other boys, bullies or who weren’t great at sports. Can you speculate about what made people go into literary theory? You, for example. How did it happen? RM: There is an element; you can do a kind of dominance theory about this. You can seem to master a subject that appeals to you. You have to be good at it. That is what I suspect drew some people to literary theory, because we don’t have to work so hard. If you look at Stanley Fish, who I think would call himself a theorist—​well, you might say he’s really just a rhetorician—​if I’m not mistaken though you get on top of something. If you’re too general about this, people say you’re sloppy. If you’re too strict, people wouldn’t say anything

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because they wouldn’t read you unless other people tell them to. But what is it you’re dominating, the text? Or another author? Or simply a situation in life? HAV: May I give an example. When I was a senior in college, I remembered that Edward Said had, the previous year, mentioned Georg Lukács. And I went over to Salter’s bookstore and, yes, there was a Georg Lukács book that had just been issued in English, History and Class Consciousness. I wrote a 30-​ page paper about it in longhand, had it typed up and then submitted it. Did fine. But now I knew a theory that could explain everything. My four other courses were waiting to have their papers written. I simply took literary works from each course and ground them through the Lukács meat grinder. And in each case, from the Day of the Triffids to The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Lukács provided an airtight interpretation. RM: That’s very good. I guess that’s good. I was thinking about the economy of theory with the minimum of  labor—​ HAV: There were raised eyebrows. George Stade, who was my popular literature teacher, I got my exam back—​ RM: That was The Day of the Triffids? HAV: Yes. And his note on my exam blue book was, “Oh, yes. Lukács.” RM: [laughs] And that was it. [laughs] HAV:  It was not subtle. So in that sense it was embarrassing. So there you have both the power and the debility of it—​is that what you mean by a theory getting on top of something? RM: I think of course you want to have both. This is why I find Peirce so interesting and so frustrating. I think he could have been a remarkably good literary critic. His daughter Lily wrote to his friend William James—​“Santiago”—​thanking James for sending a free book. In Paris they had lunch together practically every day All he wrote back and that’s in the two-​volume edition of the letters. And he said, “Well, I’m sending you one book which I think you’ll enjoy reading. But I think you may not finish the Irish book.” Which turned out to be The Golden Bowl. [Now this, just] The Golden Bowl, [and] one of Wells’s interesting popular, satiric [novels]. Well, Peirce wrote back and said, “Thank you very much for the Wells novel.” He disposed of it in a sentence. But he said, “Now, Harry’s book. I discovered—​” First of all he says, “It’s a triumph.” He says, “It’s poetry.” Then he says, “I think I know what he accomplished. But I’ll have to read it over”—​a long-​ish novel, that—​“in order to figure out how he did it.” Now that’s the theorist Peirce, yet it’s very pragmatic. We don’t know what James said, if anything, in return. HAV: That’s a toolkit theorist. The wish to take it apart and learn how it works. RM: That’s right. How does it work? You may watch and help me take it apart. HAV: And there may be an ambition behind it. “What if I were to want to write such a novel? What steps would I need to follow?” I had this experience when someone sent me a Frank O’Hara poem a couple of nights ago. My first

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pass at the poem was the rather banal observation that “Oh, you know, he talks about all five senses.” RM: Yes. HAV: So he has a kind of a machine for, at least on that level, executing the poem. He wrote a poem almost by going down a checklist of his five senses. RM: Just as the critics of the New Critics would say, You’ve got the mainspring of the watch as soon as you figure out what rhetorical machine the author is using in his theory. And that’s again, easy. HAV: Is that what they say? RM: I think so. Toward the end. And some intelligent critics, too. But there’s also the people who said, “How tired am I of that paradox.” Or that ambiguity or whatever—​summing up the best that’s ever been written in a certain genre. And you couldn’t also predict what people will like. William James couldn’t have been more wrong about Peirce’s reaction. He was attributing his own predilections to someone else who didn’t share them. That’s not to smear William, but I do think he’s been canonized a little prematurely. HAV: William James? RM: Well, Peirce of course is always telling James, “You really must spend a little time with logic before you write anything else.” I think Peirce is probably right. James’s version of Peirce’s pragmatism was a simplified version. So Peirce then called his theory “pragmaticism.” HAV: Could we possibly go back and revisit the idea of competition in academia. RM: “I got it faster,” which is a form of competition. “I got it easier,” which is the inverse, in a way. HAV: Certainly a more civilized form of competition, or controlled, than the kind that Professor Benn Michaels told me about, a kind that he attributed to a Hopkins culture of asking questions after talks. He said this was the place where no holds were barred. He said that there was a kind of competition among the very small faculty here to ask the question that was going to—​ RM: The stumper question. HAV: The question that would lay bare all the flaws of the foregoing speech, that would, in the words of one of Walter’s former students who is now a colleague of mine, Keith Gandal, “eviscerate.” RM: Ahh. Yes. HAV: And Walter said that you were very good at this, too. And you see it also in the volume The Structuralist Controversy that you’re frequently there with the first, telling question, after these people speak. Lacan! Roland Barthes! All these people in the pantheon. You’re asking the initial question. Did you wish to guide the discussion? RM: Of course there’s a tendency in asking the question to presume the answer. And I realized how often it seemed an answer that doesn’t explain anything,

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it simply establishes one’s claims and, if not a theory, at least one’s own agility. I distrust the loss of something in criticism, which is the encouragement to the readers to find out things for themselves. The reader is expected to learn a few tricks. Hugh Kenner had named it the Jane Principle. He was thinking of the wife of a great underground filmmaker. She said she loved novels, but all the novels are too long. So her solution was, especially successful novels, to read the first and last words, and see if that doesn’t give you the heart of the novel. HAV: [laughs] RM: Now, it works for some things. Ulysses is, “Stately […] yes.” That’s pretty good, I think. The Ambassadors is “Strethers’s […] Strether”; I think this is very good for that novel, but of course you’ve got to read the novel to figure out whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. But Jane represented herself as avoiding all the messy, time-​consuming work of reading. HAV: How about the end of Malone Dies or Molloy? “It was not midnight. It was not raining.” RM:  One of the things that I  liked was Moby Dick which begins, “Call.” I thought the last word to Morty was, “home.” “Call home.” Very modern. HAV: Of Moby Dick. The first and the last word. RM: Or phrases. I think it was brilliant with Tristram Shandy, as a way of eliminating what was at the heart of his prose. “I heard […] I wish that my father had met her,” and so forth, at the beginning, and “A cock-​and-​bull story, one of the best I ever I heard.” But “I heard” is very good, because it is so deeply rooted in conversation. It has to be heard. HAV: Is that significant for him, conversation? RM: Yes. He says it in various ways. But I’m sure he’s fully aware of the way that he proceeded himself. He was looking for someone who would do what he asked his readers to do. Then he would bully them once he got started. You know, he’d say, “Now, you missed something. You go back and read that last paragraph.” I can’t give you chapter and verse, but he does it in one form or another a number of  times. HAV: My [earlier] title, The Greatest Generation, is an allusion to the heroes who defeated Nazism in World War II. Do you see any military aspect to literature? RM: Proust volunteered to serve, initially. One of the most ludicrous moments in the history of French literature was Proust getting up at 5 a.m. to show up as a volunteer. He had of course served his military time, which was apparently a happy time for him. And he was ready to go out and defend la patrie. But they sent him home very rapidly. He spent the war of course not only in Paris but also in asylums of other sorts—​ HAV: Did the vogue for literary theory ruin critical prose? RM:  The way in which Jacques Derrida writes is a way which challenged readers in his day and still challenges readers. He sent me every one of his

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books after the symposium here. I think we were friends. He was very fond of Catherine, who didn’t read his stuff. She said, “I’m too fond of Jacques to read all the stuff he sends us.” I had a friend who was dean of the medical school, Tommy Turner, who lived to be 102. When he was 100, he put together what he had learned. Some of the things were interesting. Some of them were just very practical. He said, “If there’s a railing, use it.” I must remember that. He also said, “When you get a book”—​he suggested for a friend or enemy—​“When you get a book, always write a letter of thanks before you’ve read the book.” That’s pretty good advice. I find more of the conversational in Jacques’s writing than, say, Todorov’s. Well, no. Todorov has changed. He writes very different prose now than he did when he was at the symposium. Now he writes on more popular subjects. He writes in a more controversial way, which is either ruining or improving your prose. There’s no way between. Dennis, the editor who died just a year or two ago, had the bad prose contest. A lot of my friends were runners-​up and winners of this. Judy Butler won one year. If you just took the paragraphs they quoted, I think she won fair and square. I knew Judy. I liked her. Not everybody around here did. She left for very personal reasons, not for reasons that she found the place unbearable. Some of her writing has some bad qualities to it, but not all of  it. HAV: This might segue to the question: Whom would you have plagiarized? RM: Laurence Sterne. Partly because he seems so much our contemporary, my contemporary at least. And partly because he shows that writing can move smoothly from speech to writing. He talks about style in terms of trying to catch the fluctuations and the changes in register of spoken speech being translated to fiction. People have accused me of trying to write like Proust. Sometimes you read an author and at a certain moment you think, “I haven’t read everything, but that’s all that counts.” HAV: An important literary theory journal started at Johns Hopkins University. RM: We used to meet around this table. It was supposed to be a collective called Glyph. Walter was part of that group. And he sat at the other end of the table and was maybe the smartest guy at the table. But it was a group that was made up of people who were nontenured except for me and Billy Morais. It was going to be technically a collective where we would do essays. That didn’t last more than a few months I guess. It came out twice a year. Sam Weber for instance did a very interesting volume, and Walter was an active member of this and very funny. It was the kind of group that could take itself very seriously if it wasn’t careful. Walter kept that hand on it. He would make a puncturing joke at some point. If there was a balloon being blown up, he had the needle.

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HAV: Was Richard Klein in the Glyph collective? RM: He had a very active role in diacritics. He did a piece which I’m sure you know, called “Said Said. Said Said,” in diacritics. This is where he made the assertion that he associated Edward with—​God, what’s his name? He became a guru of the drug set. Paul Alpers. He’s a lawyer among other things. He defended a house of—​it wasn’t a house of ill repute, but it was a very smoky house up at Cambridge, where the neighbors said, “This is a one-​family restricted area.” There were people of all different races and colors and so forth and obviously not family in that sense. He construed family as those living together in some sort of semi-​permanent relationship and actually won the case. He became Baba Ram Dass. His father it seems to me was a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the great railroad firms. Richard Klein could find interesting things. It’s hard to conceive of, but he must be close to retirement now. HAV: Did this cohort of people form a kind of army? To go back to the military metaphor, “You could not have anticipated this group by looking at the English departments or the literature faculty of 30 years before.” RM: Yes. You could say that about a lot of disciplines at Hopkins and elsewhere. HAV: But one thing that he remarks in the epilogue is that, “Well, the first two issues sold tremendously well. 3,500 copies each. And then the sales tapered off.” But then the final issue, Number 8, looks like the first issue of Representation. Because they’re all from Berkeley. They’re all New Historicists. Greenblatt is in there. Jonathan Goldberg is in there. RM: Jonathan was here too. So there were Hopkins men in there. HAV: Was there a kind of movement from Hopkins to Berkeley at this point? Was it exciting to create Glyph during this period? RM: Yes, it was exciting. At times boring. We sat so many hours around this table. I liked it because it was the voice, not of the downtrodden but the voice of the unrepresented, the younger faculty. It came apart partly because of movements by the established faculty who went out to make sure that people didn’t get tenure. They worked very hard at it. HAV: Particular people? RM: Yeah. I mean, off the record—​my colleague Michael Fried said he was going to get first of all both Jeffrey and his wife. And he was out to get Sam Weber as well. HAV: In English? But Michael Fried was in Art History, was he not? RM: He’s also in the Humanities Center. HAV:  Walter Benn Michaels did tell me about Fried and Jeffrey Mehlman. It was a story about Fried abusing Mehlman. It’s some casual encounter in the gym, where Fried teased Mehlman. Mehlman had published a glowing uncritical review of some book. And Fried approached, teasing Mehlman with pretended admiration: “Your critique of this book was so subtle. When you

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begin to produce your critique, it’s brilliant because it’s so—​you don’t even see it coming. And then you take this book apart.” Mehlman was delighted that Fried was praising his review, but he was puzzled. He was thinking, “What critique? I loved the book. I didn’t say anything bad about it.” But Fried went on and on like this, making fun of Mehlman’s gullible pride for the amusement of Walter Benn Michaels. So it sounds like a fairly savage department or place to be. RM: Yes. This was a time. It was posited on the notion that the Humanities Center was very special. It was also special because Michael Fried wanted to make a few appointments, which he didn’t succeed in doing. He was opening up some spaces. Of course Walter’s Berkeley offer was not posited on his being in any danger here. He simply decided “Why not California?” At that time he and Frances Ferguson were married. She was not in Glyph. That made me nervous—​probably Walter too felt she should have been in the Glyph group because Jeffrey’s wife was. Oh God. HAV: It’s so complicated. RM:  Complicated. Yes. I  am exposing the underside of human nature. Michael Fried had made his point that he controlled what he controlled, and he didn’t object to this sideways movement. HAV: How did you organize the 1966 Structuralism conference? RM: We had great difficulty initially. René in Paris is sending me these frantic messages that Vernant had been denied a visa. The person who solved it was a woman down in the bowels of Hopkins administration—​she knew her way around the foreign student visas. I  said, “We have a very distinguished guy here.” He was subsequently in the College de France within a year or two. She said, “Did he go in the morning or the afternoon?” I said, “You mean to the embassy?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “I don’t know. I’ll call him. I’ll find out.” He said he went in the morning. She said, “That was a mistake.” There was a woman there whose name rang a bell. She was an anti-​Communist snoop from the McCarthy era. She had an appointment, and she was never there in the afternoons. All you had to do was go in the afternoon. He has refused to take an oath that he had never belonged to the Communist Party or to any—​ HAV: Which she administered right there in the office—​ RM:  Most people would say, “We don’t understand you Americans. Of course we’d do nothing to bring about the downfall of the American Empire.” Vernant was stickly I guess. Stickly? Is that a word? Prickly-​stickly. He thought the whole thing hilariously funny at the time. Sure. He did go back, and he got his visa without any trouble at all. Meanwhile I’ve got Milton involved in all this. “What do I have to do? What do I have to tell my brother?” HAV: Was he in the State Department? Milton Eisenhower?

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RM: He was in the Agricultural Department when he had been there. He was the president of Hopkins then. His brother was the president of the United States. That would have been a few years before, but Ike still carried considerable clout. And we had a good senator. Anyway, I was supposed to go to all these people when a woman down in the basement gave me the answer. She was a good person. HAV: Yeah. RM: Just go in the afternoon. HAV: You have captured the excitements of not just Hopkins but also of the Humanities Center, Glyph, the ferment that surrounded the structuralist controversy so-​called conference and then the formation of Glyph and—​ RM: —​and also the continuation of visitors for the following two years. That was important. That brought Derrida into the fold. HAV: You inaugurated a new era. RM: Really? So did Hitler. HAV: Thank you, Richard Macksey.

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Chapter 3 GERALD GRAFF AND CATHY BIRKENSTEIN-​GRAFF  Born (Gerald Graff): 1937; (Cathy Birkenstein): 1965. Education (Gerald Graff): University of Chicago, BA, 1959; Stanford University, PhD, English and American Literature, 1963; (Cathy Birkenstein): Columbia College, Chicago, BA, 1990; Northwestern University, MA, 1992; Loyola University, Chicago, PhD, 2003. Graff has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of California at Irvine and at Berkeley, as well as Ohio State University, Washington University, and the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000, where he is professor of English and education. Graff was a major contributor to debates about literary theory as well as author of the foremost historical analysis of English departments (Professing Literature). He and his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-​ Graff, have coauthored the influential writing textbook They Say/​I Say.

Publications Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970), Literature Against Itself:  Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), Criticism in the University (1980), Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1993), Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2004), and They Say/​I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (with Cathy Birkenstein) (2005). Influential articles include “Babbitt at the Abyss,” TriQuarterly (Spring 1975); “The Politics of Anti-​Realism,” Salmagundi (Summer-​ Fall, 1978); “Under Our Belt and Off Our Back” TriQuarterly (Fall, 1981); Essay “Taking Cover in Coverage,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001); and “What We Say When We Don’t Talk About Creative Writing,” College English (2009). Cathy Birkenstein-​Graff, a lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is coauthor with Gerald Graff of They Say/​I Say: The Moves That

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Image 5. “I was a kid who hated school”

Matter in Academic Writing, coauthor with Graff and Russell Durst of the reader version of that same textbook, and coauthor with Graff of Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment. She has published articles on writing in College English and, with Gerald Graff, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe and College, Composition, and Communication.

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Image 6. “Talking a blue streak”

Veeser taped the interview at the home of Cathy Birkenstein-​ Graff and Gerald Graff in Lincolnwood, Illinois, on July 27,  2015.  HAV: Do you see the legacies of theory in your coauthored writing instruction book, They Say/​I Say? Is there a theoretical component there, and what would that be? 

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Image 7. “Clueless in academe”

GG: If we’ve drawn on theory with a capital “T,” it would have to be in the teaching of writing, applying to it the post-​structuralist premise that identity depends on difference or contrast. When we argue that the most effective academic writing makes its argument not in isolation, but in response to something “they say,” we’re basically recycling the post-​structuralist premise that clarifying X—​in this case your argument—​means contrasting it with something

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Image 8. “MLA”

that is not X, some other argument. That is, the identity of what you are saying depends on its difference from what you’re not saying—​with something “they say” or might say, which is often a counterargument. Of course there’s a kind of instability in all this, since including this counterargument in your text, making it a central part of your writing, as we advise, runs the risk that readers will find it more convincing than what you yourself are arguing. It’s as

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if the very thing that gives your writing meaning and a point is also the very thing that threatens to destabilize it.   Let me say this another way. There’s a late chapter in They Say/​I Say on “Metacommentary,” which opens by saying that in every text there are really two texts. There’s one text in which you make your argument. And then there’s the second text—​the metacommentary—​in which you try to control how your reader is going to process it: “My big point here is _​_​_​_​.” “But don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying X. I’m saying Y.” If you don’t make that kind of metacommentary move, chances are you won’t control your reception as well as you might. One contribution of theory has been to call attention to this gap between what your text says and what you, the author, say it says. Our book highlights this problem and suggests how writers can minimize it. CBG: Another way that we’ve drawn on theory is to treat everything as always written, to suggest that there’s no outside to language. That is a—​and I’m not sure how far we want to take this—​but for us, everything is an argument. A written argument. An argument in language. Let me see if I can explain. Jerry and I don’t speak in terms of the facts. We speak in terms of arguments. The distinction goes like this. For many instructors, the facts support the argument, and those facts are empirically based in reality.  On this model, the main thing you want to do as an academic writer is make an argument that’s supported logically with reasons, evidence, facts. It’s a kind of foundationalist model—​the argument is thus grounded in something solid. For us, it’s different. Your argument is itself open to a counterargument—​a “they say,” as Jerry said—​and any “facts” or “evidence” you adduce are also open to some contrary interpretation that can be used against you. There’s really no outside to argument, no ground level outside language that you can point to and say, “Oh, here are the facts and I’m going to clobber my opponent with them.” Facts often have a duck-​rabbit quality. The argument never quite ends—​because there’s no outside to language that we have access to that resolves things once and for all. None of this is to say that there is no reality prior to interpretation, no such thing as “facts,” or that all interpretations are equal. But reality, “facts,” don’t speak for themselves. They always come packaged in interpretations or arguments. It’s really a commonality with Wittgenstein and Derrida and many others. This idea that there’s no fixed essence. If there’s any one soundbite of the theory generation, it’s this idea that there’s no fixed essence.  

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But on the other hand, for us, when we’re writing about argument, we do believe that argument does have a fixed essence: the dialectic pattern of they say/​I say.  While we’re influenced by anti-​foundationalism, we do believe that all effective persuasion does have this underlying—​even if it’s not immediately apparent—​foundation—​a ghost “they say” that haunts it—​that gives it its raison d’etre or underlying motivation. So in this respect we have a kind of complicated relationship to theory. We do believe that there’s a universal  essence or foundation to argumentative writing (the they say/​I say format), even though universalism and foundationalism in the theory world are big sins. HAV: Would it be fair to call your book a parasitic extension of theory debates? Harold Bloom’s theory about revisionary ratios seems also to be partly about restatement. Homi Bhabha’s theories about postcolonial mimicry might have something in common with counterarguments. These theorists also emphasize the importance and value of reframing things and of repeating things. So did their preexisting debates just come into sharper focus in your book? In other words, could your book have been written before the theory revolution? Could They Say/​I Say have been written for example in 1962?   CBG: For me, no. I think it’s deeply influenced by the theory generation. One book that I kept thinking about as we were writing They Say/​I Say is Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, especially his notion of the critical unconscious. To understand a literary text, Jameson argues, you need to identify this background unconscious and see how it generates the text—​how it serves as an underlying engine or motor for the work, a kind of launching pad that propels the text. For us this underbelly is not necessarily class conflict, as it is for Jameson, but simply something in the prior conversation that surrounds the topic that you’re writing about, even if you don’t name it. It’s a kind of animating or motivating presence without which your own claims won’t make much sense. GG: The absent cause for one thing or another. CBG: That’s right. I was trying to say that. The absent cause. And let me just add that this idea of an absent cause, a dialectical contrast, is deeply related to Jerry’s idea in Beyond the Culture Wars of “teaching the conflicts.” A dialectic, a conflict—​they mean pretty much the same thing, and we draw on both in our textbook. What “I say” only makes sense in terms of the “they say” that motivates, propels, or causes it, though we suggest, for maximum effectiveness and clarity that writers make this motivating force explicit. “Write the conflict into your text”—​“Plant a naysayer in your text.” These are two of our book’s big mantras. So to answer your question, we might have written an argument textbook before these two books, but it would have been very, very different.

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GG:  I agree. The message of post-​structuralism is that, contrary to what common sense would say, nothing just is itself. I think here of a student I once had who, when asked to summarize an article, turned in a verbatim copy of it and explained, when I confronted him about it, that the original had “said it so well” he couldn’t improve on it. Absurd as his excuse was, I realized it made a sort of sense: if a summary is a restatement of an original, what better summary could there be than repeating the original itself ? But of course we don’t count something as a summary at all—​indeed, we call it a plagiarism—​unless its wording differs from the original. This apparent paradox is what troubled Plato in his famous attack on writing at the end of the Phaedrus. He indicts writing because, like summarizing, it’s a representation that alters and therefore alienates us from what it represents, messes with the meaning it claims to transmit. You can see this post-​structuralist concept of “iterability” in our chapter on summarizing in They Say/​I Say. Writing a good summary, we say, involves being faithful enough to the original text so that it remains recognizable to someone who knows that text. But it also involves changing that text enough so that it has your own spin or “lean” to it, as Stanley Fish puts it. What part of the text are you selecting to summarize? What aspect do you emphasize? And how are you choosing to summarize it? So a good summary has to replicate the original and its purposes but also change it in accord with your purposes—​ it reiterates “the same” meaning, but can only do so by changing it. Which is another way of saying that identity differs from itself.  HAV: Very illuminating. It makes me think that postcolonial mimicry in the work of Homi Bhabha is yet a further development along those lines.  GG: Sure. Applied to cultures. Sure. Hybridized cultures.  HAV: So there’s clearly a legacy of theory in They Say/​I Say.  But at the same time, there’s no special vocabulary or jargon in it that postdates 1962.  GG: True; our main audience is students, so we wanted to write in an accessible way. We’re trying to popularize challenging ideas—​not just those of recent theory—​for as broad an audience as possible. CBG: And we may be breaking from theory in this. Isn’t this idea of popularizing in some ways anathema to theory—​and maybe to literary studies in general? Simply writing a textbook seems an anomaly, something that just isn’t done by the “smart set.” It’s almost vulgar or pedestrian to be “reductive.” For some theorists, as writers, “difficulty” is almost fetishized—​as if being a hard read helps disrupt common sense or the status quo. And in the broader field of English, and this includes theory, there’s a kind of disdain for textbooks—​for popularizing. It’s akin to the disdain for anthologies that Jeffrey Williams has written about.

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At the same time, this isn’t to say, as is often charged, that all recent theorists are opaque and incomprehensible. Jerry and I have both written about how overstated the charge is that equates “theory” with “bad writing.” And yet still, the theory generation didn’t make reaching a wide audience, undergraduates in particular, a priority. GG: Yeah, people make fun of bad writing by theorists, and there’s certainly a lot of it. But I  have a list of, at one point in Clueless in Academe, of theorists who are actually very good writers. Jonathan Culler. Robert Scholes. Stanley Fish. I  mean, Stanley Fish is an arch-​theorist and he’s a wonderful writer, and he always has been. Jane Tompkins. Walter Benn Michaels. Jane Gallop.  Bérubé is a particularly good writer, able to be both theoretically complex and hilariously funny at the same time! Yes, there’s often a lot of jargon in theory, but there’s also lot of good theoretical writing that uses the jargon well and translates it helpfully for a general audience. Along these lines, Cathy has a College English essay that defends Judith Butler, who is often ridiculed as the most opaque of theorists, but who, as Cathy shows, makes clear “they say/​ I say” arguments, and indeed wouldn’t have attracted the following she has if she hadn’t. We may seem to be contradicting ourselves here—​theorists are often clear writers but resist popularization. But let’s put the point this way: despite the influence that theorists have had, they didn’t make theory an educational project. It had nothing to do with education. It still has nothing to do with education. The theory generation had an opportunity to really educate students on a mass, democratic scale, but we blew it. Instead of a mass education project, theory became a cozy network of people who talk the same, think the same and have the same politics. It became just one more esoteric thing that most students—​most people—​don’t understand.    Let me tell you a story. Cathy and I were on the road—​I forget the college. We were taken as part of our visit to an undergraduate class in literary theory, with about 25 or 30 students.  That day they were reading Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” and it was obvious that the piece was completely incomprehensible to the class. It was ghastly. The teacher was talking a blue streak about “floating signifiers” and differance and so forth, and the students obviously had no clue. It was a replay of the famous classroom scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but with the students stupefied by deconstruction instead of the Smoot-​Hawley Tariff Act. CBG: I don’t think the teacher had much of a grasp. And the students—​  HAV: I never understood it either.  GG: But of course everyone was pretending to understand. It was horrible, the worst possible result of the theory revolution. Theory had these huge

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ambitions, but this class illustrated how easily it became domesticated as part of academia’s business as usual. HAV: This may sound unkind or harsh; you both seem invested in the importance of restatement, of summarizing oneself, of simplifying oneself, of clarifying what you are and are not saying, of popularization. Gerald, in Clueless in Academe, you quote somebody who says with disdain, “We don’t do that kind of simplifying here.” How does that affect the status and argument for the existence of English professors? If all they’re teaching is common sense, can’t anybody do that?   CBG: Wait—​I don’t think “simplifying” automatically means reinforcing or teaching “common sense.” You can subvert common sense simply. GG: You ask about the existence of English professors—​about their role—​ and for me this is a two-​edged question, because I’m not sure there should be English professors the way our profession has evolved. In other words, if what English professors do is exhibit arcane cleverness about literary works, I’m not sure that their disappearance would be such a huge loss. But to me the best critical work on literature, of criticism and theory, is only incidentally about literature. It exhibits qualities that one can extend out into thinking about the world, into thinking about culture, your life. One example is Michael Bérubé’s great book about raising a Down syndrome baby.  HAV: Life as We Know It.  GG: This seems to me the kind of thing that the study of literature should be about centrally. It should not simply have produced an occasional Bérubé or Lennard Davis writing about disability. It should teach how to be literate about everything, not just literature. I guess in this respect I’m the opposite of Stanley Fish, who argues we should stick to our job—​textual explication—​and shouldn’t try to “save the world.” I  think the mission of literary studies, of English departments should have been and still should be much broader than it ends up being.   HAV: Well, touché. I got some very helpful reader comments on my Said book manuscript. Frequently inscribed at the bottom of my paragraphs: “state the point” or “capture the point.”  Those are Jeff Williams’s comments. But let me ask another question here. Isn’t there a danger of making the they say/​I say move formulaic? Of making the they say/​I say move so predictable that a reader with minimal attentiveness will come to expect a repeat of that move? In fact, when you include the template in your textbook that Professor Birkenstein developed, it is very close to a Saturday Night Live parody of argument. So there’s a question for me: what’s the impact on prose style, on the quality of writing? What’s the pay-​off in terms of prose style? GG: Well, first of all, if you find yourself being repetitive or even becoming predictable—​and this again is a kind of a deconstructive point—​you need to

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add something different, more variation, to what you’re saying. There needs to be sameness as well as difference—​identity with a difference. In our textbook we tell students, “Repeat yourself with a difference.” In fact, this is a kind of deconstructive theory about how a text advances. You keep saying the same thing over and over, but each time with a difference that wasn’t there previously. “Repetition with a difference” keeps your writing focused and on track while still making it interesting. HAV: This is an enduring lesson. I find myself using it. GG: The same thing with our personalities.  HAV: Even when I’m writing emails, making sure that I draw the point, that I restate anything that might be open to an ambiguous reading. CBG: I would like to go back to your question, though, and ask about your use of the word “formulaic,” as if that term is an automatic deal breaker. You asked if there was a risk that using our templates in They Say/​I Say would make writers sound “formulaic.” You may not know this, but Jerry and I have an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Formulaic Is Not a Four Letter Word,” in which we defend formulas—​at least the right ones. In many ways this is another deconstructive point. Deconstruction, post-​ structuralism offers a powerful critique of expressivism—​the idea that in language we express our underlying, true, authentic, bedrock selves. We build on that critique and argue that all language is pre-​scripted. For us, language wouldn’t be language, a system that many people share and understand, if it didn’t rely on the repetition of conventional formulas that the speaker or writer didn’t invent but inherited. In our textbook we suggest that writing is a matter not of expressing your unique inner essence, but of mastering the convention—​the convention or Ur-​formula—​of listening to and responding to others, even if you go on to give that convention or formula your own unique spin. GG: “Hi, how are you?”—​that’s a formula—​where would we be without it? Sure, our templates can be used in mindless ways without any substance. But we think they are crucial pedagogically because they give students the language they need to succeed in academia and are not likely to generate on their own.  HAV: I have one final question. Does “Greatest Generation,” as in World War II fighters, legitimately apply to the theory generation? GG. To answer your question I want to go back to something I said in my MLA presidential address in 2008 when I  argued that the theories and methods of our generation have been revolutionary in some ways, but that, with respect to most students, they left things essentially unchanged. Talking about the Culture Wars debates between traditionalists and theorists, I said, and I’m quoting, that we had become “so caught up in the battles between traditional and trendy versions of intellectual culture that we lose sight of the

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fact that to most students it is the nebulosity of intellectual culture itself that is the problem, whether the form this culture comes in is traditional or trendy.” The theory generation was revolutionary in many respects and produced a lot of great work. I—​we, Cathy and I—​were deeply influenced by theory, as were a lot of our colleagues. But in my view “the greatest generation” in academia will be the one that does something that the theory generation didn’t see the need to do, and that is to really take on “the nebulosity of intellectual culture itself.”

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Chapter 4 VINCENT BARRY LEITCH  Born: 1944. Education: University of Florida, PhD, 1972. Leitch was a professor at Purdue and later was George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where he held the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English. Prof. Leitch has been an analyst and historian of contemporary literary theory and criticism. He has served as the general editor, in a five-​person editorial team (along with William E.  Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John P. McGowan, and Jeffrey Williams), of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001; 2nd edition, 2010; 3rd edition, 2018).

Publications Deconstructive Criticism (1982), American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (1988), Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), Postmodernism—​ Local Effects, Global Flows (1996), Theory Matters (2003), Living with Theory (2008), American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, 2nd edition (2010), Literary Criticism in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance (2014), Contemporary Literary Criticism: A Leitch Reader (2014) (a collection of 15 pieces translated into Chinese). Influential articles include “A Primer of Recent Critical Theories,” College English (1977); “The Book of Deconstructive Criticism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination (1979); “The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J. Hillis Miller,” Critical Inquiry (1980); “Costly Compensations: Postmodern Fashion, Politics, Identity,” Modern Fiction Studies (1996); “Postmodern Interdisciplinarity,” Profession (2000); “Theory Ends,” Profession (2005); “Work Theory,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 2005); and “Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty,” Critical Inquiry (2007). Professor Leitch submitted his responses electronically. HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory? What do you consider the turning points, revelatory moments, major confrontations and other

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Image 9. “The New Criticism was ably contested”

milestones of the theory period? I’m taking the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference as the conventional starting point for this story. VBL: Well, I think I’ll just give you a retrospective list of highlights, favorites and landmarks—​a timeline—​with brief annotations based on my experience of the rise of theory. Most of these events have complex roots and branches.

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Image 10. “Innumerable sneakers”

Elsewhere I elaborate on parts of this history, notably in my American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, 2nd edition (2010). Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970), influential proceedings of the 1966 conference at

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Image 11. “Theory riding shotgun”

Johns Hopkins initiating French structuralism and post-​structuralism in the United States. Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic (1971), key compendium of radical African American theory. Critical Inquiry (1974), leading theory journal established at the University of Chicago, preceded by New Literary History (1969) at the University of

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Virginia and diacritics (1971) at Cornell University and followed by several dozen other theory journals. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), widely read authoritative guide to French theory and MLA award-​winning book. Richard Ohmann, English in America (1976), ideology critique of the American English Department as a hegemonic institution. Society for Critical Exchange (1976), theorists unite. “Limits of Pluralism” (1976), MLA Convention panel featuring in standoff distinguished professors Wayne Booth (critical pluralist), M.  H. Abrams (traditional humanist) and J. Hillis Miller (deconstructor), with proceedings published some months later in Critical Inquiry (1977). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. 1977), accompanied by Gayatri Spivak’s 75-​page influential introduction to Derridean deconstruction and French theory. Edward W.  Said, Orientalism (1978), onset of academic postcolonial studies, Foucauldian new historicism and pioneering US cultural studies. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic (1979), feminist blockbuster on the psychosocial history of women’s literature. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (1979), Yale deconstructive literary criticism, rhetorical “close reading,” in its most ambitious, painstaking and bold form. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979), exhaustive and unforgettable account of how cultural capital works in contemporary society. Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious (1981), sophisticated synoptic contemporary Marxist high theory and model of “symptomatic reading” (aka ideology critique of literature). Mikhail Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981), influential theories of narrative and “discourse” (language). William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy (1984), chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), initiates US cultural wars by attacking higher education and defending both Western culture and his own canon of Great Books. Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto” (1986), groundbreaking, wide-​ranging and influential socialist-​feminist theory plus map of postmodern culture from a scientist. New York Times (1987), publishes article on Paul de Man’s links to 1940s fascism, casting a shadow over American and French deconstruction. National Association of Scholars (1987), US conservative antitheory organization funded by right-​wing foundations. Lynne Cheney, Tyrannical Machine (1990), NEH chair initiates another round of cultural wars, condemning academic research and singling out theory for special contempt.

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Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), masterpiece of queer theory with emphasis on continental European theory. Routledge Revolution (1989 onset), vanguard theory publisher during the 1990s, with pioneering editor William Germano at the helm. Cultural Studies Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana (1990), legendary formation of US cultural studies. Landmark proceedings published in 1992 by Routledge. Paul Lauter, Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990), US literary multiculturalism consolidated and triumphant. Teachers for a Democratic Society (1991), theorists unite against culture wars. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), contemporary Western culture memorably diagnosed in its third-​stage capitalist mode of production. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (1994), collected essays from leading black feminist, public intellectual and advocate of cultural studies focused on contemporary popular culture. Yale University Graduate Student Strike (1995–​96), encourages nationwide unionization of exploited teaching assistants and adjuncts. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), includes works from the colonial period to the present in two-​dozen languages. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), bestselling communist critique of globalization from two theorists published by Harvard University Press. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), theory consolidated by a six-​ member collective of theorists commissioned by the leading textbook publisher. (I serve as a general editor of this textbook.) Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, Theory’s Empire (2005), antitheory compendium of 50 carefully curated pieces. David Harvey, Neoliberalism (2005), popular incisive Marxist critique of global political economy in its contemporary merciless laissez-​faire mode. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), boldly promotes literary “distant reading,” applying big data and statistical analysis with such methods later elaborated at the pioneering Stanford Literary Lab (litlab.stanford. edu). David Horowitz, The Professors:  The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006), savagely indicts a who’s who of theorists. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works (2008), among the best of many critiques of today’s US corporate university, particularly critical of its degraded labor practices.

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Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading” (2009), much-​cited polemical call to return to literary close reading and away from ideology critique/​symptomatic reading. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), postcolonial ecocriticism focused on slow violence (e.g., toxic drift, deforestation, ocean acidification and climate change), which disproportionately impacts the global South, with Nixon highlighting writer-​activists who address the phenomenon. HAV:  What were your own personal breakthroughs, epiphanies, inner revelations? How did you come to theory? What were the stages in your development as a theorist? How would you characterize theory’s effect on your personality, behavior, history? VBL: A few years after I received my PhD in the history of poetry and poetics in the early 1970s, I switched to literary and cultural theory as a specialty—​a 10-​year process in retrospect. I completed three summer retrainings, with an NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship at Princeton in 1976, a fellowship at the School of Criticism and Theory at UC-​Irvine in 1978 and a Mellon study grant at the International Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies at Vanderbilt University in 1981. Such grants are rare today. During this time I completed an undergraduate program in French and then spent a capstone summer in 1982 at the Alliance Française in Paris. French theory was my focus during these years. William Germano, then editor at Columbia UP, published my Deconstructive Criticism in 1982, which I started in 1976 after reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology and then exploring its complex American reception as well as its French context. By the time I  finished my second book with Germano at Columbia UP, American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (1988), I had developed a point of view as a left cultural critic as well as a historian of contemporary criticism. Meanwhile, Germano moved to Routledge, which published many important theory books throughout the 1990s. What most shaped my way of thinking was researching and historicizing 1930s Marxism, the New York Intellectuals, literary feminism, black aesthetics and cultural studies. It was a potent combination. At the same time the Reagan revolution, the rise of neoliberalism and the attendant culture wars radicalized me. Not incidentally, I received a research fellowship for this book from the American Council of Learned Societies. An NEH fellowship supported my first book on deconstruction, but would not have been possible by the mid-​1980s when the purge-​ minded antitheory Reaganites came to power at NEH, notably William Bennett followed by Lynne Cheney.

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Looking back, I see the first quarter of my career as progressing from being a literary and philosophic dilettante to a committed productive scholar and from being a cheerful person to a sober, somewhat embattled critic. For this mood change I credit in part the antitheory culture wars started in the Reagan era, which to this day intermittently flare up. In addition, I  credit the rise of the post–​welfare state corporate university that has become increasingly vexing especially its exploitative labor practices. There are several other personal matters commencing in the 1980s:  a 16-​year marriage going on the rocks, a job turning sour and then a decade as a single parent with two college-​ bound teenagers. HAV: Have you got an anecdote or two that would help people to grasp the uniqueness of experiencing the rise of theory? VBL: Here are two personal anecdotes. In the early 1970s I worked for one year as an interim assistant professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Florida. It was my first academic job, not counting prior work as a teaching and research assistant. There I met Gregory Ulmer, later author of Applied Grammatology (1985) plus other theory books, who had just completed his PhD in comparative literature with Robert Scholes at Brown University. As new faculty members, we used to hang out together. He introduced me to French theory, especially structuralism and semiotics. Scholes was a pioneer in those years and Ulmer was an emissary. At first I put up a good fight, using Anglo-​American formalist theory and intellectual (not social) history to defend the historically informed literary and aesthetic criticism in which I was unrelentingly trained. Slowly but surely, I glimpsed the strengths of structuralism and soon moved on to reader-​response theory in the work of Stanley Fish and Norman Holland, which problematized the dynamics of reading against formalist accounts. I experienced this turn of events over a roughly two-​year period first as a crisis entailing a loss of faith and then as a conversion. Under the headings of both biting the hand that feeds you and coming out publicly, I  befriended the distinguished historian of theory Murray Krieger in 1978 at the School of Criticism and Theory, where he was the director. At a convention session devoted to his work, hosted by the MLA Division on Literary Criticism in 1981, I publicly attacked his work for 20 minutes in a very large crowded room, treating him as the last of the benighted though brilliant New Critics. There’s a Festschrift carrying this material first printed in New Orleans Review (1983) and then as an expanded book in 1986. I  had the impression at that moment, and occasionally later, that I  was speaking for/​channeling a generation in promoting new theory paradigms. Over four decades, I’ve been out as a missionary, not uncritical, for various post-​formalist theories.

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HAV:  What were your own most important interventions? Why were they significant? VBL: Interventions? Well, there have been many interventions, big and small, in my conference papers, articles and books, where I  critique others and develop my own arguments. Some friends tell me that my Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992) contains my most original polemics and counter-​theories. But the first items that come to my mind are some innovations in my earlier American Literary Criticism that maps five decades of critical history. To start with, I offer substantial separate chapters there on schools and movements not previously covered in panoramic accounts of American literary criticism, including notably the New York intellectuals, phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics, black aesthetics and US cultural studies. From a historiographical perspective, I do things my predecessors failed to do. For instance, with each group I systematically examine pedagogical programs and implications, stress marginal and contradictory internal elements, bring in for contrast parallel European movements and document reception and crossover phenomena. What else? Last but definitely not least, I programmatically foreground an array of key institutional phenomena such as the roles played by journals, conferences, presses, foundations, professional organizations and the creation of new fields (e.g., semiotics, narratology, women’s studies, ethnic studies, theory itself). Previous histories of criticism and theory tended to be intellectual history overlooking material realities. I  intervene and counter with concatenated materialistic social, political and especially institutional microhistories. This bulky book offers a singular instance of the 1980s turn to new historicisms. I’ll mention another intervention—​ my 2014 Map of Theory—​ a riposte to ubiquitous pronouncements of the end of theory and the arrival of a posttheory period, which have filled the air in recent decades. For me posttheory/​after-​theory phenomena mark a new disorganized yet prolific phase of theory, a veritable twenty-​first-​century theory renaissance outlined by the Map (a platform). HAV: What was the relationship between theory and writing? Theorists have taken a beating from self-​appointed arbiters of prose style. Is the chastisement warranted? How would you describe the various writing styles of prominent theorists? Are these styles of a Procrustean uniformity? Or are different theorists notable for distinctive prose styles? If so, how do these styles relate to the different theorists’ theories? VBL: As a longtime teacher of English composition, I am personally committed to clear, economical and elegant prose. Models for me early on were Roland Barthes, Barbara Johnson and Geoffrey Hartman (my teacher at UC-​Irvine).

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Image 12. “Map of Theory”

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Some famous theorists have written poorly based on American standards of plain style, for example, Judith Butler in Gender Trouble; Gayatri Spivak in the famous essay on the subaltern; and Slavoj Zizek seemingly everywhere, not to mention earlier figures like Hegel and Lacan. But it is largely a matter of audience. They were addressing highly specialized readers. The way I see it, every field has both insiders and popularizers. The latter favor accessibility and the former gravitate toward coterie codes. As a theory specialist, I don’t begrudge insider jargon and mystagoguery. While I  appreciate the plain style of Fanon and Foucault, I  respect the meandering baroque voices of, for example, Emerson or Derrida, whose distinctive sentences mimic the flows of thinking. However, as a teacher of theory to undergraduate students, I lean toward plain style theorists where available. Last point. Some complaints about theorists’ prose styles signal not only avoidance of engagement with the substance of their arguments, but also programmed devotion to hegemonic puritanical plain style (an American fetish). HAV: How would you characterize the relationship between American theory post 1966 and the dominant literary theories preceding them? Perhaps you could consider the American-​dominant New Criticism as one aspect and, as a different phenomenon, the efflorescence of French (and German) theory leading up to 1966? Did a desire to kill off the New Criticism animate the post-​ 1966 theorists, somewhat as the literary modernists were committed to extirpating nineteenth-​century literary norms? Was there real or only superficial continuity of New Criticism and post-​structuralist criticism? How about the French? Has American theory been little more than a re-​hashing of the truly original discoveries of Canguilhem, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, et al.? Or was the American scene innovative and fecund in its own right? VBL: However dominant New Criticism was in the early postwar period (1945–​ 70), it was ably contested in the United States at the time by the New York intellectuals, the Chicago school, philologists (especially E.  D. Hirsch Jr.), myth critics and reader-​response theorists, all home-​grown groups. Paralleling these challenges were simultaneous contemporaneous imports from Europe, namely, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics and structuralism, that is, continental philosophy. Keep in mind that New Criticism was itself not a homogeneous movement (for example, consider how different Kenneth Burke is from Cleanth Brooks). The dominant position of New Criticism, flanked by many antagonists, was short lived as was the fiercely contested post-​structuralism that replaced it in the 1970s and itself got nudged aside in the 1990s by new historicism, postcolonial theory and cultural studies. For its part, post-​structuralism was not one thing (Foucault vs. Derrida vs. Lacan vs. Deleuze vs. Kristeva et al.). Post-​structuralisms.

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Like Thomas Kuhn before me, I have found that when scholarly paradigms shift, it is a matter more of discontinuities than continuities. The close readings of Yale deconstructors only look superficially like those of New Critical predecessors. There are many modes of close reading. It’s not one thing. I can testify personally that the New Critical “close reading” methods—​ encapsulated in a dozen taboos and rules of thumb—​which I was taught in the 1960s by most of my teachers, had become stale and repetitive by the 1970s (see, for instance, the New Criticism’s dogmas on affective fallacy, heresy of paraphrase, intentional fallacy and literature as a unified autonomous verbal icon). If you want to find innovative and fecund American theory in the late twentieth century, turn to feminism, multicultural and ethnic theory, plus postcolonial and queer studies, none of which are European imports. HAV: What are the legacies of theory? What remains that is living and generative? What aspects of theory are vestigial and merely an obstruction? VBL:  To start with, how do you define “theory”? For me as a historian, theory begins with the confrontations among the ancient sophists, Plato, and Aristotle. It remains alive and well today. Talking of the end of theory or posttheory makes no sense to me. In any case, the most nontheoretical forms of literary criticism around remain steeped in theoretical concepts, devices and traditions. Check out your local community book club:  readers have presuppositions about plot, character, setting, motivation, symbolism, etc. My idea is everyone has a theory. The question of what remains today from the recent flowering of contemporary theory unconsciously links theory to the conditions of modern market societies characterized by increasingly speeded-​up changes in fashion. This thinking gives us the idea of a Theory Market and theory fashions, which I explore in Theory Matters (2003). What’s in? What’s out? What’s the newest thing? Where do matters stand today, for instance, with Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism? Are we now beyond new historicism, queer theory and postcolonial studies? What remains of post-​structuralisms? But in relation to theory, concepts of commodities, fashions and shelf lives compose a degraded though apt picture. All that said, I’m quite willing to play with questions concerning theory fashions. It’s part of a theorist’s job today to send out market reports. HAV: What are the futures of theory? What are the up-​and-​coming theories? Look into the seeds of time and say which will grow, and which will not. VBL: The best way for me to answer this question is to cite my Map of Theory, which is the flyleaf of my book Literary Criticism in the 21st Century:  Theory Renaissance (2014). There I explicitly address theory futures with the mid-​and short terms in mind.

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In this work I  develop four major claims, as the opening paragraph states. First, despite all the talk about posttheory and after theory that has been floating around for several decades, there is a theory renaissance underway. Granted, it is difficult to see at first glance. Second, as my Map suggests, twenty-​first-​century theory is knowable but unmasterable. This chart contains 94 subdisciplines and fields circling around 12 major topics (reminiscent of planets and satellites), which can change spheres and fuse into original combinations and crossovers. Third, the twenty-​first-​century theory renaissance takes a characteristically postmodern form, namely, disorganization or disaggregation into many subdisciplines, fields and topics (see my Postmodernism—​Local Effects, Global Flows (1996)). In a world in which there are 10,000 US mutual funds, 18,000 wines reviewed annually in Wine Spectator and innumerable sneakers to choose from—​with guides for dummies everywhere to assist us in these arcane areas—​proliferation and fragmentation should come as no surprise. Fourth, the 16 or so earlier well-​known twentieth-​ century schools and movements of theory from Marxism, psychoanalysis and formalism to postcolonial theory, new historicism and queer theory are, strictly speaking, a twentieth-​century phenomenon. Schools and movements do not pertain to earlier centuries of theory nor to the twenty-​first century. Nevertheless, they remain important today as sources and resources not only for practical criticism but also for teaching theory. By way of simplification, the 106 items constituting my inventory of theory can be regarded as today’s cultural studies movement in its disaggregated form. The takeaway message of my claims is that with literary and cultural criticism today, theory, for good and ill, is everywhere but nowhere. HAV:  Is “The Greatest Generation” an ironic sobriquet? Millennials as represented by Heather Steffen charge that it is ironic because the adjunctification of the profession took place on your watch. Is Heather right to believe that the theory generation ignored the political and social realities of the profession in that way? How about in other ways: was theory reactionary? VBL: The way I see it, cultural generations last roughly 15 years. At any one time, three or four generations are busy at work. When I was coming up in the 1970s and 80s, Lacan (born 1901), de Man (1919), Jameson (1934) and Gates (1950) were important living figures. There is no such thing as “a” theory generation. Concerning the rise since the 1970s of the neoliberal corporate university—​ with its radical defunding of public education, high student debt and majority disposable academic workers—​ I hold neither theorists nor baby boomer academics responsible. Permit me to cite briefly a 1972 article I  published in the MLA Newsletter (September 1972). There I  criticized as symptomatic an “innovative” short-​ term postdoctoral internship advertised by a large

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research university offering half the normal salary for “feeding off the desperation of the unemployed intellectual proletariat” (7–​8). I was a desperate new PhD and could see what was happening. I was not alone—​far from it. Not incidentally, I came to document the sorry history of contemporary US academic labor—​adjunctification—​in “Work Theory” published in Critical Inquiry (2005) and updated in my book Living with Theory (2008). By the way, union membership in the US labor force of 150 million workers has declined over the past 50 years from 33 percent to 10 percent. The fact that the US academic workforce of roughly one million went from 80 percent tenure track in 1970 to 27 percent tenure track today has little to do with literary theory and theorists or a particular academic generation. Okay, yes, faculty should have unionized, though the 1980 Yeshiva University US Supreme Court decision installed an effective roadblock against unionization, not to mention the nationwide rise to power of the union-​busting right and fellow-​traveling media. And then there’s the problem of faculty identifying with the aristocracy, not the working class. If you’re looking for reactionary theory, I  would recommend looking at the culture wars and especially extreme right-​wing warriors. Start with David Horowitz’s The Professors:  The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006), which singles out as dangerous professors an array of theorists, including Stanley Aronowitz, Amiri Baraka, Michael Bérubé, Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Fredric Jameson, Eve Sedgwick and Michael Warner. I am surprised, Professor Veeser, that you did not make this blacklist. HAV: After going through these questions, you are invited to comment on the questions themselves. Have I  asked the right ones? Have I  neglected to ask about matters that you consider crucial? Do you have any general comments or advice about this historical project of  mine? VBL:  I believe the best way for me to respond here is to list a handful of features characteristic of the spread of theory during the past 60  years as well as timelines worthy of consideration for a new history of contemporary theory. Theory Pedagogy. In this broad category I would include the abundance of theory-​specific syllabi, course packs, textbooks, conferences, special issues of journals, book collections and reference sources (encyclopedia, glossaries, guides, etc.). Theory Job Market. A distinctive market for theorists existed for two decades starting in the early 1980s, a time when others and I had interviews for designated theory jobs. I was hired explicitly as a senior theorist at Purdue University in 1986 and later at the University of Oklahoma in 1997, and interviewed early in the new century at several research institutions seeking theorists. Data should be available with the MLA’s Job Information Lists. Perhaps many such jobs were

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for senior scholars. While the proliferation of theory in the new century has rendered it ubiquitous, it is positioned presently as an essential secondary specialty. In the twenty-​first century, faculty hiring has largely reverted back to the modern standard matrix of period-​nation-​genre, such as nineteenth-​century British novel, with theory riding as essential shotgun. Theory Book Series. Now widespread, a series of books dedicated to theory commenced in earnest during the early 1980s. I’m thinking of the University of Minnesota Press’s fertile Theory and History of Literature and Columbia University long-​standing European Perspectives, both started around 1980. But there are many, many more, and they keep popping up. Check any scholarly press for its series, which frequently publishes interesting theoretical works. Theory Programs. Theory curricular tracks, certificates, centers, institutes and lectures series have proliferated and did not exist before the 1970s with a few exceptions. So, for example, I co-​founded the semi-​autonomous Theory and Cultural Studies Track in the English Department at Purdue University. Many universities have designated theory programs of one sort or another. They’re the lifeblood, segments of the capillary system, of theory in our time. Theory Crossovers. An unprecedented abundance of theory-​indebted works—​crossover texts—​marks out the position of contemporary theory as an enabler of increasingly expected academic research and innovation across all literary periods and cultural practices. See, for instance, the extensive theory bibliography at the end of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition (2010), which lists well-​received crossover texts that mark fruitful intersections between and among 16 schools and movements. For example, it cites for African American criticism and theory influential crossovers with Marxism, structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, queer theory, cultural studies and so on. It would be easy enough for the field of recent English Renaissance studies, let’s say, to showcase scholarly works shaped by feminism, queer theory, new historicism, psychoanalytical theory, etc. I don’t see an end to such crossover publications, quite the opposite. This phenomenon forms a significant part of the story of contemporary theory—​ to the utter dismay of antitheorists. (By the way, the Norton bibliography was not updated for the 2018 third edition given the vast profusion in the interim of not only theory publications but also online theory materials and crossover works.) Theory Exports. As a theorist, I  have been invited to teach and lecture in an array of countries (for instance, China, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Hungary and India). My American Literary Criticism has been translated into several languages (Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese and Korean). Two other books

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of mine have been translated, and a collection of my essays was edited and translated in China. Roughly half the copies of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism sell each year outside the United States. While the United States imports some theory mainly from Europe, it exports it around the world. That is part of the history of contemporary theory.

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THE SECOND WAVE

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Chapter 5 WALTER BENN MICHAELS  So my little group of peers, the 20 or 30 or 40 or however many people who are almost exactly my age and made out like bandits, we were a bunch of bright 23-​year-​olds, who were put in a position where we could do this stuff and we were extremely fortunate. If we were on the job market right now, we would be fucking desperate. A few of us would get lucky, still, and get jobs, like the kind of jobs we did in fact get, but it would be even more obviously luck now than it was then. Born: 1948. Education: University of California, Santa Barbara, BA, 1970; PhD, 1975. Michaels was assistant professor (1974–​77), professor (1987–​2001), and chair of English Department (1998–​2001), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; was assistant professor (1977–​ 80), associate professor (1980–​ 86), and professor (1986–​87), University of California, Berkeley; and is professor of English (2001–​) and head of department (2002–​), University of Illinois, Chicago. Michaels’s work has generated a set of arguments and questions around issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, and meaning and intention in interpretation.

Publications The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (2015), The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006), The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004), Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995), and The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). Some of his influential articles are “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “Neoliberal Aesthetics:  Fried, Ranciere and the Form of the Photograph”

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(2011); “Interview on Photography and Politics” (2011); “Meaning and Affect” (2012) (all on nonsite.org); and “The Beauty of a Social Problem,” The Brooklyn Rail (2011). Further essays have appeared in Structuralist Review, the Georgia Review, Representations, Paideuma, the San Diego Law Review, and New Literary History, as well as essay collections. He is a founding editor and regular contributor of nonsite.org. Walter Benn Michaels was interviewed by Veeser at the MLA in Vancouver on January 11, 2015, and then again in his office at UIC in Chicago on July 28, 2015. The following text draws from both interviews. HAV:  What is the big picture of literary and cultural theory, including the signal events, turning points? WBM: In my generation, Foucault and Derrida, but Foucault didn’t have much to say about what I was especially interested in—​whether texts meant what their authors intended them to mean. I mean, he had views but no arguments. Derrida, however, had lots of arguments, so for me in the ’70s he was very central—​first because I thought he was right and then because, working with Steve Knapp, I started to think he was wrong. Then by the time you got to the late ’80s, the questions about the meaning of the work turned into questions about the ontology of the work. And that made a text of the late ’60s, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” newly important, more important than anything Derrida or Foucault wrote on these questions. So Fried’s work, and then, more recently, for me Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, which appeared in the ’50s but has been important to me in all the theory things I’ve written in the last 5 or 10 years. But this route from intention through the ontology of the work and then back to intention through the theory of action is not what a lot of people who do theory today would think of as theory. So maybe it’s still against theory? HAV: Were there defining or illustrative events during this period? WBM: I used to teach a theory course which was sort of organized around controversies, so the Derrida–​Foucault controversy, the Derrida–​Searle thing, the Gadamer–​Habermas debate, the battles over “Against Theory,” and then the whole set of debates about race—​were there any coherent anti-​essentialist accounts of it (correct answer, no). All these were important theoretical events. But, of course, they took place while some much more important but not utterly unrelated events were also taking place. When Derrida arrives in the United States with “Structure Sign and Play” in The Structuralist Controversy, it was like [’66–​]’68, it’s the year in which inequality was at its lowest in American history. The most recent data has 2013, 2014 as the highest. So you know if you talk about the intellectual history of the period, one of the

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reasons why I was skeptical about your calling this “the greatest generation” or “great theorists” or whatever is that we didn’t have fuck all to say about this. We didn’t even notice the rise in economic inequality, much less do a little theorizing about the relations between that rise and our own work. And, at least according to me, insofar as we helped make the question of identity central to theory—​which we totally did!—​we actually contributed to the problem. And, of course, economically, we benefited from it. So the rise in identitarianism and the idea that we should be worried about the economic differences between black and white and women and men as opposed to between rich and poor was a total disaster. Only, like Steve used to say about subversion, not for us. HAV: Would you define the rise of identitarianism or do you have an analysis of it? Why did it happen? WBM:  The simplest way to put it is just the complete replacement of the problem of exploitation by the problem of discrimination. And along with it, the abandonment of universalist political goals. In literary theory this didn’t matter because people just had the wrong idea of what universalism was—​ they thought it was a (bad) goal instead of an inevitable entailment of the possibility of disagreement. But in left politics it was totally fucked up. Take our field—​higher ed—​and your university (and, for a while, mine too). In the ’60s CUNY committed itself to open admissions—​free higher ed for everyone. Which, we know, didn’t take. So instead we got a system in which instead of colleges becoming more open, they became more diverse. You know, it’s one thing to say that everybody should go to university. It’s another thing to say, I’m not going to be happy until 13.2 percent of my university is African American. That’s a very different model from open admissions. And my generation fights like cornered raccoons for that model—​in universities, in Oscar nominations, at Goldman Sachs, in the Whitney. It’s like our only idea of social justice is affirmative action—​making the elite more representative. Which effectively obscures a different ideal of social justice—​getting rid of the elite. HAV: How did you yourself become a theorist? WBM: When I left Trinity [a small, private high school], my deepest desire was to be a number in a very large group, where no one would have the faintest idea who you were, and to be far away. The day I had gotten in [to Michigan], I’d sort of fallen in love with this girl in New York. I kept on flying back every weekend, and except in philosophy and creative writing (I know!), my grades weren’t very good at Michigan, in part because I was never around, and in part because it turns out that if you don’t bear down a little in the first month or two of Greek, the next couple of months become sort of incomprehensible. So between missing my girlfriend and being horrified by the idea of any more Greek quizzes, I decided to leave Michigan. So I went to CCNY,

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on Convent Avenue. And I  started doing also some work, first as a reader of manuscripts. I  knew some people in publishing, and they gave me some work reading French novels to evaluate for translation. My boss said, “You can never make more than 50 bucks a shot doing this and you can’t survive on that.” So, although 50 bucks was worth more then than it is now, eventually I started translating because translation paid a little better. And to stay out of the draft, I went to City College. At City I was still interested mainly in philosophy. And City had a much stricter set of requirements. It was a kind of old-​fashioned school then. So I was only able to take two philosophy courses the entire time I was there. And I did well in those and liked them. But I didn’t do that well in most of the others. I was doing other things. So I was on probation after the first semester. I don’t remember the name of the guy who taught me my first and only English class at City, but I  do remember how badly I performed in it. I remember writing an essay assigned on eye imagery in King Lear and thinking, This is an unbelievably stupid fucking thing to be doing. These people! What wankers literary critics must be if this is the kind of stuff you do. I had a very close friend, John, who had been with me at Trinity, then had gone away to school for a bit and then had gone to Columbia. And John had introduced me to the work of Samuel Beckett. So the only serious literary commitment I had was to Beckett. And I also wrote short stories—​bad short stories. But kind of like arty, philosophical short stories. And at Michigan, my roommate’s mom came up to Ann Arbor from Detroit to take him out to dinner and said in effect, “Bring one of your little friends.” I was thrilled when he asked me—​a real restaurant dinner as opposed to what they were giving you in the dorms! So I go to dinner. And there was another woman, a grown-​ up, there with her, and I didn’t really know who the grown-​up was, but she was very smart, very intense; we started talking about literature. And she said to me something about Borges, whom I had never heard of. It’s like you know fall of ’66. And she talked about Borges and talked about literature really, really well. And so Michigan used to have bookstores that were open to like 2 o’clock in the morning, maybe they still do. So after dinner we go back, and I immediately go out to main street or wherever the thing is and buy a copy of that beautiful little paperback of Labyrinths, go home and read the first story and, like everyone else, am completely blown away. So my idea of literature is going to be Borges and Beckett, and I’m beginning to see that my ability to write like that is in doubt. But I end up in literature anyway because my girlfriend is now graduating from high school and wants to go to the College of Creative Studies in Santa Barbara and I get admitted there also as a literature person. HAV: Was this the same woman you had been flying back to New York to see? WBM: Yes. My first wife and the mother of my daughter. She was the one who actually became a philosopher eventually, taught for many years at

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Hampshire, coauthored a really good book called The Mommy Myth, a feminist account of the sort of ideology of motherhood in the United States. So I went with her to Santa Barbara, and the day, maybe a couple of days, before I left, I was talking to my friend John on the phone, my friend who had turned me on to Beckett and all that, and John said, you know there’s this really smart book about Beckett by this guy who teaches in the place you’re going; it’s called I think just Samuel Beckett by this guy Hugh Kenner. So I bought a copy of the book and took it with me on the trip out, to read it a little bit at night, and I completely fell in love. It was in a way not that different from reading Beckett himself; it was like the closest thing, not at all like eye imagery in Lear. Joyce Carol Oates on Borges had been great, but it was dinner table conversation. This book was a person talking about literature in a way that made literature and even literary criticism seem more interesting than the philosophy courses I’d been taking. Really, Kenner in a book like The Counterfeiters was literary theory before Theory. And I was there [at UC Santa Barbara] as an undergraduate for two years, and an MA student for one and then I left to go to SUNY Buffalo. But, like Michigan, it didn’t quite take. And at Santa Barbara, when I went back there, I took a theory course from this very smart guy, Herbert Schneidau. I think there were just three students in it: me, and Kaja Silverman, and a guy whose name I can’t quite remember. And the core of it was reading lots of the essays and then the discussions afterward, from a hardcover book that later came out in paper as The Structuralist Controversy, so it was the stuff from ’66. The Derrida essay loomed large, Lacan, Poulet, so I was super-​interested in all that. The minute I started reading that stuff, I was totally interested. HAV: He’s the gentleman who hired you to translate the Grammatologie. WBM: Yes. Not translate but to read it and then give him kind of a summary of the argument. Translating it would have been even more impossible. So at that point, all my interests, all the philosophical interests I had, were really much more usefully for me now focused on these literary theoretical questions. And that was for me also a new kind of literary theory. Because before then a lot of what was being done with literary theory was just not stuff—​I’m not saying it wasn’t valuable stuff, it was just something I had zero interest in—​I mean, Northrop Frye is like a super-​brilliant guy, but the question of what genre something belonged to was never a question I could remotely get interested in. But the minute you started talking epistemological questions—​how did you know something?—​and then ontological questions—​what was something, what made one text different from another?—​the minute you read “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” that is the fucking point of that story, right? Is there a difference between these two texts, both of which consist of the same phonemes, the same morphemes, the same spaces between them?

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So they are indiscernible, in a certain way. Does that make them the same text? Not theory before Theory but against theory before “Against Theory.” So that kind of question I’ve been interested in ever since, never not been interested in that kind of question. HAV: Do you feel that personal encounters mattered more than books and articles that you read? WBM:  Well, a lot of times, like with Joyce Carol Oates, the personal encounters lead to the books and articles. I had a very good French teacher in high school, so I read French easily and I sometimes sort of give talks in France—​in French. But not easily. So anyway, because of this teacher, I had French, and Herb employed me as a research assistant to produce kind of like a précis of De la grammatologie. So I’m reading this thing, and it’s hard French, and it’s hard to write these précis, and just when you were getting the hang of it, you know, you would find that, fuck, these pages that you totally understood and do understand, these are the positions he’s attacking! And so what the fuck is his position? So I  worked very hard at this for a couple of months. So that was very useful. And then I heard Paul de Man speak at UCLA. He gave a talk which was the Archie DeBunker talk. I loved it. Then I wrote a paper sort of on Derrida and decentering, and in fact, it was my writing sample for getting a job, and I was hired at Hopkins. And Hopkins was useful because at Hopkins I met Stanley [Fish], and that was extremely useful because Stanley had a different set of debates, so he and I had many, many discussions, and I met Frances Ferguson, who had been a student of de Man’s and who also had a different but very smart take on things I  cared about. And then we started Glyph, which was nothing but Derrida and de Man. HAV: You and who? WBM:  Sam Weber, Dick Macksey, Henry Sussman, Carol Jacobs, all these guys, hardcore deconstructors. Jeffrey Mehlman was much more a Lacanian than the others were. I was very, very, very into Derrida. We all took ourselves to be, and probably were, pretty cutting edge. HAV: What were your most important interventions? WBM:  The very first thing I  published was “Walden’s False Bottoms.” Which, though it was written more in what would be my prose style—​I never thought the high deconstructive style was an object of desire—​it’s a deconstructive argument. Basically, against [Stanley] Cavell—​the core of it is that the contradictions of Walden are not resolved, indeed, are, in the end, thematized—​insofar as they allow a thematics—​as insoluble. It’s probably wrong. But when [Jonathan] Culler does his book on deconstruction, his first example of American deconstruction is “Walden’s False Bottoms” [written by Michaels].

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Then I go to Berkeley and continue to do deconstruction and to produce a certain reading of Derrida which Steve Knapp convinces me is the wrong reading of Derrida. But I was seriously into it; I mean, I had a contract for and a manuscript of a book that I decided not to publish, and the last chapter of the book is called “Common Sense Deconstruction.” It tried to show that “Signature Event Context” was pragmatist! Really, by the time I got to Berkeley, and people like Barbara Johnson were publishing authoritative deconstructive essays, it had become clear to me that my account of Derrida was not theirs. And one way of putting it would be to say that if their account of Derrida was right, then I  didn’t agree with Derrida, either. It was when Steve Knapp and I started teaching together, we spent a whole year arguing about this, and I decided, No, actually, people like Barbara were right about Derrida, and I was wrong about Derrida, but also then people like Barbara were just wrong, because Derrida was wrong, too. HAV: How in The Gold Standard did you transition from deconstruction to New Historicism? WBM:  The Gold Standard is actually obsessed with fundamentally deconstructive problems—​it just isn’t itself deconstructive. And for me the New Historicist part was more about a way of writing, basically about how you could get different kinds of materials in without saying things like, “And while he’s writing this, this is what’s going on in the world.” What Jameson was getting at when he identified New Historicism with the problem of the transition. You needed a series of transformations, more like equations than like a story. So that was very challenging, totally. And then I got interested in the question of race. It wasn’t, at the time, for political reasons; it was more that I  taught an American novel course in summer school to make some extra money and, reading Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury back to back to back, realized they were basically the same book, made from a kind of nativist recipe, and then I got interested in the theoretical arguments that were making race intellectually respectable again. So I wrote a series of things that became Our America. […] It just sort of happened. I will say this: as mad as people got about the “race is just a mistake” stuff, they were never as mad as they were over “Against Theory.” The way to really piss literary critics off was to tell them texts meant only and always what their authors intended. To tell them that there’s no such thing as race, and that their social constructionist account of race was incoherent, it was annoying, but it wasn’t like, it didn’t really hit them where they live. Although when it became a more political argument—​in the diversity book—​it produced a high level of rejection. Upper middle class people—​the people who teach at elite universities and the people who go to them—​really like their progressive politics without class. Or with class turned into an identity to be respected or an obstacle to

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be overcome. They don’t like it as, you know, the structural principle of the society they live in. HAV: What has been the impact of theory on English prose style? WBM: Not much on mine. I mean if you go back and read the essay in The Gold Standard about naturalism, it’s not a deconstructive style. HAV: It’s a really difficult essay. WBM: But I don’t think the main thing about my prose is its difficulty. The Trouble with Diversity was edited by a very, very brilliant editor, Sara Bershtel, she just edited the shit out of it, but it wasn’t really sentence level, it was subject; she wanted more stories. The sentences still sound the same; everything I write sounds like that. If I sent something out to PMLA, anonymous, if you’d ever read anything of mine, you’d have to be an idiot if you couldn’t figure out within about ten sentences, “It’s either Walter or it’s one of Walter’s students who’s going through a phase of writing like Walter.” HAV:  Would it be fair to say that part of that is your training in analytic philosophy? WBM: I think it’s more the tone. And with the more political stuff, the tone is contempt. I don’t really try and cut back on it any more. You know, people have to get a little pleasure out of what they do. HAV: Whose prose would you want to plagiarize? WBM: I mean, like plagiarizing Proust, you couldn’t figure out a way; Proust is a pretty significant figure for me in my thinking about the world, Peter Weiss, who I can’t even read in German, so I don’t really know. I’ve always been influenced by people writing in French, maybe I have plagiarized Julien Sorel’s mépris [contempt]. When I read The Trouble with Diversity in translation, I  thought, “Yeah, that sounds more like me than I  do.” So maybe what I’m going for is like some French translation of  me. HAV: What has remained as the enduring legacy of the theory years? WBM: Well a few people still carry on about the radical material agency of the sign, that’s a legacy. But the primacy of the subject stuff—​from affect to identity—​it’s completely still around. And in the university it’s more than a legacy; it’s some kind of dominant gene. It’s there intellectually, from the people still trying to identify something biological to go with their fantasies about race to the people still imagining some kind of social construction—​ like cultural inheritance—​that will do the work biology can’t. But, of course, it’s even more there administratively—​the first thing every university wants to tell you is its diversity stats, and the second thing is how hard it’s trying to improve them. No one brags about the median family income of their students. Although that’s something that really is inherited. The legacy of the New Historicism pretty much sucks. Finding some archive and connecting it up with some text you want to talk about was not a good

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result. So you do have a lot of really boring work, and the intellectual ambition is low. But the current hostility to any kind of historicism is sort of promising. Any intellectual work that has some real anger behind it has a chance. HAV: Can you say something about the beginnings of the New Historicism? WBM: We had a reading group; Paul and Svetlana Alpers, Steve Greenblatt, Lenny Michaels, Frances, and me were the beginning, maybe a couple of others, I can’t quite remember. And we read a bunch of straight theory. So we read, for example, Kant. And then we expanded and started talking about each other’s work. And then Steve says, “Let’s make a journal.” So we’re all grateful, because it means we can stop having these meetings where we talk about each other’s work. And suddenly we’re all fucking New Historicists. So, you think, well, What’s up with that? But then immediately you start getting job offers. And I mean no one could really have thought that Stephen Greenblatt’s “anecdotes” and my “logics” really had all that much in common. If in the future anybody actually cares about it, it’ll be disaggregated—​the actual work done under the banner of the New Historicism from the sort of intellectual and social meaning of the brand of the New Historicism. It wasn’t that we were fighting with each other, but we were on different tracks. The word power never appears in my work. I was interested in markets, not in power. So obviously power was a big thing in Steve’s work and the state was big in Mike Rogin’s, while markets mattered in mine. But you’d need to figure out how these things related to each other. And how they then related to Steve Knapp or Joel Fineman or Frances Ferguson, who in very different ways didn’t care about any of them. And then Cathy [Gallagher] and Steve wrote that book which I took a look at and realized right away it would be better if I didn’t read it. HAV: What is the future of theory? WBM: You know, I think the notion of the future of theory is bad. Theory was more a socioeconomic thing than a set of theoretical issues. The issues have futures. Like this morning [in Walter Benn Michaels’s MLA panel]: the debate Katherine Hayles and I were having about what counts as an intention, as an act. It’s a serious question and has been for a long time, and obviously we haven’t resolved it and it’s fun to have the opportunity to think and talk about it with someone like her. So what was good about theory was that it gave us the opportunity to start thinking about those things. But the whole generational, political, economic, demographic, moment, which produced the theory generation—​that’s as over as the Rolling Stones. In part, literally, because we’re dying or dead. And right now the younger people who are keeping Theory alive are doing so in moronic ways—​like reinventing the performative, which was already fucked up, as affect theory, which is fucked up but with mirror neurons. And trauma! Oh my God. So the younger people

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who are doing work that is interesting may be avoiding some of the interesting theoretical questions because we made them look less interesting than they actually are. HAV: Did your greatest generation cause the adjunctification of the profession? WBM: I think it would be sentimental to think we caused it. But we were for sure symptoms of what did cause it and we haven’t done enough to address it. If we just replaced our identitarianism with labor organizing—​or at least added labor to 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. When I went into the academic world, I was just thinking to get a job where you’d get paid to talk about things that you really cared about, and to write about them, even though very few other people wanted to read what you wrote. I never imagined what actually happened—​the whole star system thing—​big salaries, flown all around the world to give talks. Anybody would like that; no one would turn it down. It’s fun! But it’s not the job I was going for. That job was a job that pays $75,000 a year and has decent healthcare. You want to say, I can make seventy-​five thousand dollars, and I can write about stuff that matters to like 400 people and I can make a decent living. To me, if we can produce a world in which that’s the norm, so there are fewer people like me, but there are also fewer people unemployed, and there are people who can make a living doing this, and the status battles between them are just for status, that would work. So my social democratic fantasy would be, first of all, we were actually living in a social democracy. And second of all the gap between the well-​paid and the badly paid would be much narrower. And third of all, we’d all be teaching like 2–​3 or 3–​3, and we’d all be teaching kids of all social backgrounds and we wouldn’t be under threat of non-​reappointment unless we were totally fucking up. HAV: So let me ask you two coda questions—​ WBM: But wait, don’t you think that’s a pretty reasonable view of what the future could be? HAV: You just described my life. That’s what I do. WBM: So why is that bad? HAV: It ain’t bad. It’s great. WBM:  So this may be where the greatest generation thing works, with the emphasis on generation. So my little group of peers, the 20 or 30 or 40 or however many people who are almost exactly my age and made out like bandits, we were a bunch of bright 23-​years-​olds, who were put in a position where we could do this stuff and we were extremely fortunate. If we were on the job market right now, we would be fucking desperate. A few of us would get lucky, still, and get jobs, like the kind of jobs we did in fact get, but it would be even more obviously luck now than it was then. I don’t mean that some

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people aren’t better than others at doing literary criticism, then and now. I just mean that you know sheer political economy played a much greater role in our lives than our talents did. HAV: Have you anything to add? I am going to Baltimore to interview Richard Macksey. WBM: So when you talk to Dick, ask him if he remembers, and has a copy of, a thing I  think he did, and I  think it was called “Guide to the Newer Criticism,” and it was like a self-​help thing for how to write deconstruction, and it was pretty funny. I  remember seeing a mimeographed copy when I was at Hopkins, the first time. Somebody had made up some fake Eastern European deconstructive type, and I think that the fake deconstructive type had a publication or two, and maybe Dick attributed this to him. HAV: Fake? WBM:  Yes, a parody deconstructive guy. But “The Guide to the Newer Criticism” was full of helpful hints. The one I  remember is “Don’t preface your essay with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot.” No one would even be tempted now, but it was good advice then; it was a mistake I could have made! But the most telling thing was a sort of fill-​in-​the-​blank, Mad-​libs game where the key to success was, if you needed a noun, “problematic” was always the right answer. For the previous several hundred years of human history, problematic had been an adjective. But in the ’70s, as long as you were using it as a noun, you were okay; as an adjective you just might as well be living in 1958. And now, of course, problematic has gone back to being an adjective, and it’s not okay. A graduate student visiting from Scotland came to see me the other day to talk about work and mentioned that an American student back in Edinburgh had advised him against meeting with me. Why? Because I’m “considered problematic.” So, there you go. HAV: Thank you for the interview, Professor Walter Benn Michaels.

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Chapter 6 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK  HAV  Some people would say that close reading was a kind of Trojan Horse that allowed deconstruction to be—​ GCS  To be misunderstood. HAV  —​to be smuggled in to the American—​ GCS  To be misunderstood. Born: 1942. Education: Presidency College, Kolkata, BA, 1959; University of Cambridge and Cornell University, PhD, 1967. Spivak is a theorist, feminist critic, originary postcolonial theorist, and professor of comparative literature. She sustained her critique of phallogocentric historical interpretation, including bourgeois feminism, throughout her career, comprising professorships at the University of Iowa; the University of Chicago; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of Pittsburgh; and Columbia University.

Publications Her dissertation, advised by Paul de Man, was on W. B. Yeats and titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats. She published Of Grammatology (1976), an English translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (1967). Her other publications include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-​colonial Critic (1990), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012). Added to these are her translations: Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1997), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Song for Kali:  A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000), and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002). Spivak’s book Du Bois and the General

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Strike is forthcoming. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (1985) was an important article, as was “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1984). She has been an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986. Gayatri Spivak was interviewed by Veeser on January 14, 2019. HAV: Let me ask you the biggest question. Did theory affect ordinary people’s lives in a beneficial way? GCS: No. No! In no way. Neither beneficial nor maleficial. HAV: Are you suggesting it is strictly of interest to the professionals who deal with it? GCS: No. It can be of interest to anyone. But we’re talking about beneficial. No, I don’t think it does any good. HAV: Okay, question two. GCS: Or bad. HAV: What is the shape of the years of American theory? Where would you start it? Would you start it with the 1966 conference? Or would it be your translation of Derrida? GCS:  No, there were people like Kenneth Burke. There was Raymond Williams. There were those people. I mean they were British; I mean Kenneth Burke wasn’t British. They were British but they had quite a strong American influence, I think. So what about Cleanth Brooks and Austen Warren, etc.? I think that was American theory. Northrop Frye, the guy who did Blake—​? HAV: Wimsatt? GCS: Wimsatt for sure. But on Blake, Norman O. Brown. Those people. Those are the people who kind of started theory. HAV: Do you see that as a continuity with post-​structuralism? Or do you see a break in between? GCS:  It’s not a break! But what is normally called post-​structuralism is a French thing. What did that have to do with. […] These are very national. America and England kind of shared. But that was a French thing. HAV: Some people would say that close reading was a kind of Trojan Horse that allowed deconstruction to be—​ GCS: To be misunderstood. HAV: —​to be smuggled in to the American—​ GCS: To be misunderstood. HAV: —​way of doing things. GCS:  Deconstruction is not close reading. Deconstruction is also thinking about the lives of the authors et cetera et cetera, which is certainly not kind of close reading philosophy of intentional fallacy. That’s not deconstruction.

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Deconstruction is quite flexible. And so it became transformed into, appropriated into close reading. But that’s a very different thing. But it’s Rene Wellek who began theory here. They came in, Rene Wellek, Frankfurt School, they came in and I  remember there was a big fight, George Lyman Kitteredge and so on at Harvard, that’s the beginning of theory in the United States. And then before that, of course, there was William James. There was a lot of theory around in the United States. Charles Sanders Peirce, pragmatism, a lot of  stuff. HAV: Would you say that neo-​pragmatism, for example, had a separate identity during the ’70s and ’80s? GCS: Yes. And they all appropriated the French stuff and swallowed it up and turned it into, made it resemble American huge powerful narrative of theory. HAV: Some people would say that theory was given a twist by the American desire for moralism or for self-​criticism and that it was turned into a kind of puritanical crusade that was totally foreign to its emergence in France. GCS: The French stuff was also very moralistic. People like Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, et cetera—​they were very moralistic. HAV: In addition to this stand-​off between Kitteredge and Wellek, can you think of other turning points that you would make touchstones or moments in the theory years? GCS: I suppose that surface reading now is one. I would say that is a turning point. Resistance to theory. I can’t think of anything else. HAV: Would you say that the debates over professionalism had any theoretical traction or dimension? Or was that about something else? GCS: Something else. HAV: I’m thinking of Stanley Fish. GCS: Something else. As far as I am concerned, something else. Very parochial. HAV: What do you think were your own major interventions? And what were the consequences of  them? GCS: That’s for other people to say. How can I say [laughs] what my major interventions were? Everything! [laughs] No, that’s for other people to say. HAV: But you have reflected on your own work, and you’ve also gone back and even rethought it, haven’t you? GCS:  I’ve learned from my mistakes, yes. But that’s very different from [laughs] major interventions. HAV: Do you think that theory has had any effect on English prose style in the English language? GCS:  Well, I  don’t know what you are calling theory. But I  can give you a whole slew of particularly American theory. I suppose it must. It must make your prose different if you are a theorizing person. A theorizing person looks for precision. And so therefore the prose becomes different. That’s all I would

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say. I don’t think there’s a particular kind of prose associated with theory as an abstract word. No. HAV: So then the uproar over the bad writing of theorists is kind of a public relations project of the middlebrows who couldn’t understand theory. GCS: No. In fact, I quite often agree with them. I think people sometimes tend to write in a very difficult way. I certainly have been guilty of it myself. There are many different kinds of reasons. I don’t know. I’m not a cause-​and-​effect person. But there is a piece by me called “Deconstructing Historiography” that is so badly written that it makes […] it is now on the syllabus of the MA in many Indian universities. Students come to me and ask me to explain, and I say, “Would you please tell your professors,” and I’ve even spoken to the universities grant commissioner in India, saying, “Take that off of the syllabus. You want something written by me, choose something later, when I tried to write more easily.” But it’s not therefore more comprehensible. That’s the problem. But also there are certain kinds of supposedly plain prose which is very bad. But the difficulty, yes, I did write in a way that was too—​ HAV: Do you think that the theory generation or the people who were doing theory at this time had any culpability for the way the humanities have developed a kind of adjunct-​driven labor pool? GCS: No. HAV: There’s no responsibility. GCS: No. I don’t think there’s anything. That adjunct stuff has begun because of the corporatization of the university. As a kind of cost efficiency. HAV: Do you think that there’s any kind of allegory in theory of the Reaganite and then subsequent economic principles? GCS:  There’s no allegory, but there is a relationship. It has to be thought through carefully, but it’s the old base and superstructure that I’m talking about. It’s not simple. Again, it’s not cause-​and-​effect. But it’s the kinds of things […] for example, the whole intentional fallacy has something in my mind to do with the avoidance of responsibility in the Cold War, so nobody’s responsible for what they are writing. So for me it’s how can we make philosophies good, doesn’t matter what we do with them. Today, for example, this kind of tremendous biennales and these very large conferences that I was talking about. It’s in order to kind of give some kind of approval to so-​called globalized capitalism. It’s all good, right? So those kinds of relationships. I don’t think there’s an allegory anywhere. You know theory legitimizing itself as science of any complexity because STEM is important. If I really were to give you a serious answer, I would have to sit down and read a lot of stuff. I don’t really work on these kinds of issues. So I’m just giving you a layperson’s answers.

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HAV: Just off the cuff, when you think about the economics of derivatives and junk bonds, things after the United States went off the gold standard and the dollar began to float on the international market, is there any parallel there to the multiplicity of  texts—​ GCS: No. HAV: —​in deconstruction? GCS: No. One can make a parallel if one has a very simplistic theory of the relationship of aesthetics and economics. No. I don’t think there’s a parallel. I mean you can say, these are varieties of fiction, I mean fiction in the strong sense. But that’s a theoretical pronouncement. That’s not a parallel. HAV: And the last question. Where do you think that American literary theory, or theory proper, goes from here? GCS: I have no idea [in an undertone]. I’m always pleased with the unexpected, the contingent, et cetera. And even, there are so many universities, and four-​year colleges and so forth. It’s very hard for anyone to say where something like theory is going. How do I know? I have no idea. You see, my problem is that I’m supposed to be a theory maker. But I don’t study theory, if you know what I mean. I don’t even know what theory means, frankly. When you began this interview with your translation of the Grammatology et cetera I mean, theory the word by itself doesn’t mean anything to me. So, I have no idea. I am sorry I can’t be more rich. HAV: Thank you, Gayatri Spivak.

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Chapter 7 JANE GALLOP  I think I  was turned on by how hard it was to understand, and yet how it seemed to be about things I cared about, and the relation between language and culture and sexuality. Born: 1952. Education: Cornell University, BA, 1972; PhD (French literature), 1976. Gallop taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio; was Herbert S.  Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women’s Studies program and served as chair of the Department of French and Italian. She has also taught or served as a visiting professor at Gettysburg College, Emory University, the University of Minnesota, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Center. She is Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–​Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. While the topics of her work vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts.

Publications Intersections:  A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (1981), The Daughter’s Seduction:  Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), Reading Lacan (1985), Thinking through the Body (1988), Around 1981:  Academic Feminist Literary Theory (1991), Pedagogy:  The Question of Impersonation (ed.) (1995), Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), Anecdotal Theory (2002), Living with His Camera (2003), The Deaths of the Author: Writing and Reading in Time (2011), and Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (2019). Her influential articles include “The Critics’ Exchange,” MLN (1974); “The Ghost of Lacan, the Trace of Language,” diacritics (1975); “The Ladies’ Man,” diacritics (1976); “The Seduction of an Analogy,” diacritics (1979); “Psychoanalysis in France,” Women and Literature (1979); “Impertinent Questions: Irigaray, Lacan, Sade,” Sub-​stance

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(1980); “Sade, Mothers, and Other Women,” Enclitic (1980); “Reading Friends’ Corpses,” MLN (1980); “Of Phallic Proportions: Lacanian Conceit,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought (1981); “The Immoral Teachers,” Yale French Studies (1982); “The Difference Within,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’:  Where to Begin?,” Sub-​stance (1983); “Quand nos levres s’ecrivent: Irigaray’s Body Politic,” Romanic Review (1983); “Beyond the Jouissance Principle,” Representations (1984); “Why Does Freud Giggle When the Women Leave the Room?,” Hecate (1984); “Psychoanalytic Criticism: Some Intimate Questions,” Art in America (1984); “Annie Leclerc Writing a Letter with Vermeer,” October (1985); “Reading the Mother Tongue,” Critical Inquiry (1986); “The Problem of Definition,” Genre (1987); “Heroic Images: Feminist Criticism, 1972,” American Literary History (1989); “A Tale of Two Jacques,” Discourse (Summer 1992); “The Teacher’s Breasts,” Discourse (1994); “The Translation of Deconstruction,” Qui Parle (1994); “Resisting Reasonableness,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 1999); “Making ‘the One’ Impossible,” diacritics (2004); “Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique,” Feminist Studies (2001); “Bersani’s Freudian Body,” PMLA (2010); “Precocious Jouissance:  Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion,” New Literary History (2012); and “The Twentieth-​Century Orgasm,” Feminist Formations (2016). Jane Gallop was interviewed by Veeser in Vancouver, Canada, on January 9, 2015. HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory, the turning points, the defining moments? JG: There was one very particular thing that happened in the United States in the late ’70s and early ’80s that seemed really, really important, which is that as deconstructionist reading started becoming more widespread, disseminated in the United States, a lot of people noticed the similarity—​rightly so—​between the reading style and New Criticism because of the close reading and the attentiveness to language. That was a major thing that happened that actually influenced the course of English study in the United States for a couple of decades—​and, actually, still. We’re still in the wake of that, I think, even though it seems very far away. One of the things that happened is that some of the English Department adopters of deconstruction were people that were still reading canonical English literary texts; they were reading texts of Romanticism, as you know; the Yale school was exemplary of this, but they are not the only people. It’s very clear that there’s a complete continuity between New Criticism and that kind of reading. At the time I thought, this is the least interesting use of deconstruction that I could imagine, because it seemed to me that it was just more close reading of literary texts. Now, I have never been a big close reader of literary texts, so that seemed not so interesting to me.

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But it had an enormous effect because it allowed post-​structuralism; it allowed it in. It was like a Trojan Horse. Because it didn’t look so radically different even though there was all this hoo-​hah about it. It was relatively easily assimilated to what people do in English departments because it just looked like—​it revivified close reading. HAV: Was the New Criticism still going strong? JG:  New Critical close reading was already dying, because of the ’60s and social movements and New Criticism, and it gave it new energy so that it went on for another 15 years, although now it was called deconstruction. And I think that that made Theory, because there were all these words, you know there was post-​structuralism, there was theory, there was French theory, there was deconstruction—​and they were all of these kind of like vague signifiers that nobody knew what they referred to. But there was the kind of work that, like de Man and Hillis Miller were doing at Yale, looked completely like New Criticism but also looked like deconstruction, looked like theory, looked like post-​structuralism, and it allowed a lot of theory that was really different than New Criticism to become kind of what people were doing in English departments. It was this weird, gradual transformation. It was not a revolution. It was something quite different. And all this stuff happened over the course of the decade of the ’80s; I would say that as much as people were complaining about deconstruction, it was like English graduate students throughout the country were starting to do these, you know, deconstructionist readings of canonical texts. And it looked like it wasn’t such a radical change. But it was connected to this whole other body of theory that was actually much bigger and less and less something that could simply be applied to a bunch of canonical literary texts. This is a little bit vague. But so I see that something there just kind of changed and that some of it looked like, “Oh, here’s like a way to revivify close reading and make it, you know, more lively and edgy and a little new and with a little French accent,” or whatever. But then under the name of theory or post-​ structuralism, some people started doing some quite other things that really looked quite different. So that is my sense of what happened over the course of the ’80s. Then, the New Historicism came in by the end of the ’80s. It was also another new way of doing close reading, in some way, but by changing the kind of text we were looking at, or that we were putting in juxtaposition and all of that sort of  stuff. HAV: So did the New Historicism sustain theory all through the ’90s? JG: My sense is that the era of Theory was really gone by the beginning of the ’90s or was on the way out. Although it started in the late ’60s, its high point was probably the mid-​’70s to about 1990: it was about 15 years. And by the ’90s, the discipline of English had completely changed. The canon was

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gone. The canon as it was just completely normal in the ’70s was really gone by the ’90s; it is a completely different canon. There’s a lot more people in it, but there’s also a lot more reading of various kinds of non-​high-​literary texts. It moved in every direction, as you know. We started reading women. We started reading men of color. We started reading people from outside of Europe. We started reading things that nobody thought of as literature. So it went in every direction. So that started in the ’90s, and it was abetted by post-​structuralist theory, which gave the kind of intellectual rationale to these moves, so that it seemed that it wasn’t just a popularizing move. But it was like a strong theoretical move. But it’s funny because the first theory that caught on here was a kind of deconstructive reading of the most canonical texts. But that sort of opened the door. I am amazed by both how much Theory seems in the past and how much it still is in the present. I want to say that because otherwise it is kind of hard to see it. So to me the era of Theory, the high era of Theory, was on its way out by the time we reached the early ’90s, and it kind of like was going out through the ’90s, and seemed gone by the end of the ’90s. But it’s not actually gone. It just has a really different place. I think its place is, it’s become actually foundational. Which is a weird place for it to be since it’s kind of an anti-​ foundationalism, right [laughs]. There’s not an English department I think in the country that does not teach a course in theory both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. And those courses weren’t there in the ’70s, right? And they’re still there, right! And so people are still trying to figure out what the latest theory is, and they’re doing economic theory, or they’re doing what—​but they always trace back their work to some post-​structuralist of the ’70s, one or the other. So you see it. It doesn’t have the kind of consistency it had. It doesn’t seem like a movement anymore. Because it’s kind of like moved to the background. I  think it changed the way people in English departments think about the work they do and work, in a way that I just absolutely see the lasting influence if you see the random work that people do in lots of different ways. I feel like the era of Theory was one in which Theory was something new, that was seen as this thing, and now it’s probably what literary theory was before, which is to say that it’s some of the like the intellectual background of the work that people do; I think it’s gone back to being that, although it’s a different set of texts than it would have been before the ’70s. HAV: How did you come to be involved with literary theory? JG: I started grad school in 1972. I started in French at Cornell. […] I didn’t start at Cornell because I was interested in theory, but my notion of theory was very much shaped by that. Because the journal diacritics, which came out

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of the department in which I was a graduate student, was a big force in promoting theory in the US. […] what I was at the time was a radical lesbian feminist and who for some reason was interested in French lit, I’m not sure why. I’d been a lesbian feminist as an undergrad and went to grad school thinking that I was going to write a dissertation on the lesbian in French lit. That was my plan. This was very early 1970s feminist criticism, pre-​post-​ structuralist for sure. My first year there I  encountered post-​structuralist theory, and I  encountered in particular the work of Lacan and Derrida. There were a number of people teaching in that department who were interested in Lacan and Derrida. The way that I  for years told the story was that I went to grad school as a lesbian feminist but I came out a post-​ structuralist. And that felt like a really big transformation. By the end of my first year of graduate school I was really excited about reading Lacan and Derrida; I was still a feminist, but it was kind of different from the feminism I had come in to grad school with. I remember discovering at the time that there were other feminists grappling with, particularly with, Lacan and psychoanalysis, Juliet Mitchell, Luce Irigaray—​people would tell me about them because I was trying to figure out how to be a feminist and a Lacanian at the same time. And that I always felt like I was just lucky. My formation included the intersection of two really big intellectual movements, second-​ wave feminism and post-​structuralism, or something like that; there were a lot of names for it; I didn’t necessarily call it post-​structuralism in 1972. I was one of the first people in America working at that intersection, so it meant that there was a lot of interest in my work that wouldn’t have been there for someone just coming out of graduate school working on whatever. So my sense of theory in the American academy is somewhat skewed by my not having been in an English department until 1990, but my having been in a French department. And in a French department, theory really was French theory or the German theory that French theorists read, and it was, “This is what is going on, this is the intellectual life of France, and this is what you have to know if you’re going to be in French.” HAV: They didn’t do close reading in French. JG:  Well they did, but they did like explication de texte. They are different traditions of close reading. But I  had not read the New Critical texts until much later in my life. New Criticism was not a big influence on French. This is how it looked to me, in this very particular place, where this thing hit me and took over my life. And I  don’t think you can just generalize from that. I think that may be true of anyone who lived through it. It’s like the Stendhal novel that he’s at the Battle of Waterloo but he only sees what’s going on right around him.

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HAV: Yes. Would you say, for example, that the personal encounters with these theorists that you mention, Kristeva and so on, was more important to you in some way than reading their work? JG: I remember in grad school. First Foucault came for two weeks, and then Kristeva came for two weeks, and then Cixous came for two weeks, and this was before people in English departments, except maybe at Cornell, knew these people were important. But they were part of what we learned as graduate students, intellectually so much more exciting than anything I had ever encountered. They were about the same things I was interested in as a lesbian feminist; they were interested in Lacan and […] the relation between language and sexuality and culture. But they were a much more interesting way of thinking about it. They just seemed really difficult, and smart, and really edgy. There was something about their edginess of, their lack of piety, something like that that really spoke to me, that I felt that this made sense. I  remember going to dinner with Kristeva. My then-​boyfriend, who was a graduate student in French, and I  took Kristeva out to dinner, because she was there for two weeks and she was like available. And I could already see that there was no shortcut to understanding her work. She was a real person, she was in town, she was happy to have people entertain her. She was friendly and she was charming and we were trying to be charming, but there was no social route or personal route to her work. The work was just hard. I think I was turned on by how hard it was to understand, and yet how it seemed to be about things I cared about, and the relation between language and culture and sexuality. HAV: Do you remember any breakthrough moments? Epiphanies you had? JG: One of the big breaking moments, but I’m now, like, a dissertator, it must have been about 1974 or 1975, and I read Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, I read Le plaisir du texte—​because I was reading it in French—​and it had this amazing effect on me, which is that it made me feel like I  could talk more directlier about what I  was interested in; I  had found Derrida, and Lacan, and Foucault, and Kristeva more intimidating; I  felt like I  had to write in this very high theoretical language, that I  was half mastering and half not mastering. But there is something about Le plaisir du texte; I think it is still my favorite book, because it liberated me from a certain kind of high structuralism, high theory even though Barthes was a theorist, that I was half mastering, half not mastering, even though Barthes is a theorist, by saying, “No, you could do something more experimental, more playful, more open, more literary.” I remember reading that thinking, Oh, I could do something, I don’t have to like just show how smart I  am; I  mean there was something going on with Barthes in that moment, and I came to that a little later, after Lacan and Derrida, as he was moving from structuralism to post-​structuralism, he

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was moving to something more writerly, more reflective, and it opened up the possibility for me of a kind of directness or writing or playfulness or whatever that was real formative for me. But mainly I  experienced it as, Ohhhh—​I don’t have to be so just like so rigorous and strict and abstruse. So for me the best part of post-​structuralism was not—​although the difficulty of the theory is what attracted me—​the best part of post-​structuralism—​and for me it is exemplified by something like Le plaisir du texte, although there is also a text of Derrida that exemplified it, and there’s also Lacan’s crazy style that exemplified it, was the opening up to the fact that this was also a form of like very edgy, very smart play, and not just like you know smart ideas and systems. I mean it was really very different from reading Kant, for example, because there was something other than the high seriousness of it all. HAV: So was your work always playful? Your book Reading Lacan seems like straightforward exposition. And yet it has already some of your freewheeling style or experimental writerly interest evident in it. Was that your first book that incorporated writerly playfulness? JG: No. My work from the beginning, probably from the beginning of graduate school, had this kind of weird playful—​to me, I had a tendency toward a kind of edgy humor, in which you’re being kind of irreverent, or you know poking fun at certain pious ideas through humor, and there’s something about that that is probably family background, personality, et cetera, and I was very responsive to things that I was reading, these very smart theoretical texts that seemed to have some version of that; I definitely started writing like that as soon as I could; I think I got much better at it over time; it was kind of hard to pull off, but it was—​I always had a kind of hatred of a certain kind of seriousness, and for me the kind of theory was the kind that I never liked was the theory that said, “Here is how it works and here is how it all fits together,” because I  thought that that was not only pompous but also wrong, always wrong, inevitably wrong. I was always attracted to a kind of theory that was busily kind of calling into question certain pieties or presumptions or something like that. HAV:  So people must have been a little surprised by your eccentricity as a writer? JG: It seemed perfectly normal to me. It seemed I was just taking this stuff seriously by trying to write this way. That trying to write something that wasn’t simply from the position of this kind of like mastery et cetera seemed to be only taking seriously what it was we were all reading, and so I didn’t think there was anything odd about it. And I remember being surprised when I was sending articles off to journals that like they didn’t get what I was doing at all. I was so formed by this very immediate context of diacritics and this kind of passion for post-​structuralism in the department I was in that I didn’t really understand

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that the rest of the profession had not really like accepted this kind of writing. I think I still kind of don’t get it. [laughs] I’m always shocked and possibly slightly offended when you see people who are various kinds of interpreters of post-​structuralism that do it in this mode of high seriousness and trying to lay out and map what the knowledge is as if you can have this position of mastery. Seems to me it’s not getting it. It doesn’t make sense to me. HAV: What were your most important interventions? JG:  Okay, I’ll try to list them. They are more ideas than things; they are themes, but that can be an intervention. I think that my first and possibly the only intervention that most people know about me was to really intervene and make a strong case for a post-​structuralist and psychoanalytic feminism and one that was strong enough so that people by the ’80s—​I made this intervention in the late ’70s—​by the ’80s there were a lot of graduate students in English departments starting to think that was the way to go. That whole moment disappeared by the late ’80s. That’s an intervention: basically, being strongly a feminist, yet being strongly psychoanalytic and post-​structuralist, and suggesting that that was actually a really productive way to actually be a feminist. That I would say is my first intervention. These are not chronological. But that is the one that is really restricted in time because the whole thing of post-​structuralist feminism and French feminism kind of disappeared by the end of the ’80s as a thing. Except it’s marked on history. I would say my second intervention was the real insistence on the close reading of theoretical texts, and I  would say consistently across my work, not literally everything I  ever wrote but pretty much most everything I  ever wrote was involved in performing a close reading of a theoretical text as a way of getting theoretical texts to open up into thinking rather than into the soundbytes that everyone was presenting then. And I  feel like that is the thing that I  most believe in across my work, is that idea that theoretical texts are texts, and that the best way to learn from them and to think with them is to read them, and to read them as texts rather than as a précis of their main ideas. That to me follows so naturally from the kind of formation that I thought I was getting as I first encountered post-​structuralism. I was shocked by how many people did the opposite, which was, let’s give an account of like the imaginary in Lacan; you know, we’ll do that. I think it was my application of Derrida’s reading of philosophical texts in that very close reading mode, in the mode that’s deconstructive. And that it wasn’t about not taking them seriously as philosophy but it was about like looking at their textuality. And I think I understood that you could read any text that way, but for me it was most interesting to read various types of theoretical texts that way. And I still do that. I think that’s what I did this morning.

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HAV: Would it be fair to say that you read the theoretical text as a kind of poem, or at least as a work of literature? JG: It would be fair but I wouldn’t say it. And so there was for a while the phrase, “theory as a literary genre,” which was sort of recognized. I  could do that, and people often classed my work into that category; this was a category around in the ’80s or ’90s or something like that, and I think that my resistance to it, which is a little silly, is the following. I believe that I am taking Theory really, really seriously, as ideas. And I think the way to take it as seriously as possible as ideas is to do a close reading of it as a text, because to me the thinking happens in the text and not somewhere behind the text, that is just reported by the text. What’s interesting is that I never liked Derrida’s readings of literary texts. I don’t find them interesting, I don’t like them; I just think they’re a philosopher trying to do literary criticism. It’s his reading of Rousseau and of Plato, it’s his reading of philosophical texts, in which, as he gets into the language, you feel the ideas like open up and get really complicated and interesting and lively. So I think that the idea that you are reading philosophy as a literary text implies, Oh, you’re looking at how beautifully it’s formed and all of that. Whereas for me it’s really, I’m interested in the thinking, but for me the thinking doesn’t happen behind the text, it actually happens in the text. And you get access to that thinking and are engaged with that thinking when you are doing that kind of close reading. HAV: Was your style a consequence of your theoretical involvements? JG: Yes. I can’t remember saying, Oh, I will do this, and working it out. I really loved the theoretical texts in which really interesting things happened, in which there was wit and play and crazy stuff in the language, and the ideas seemed much more multidimensional, I really loved that and clearly I wanted to be able to write like that. And I felt like those things were just more interesting and stronger. I have like no tolerance for dry, boring theoretical texts. I feel like there’s nothing more energetic than thinking, and I feel like dry, theoretical texts like kind of congeal that thinking.

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Chapter 8 HOMI K. BHABHA  Born: 1949. Education: Elphinstone College, University of Mumbai, BA, 1970; MA, MPhil, and DPhil, Christ Church, Oxford University, 1990. Bhabha taught in the Department of English at the University of Sussex, became Old Dominion Visiting Professor at Princeton University, and then Steinberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1997 to 2001 he served as Chester D.  Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. In 2001–​2002, he served as a distinguished visiting professor at University College, London. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University since 2001. He has been faculty fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory. Professor Bhabha initiated contact between decolonization and advanced literary theory. His interventions have woven psychoanalytic thought, especially that of Jacques Lacan, with deconstruction and critical race theory. He has affirmed that power is always limited in its ability to determine identities and control representations and has formulated new conceptions, such as hybridity, that have influentially redefined the subject of postcolonial studies.

Publications Nation and Narration (ed. 1990); The Location of Culture (1994); The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics); Still Life (2004); Adagio (2004); Edward Said:  Continuing the Conversation (2005; co-​ed. with W.  J. T.  Mitchell); Framing Fanon (2005); The Black Savant and the Dark Princess (2006); Elusive Objects (2009); On Global Memory (2009); Beyond Photography (2011); and Our Neighbours, Ourselves (2011). His articles and chapters include “What Does the Black Man Want?” New Formations (1987); “Remembering Fanon:  Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” Remaking History (1989); “Hybridité, identité et culture contemporaine,” Magiciens de la terre (1989); “Articulating the Archaic: Notes on Colonial Nonsense,” Literary Theory Today (1990); “DissemiNation: Time,

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Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration (1990); “Interrogating Identity:  The Postcolonial Prerogative,” Anatomy of Racism (1990); “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate,” October (1992); “Postcolonial Criticism,” Redrawing the Boundaries:  The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (1992); “Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt,” Cultural Studies (1992); “The World and the Home,” Social Text (1992); “Unsatisfied:  Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Text and Nation: Cross-​Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities (1996); “World and the Home,” Dangerous Liaisons:  Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997); “Front Lines/​Border Posts,” Critical Inquiry (1997); “Conversational Art,” Conversations at the Castle:  Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art (1998); “Liberalism’s Sacred Cow,” Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999); “Afterword: An Ironic Act of Courage,” Milton and the Imperial Vision (1999); “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture (2000); “Foreword” to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, transl. Richard Philcox (2004). Homi Bhabha was interviewed by Veeser at Harvard University on September 17, 2015. Professor Bhabha worked further on the interview in Spring 2020. HAV: You once wrote that “the postcolonial migrant presence articulates the narrative of cultural difference, which can never let the national history look itself narcissistically in the eye.” Do you see the professing of English literature as in any way partaking of a postcolonial moment? HB: This is an excellent question. What I said on that occasion has become even more pressing and pertinent today. It is impossible to “profess” literature now without turning your attention to the persistence of the “postcolonial moment,” as you put it. Across the world, from South Africa and Europe to the United States and Latin America, students have been calling for the “decolonization” of the curriculum while they explore the uses (and limitations) of postcolonial critical discourse. For instance, Natalie Diaz’s most recent book is titled Postcolonial Love Poems. The fire and air of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary ideas are sweeping through discourses of contemporary social movements. In the United States, for instance, Claudia Rankine’s great lyric poem Citizen addresses the concerns of Black Lives Matter by invoking Fanon’s biopolitics of racist inequity and psychic indignity—​you could call it a biopoetics—​to address the migrant and minoritarian oppressions of the twenty-​first century. The postcolonial migrant presence today is represented by over 70 million displaced peoples. The global sweep of populist, majoritarian nationalisms—​ largely xenophobic and racist—​has unleashed a profoundly unjust war of words and deeds against minorities and migrants, depriving them of human

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rights and denying them the dignity of civic representation and civil recognition. The postwar wave of postcolonial migration has been followed by a post-​9/​11 wave of migration caused by Euro-​American “wars of liberation” in Syria, Libya, Iraq, which has led to the refugee “wave of death” in the Mediterranean. Let me be clear: the tyrants of the Middle East have resorted to plunder, violence, and torture to keep themselves in power, and they deserve their destruction. But if you, as a world power, participate in the destruction of sovereign states, you have to be supported by independent liberation forces from within, and you have to responsibly participate in the reconstruction of these destroyed states. The old Imperial policies of “seduce and abandon” and “divide and rule” have been remobilized by Western powers in the post-​ 9/​11 era, and those who suffered unyielding despotic rule are now suffering the aftermath of militarized “democratic” interventions at the hands of foreign powers. Post-​9/​11, the racist narcissism of the ethnic-​nationalist state has frightening echoes of the “nazi-​cissim” (if I may coin a word) of 1930s national socialism. Historians with widely differing ideological perspectives, coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, have drawn analogies between the 2020s and the 1930s. Today, “cultural differences” are criminalized as part of surveillant and carceral “border discourses.” The everyday life-​worlds of Palestinians have, for the longest time, been defined by the status of the “border” as if the borderline is the full extent of their cultural identity and their political destiny. The “wandering Jew” is a persecutory signifier of anti-​Semitic discourse that characterizes the history of Jewish persecution and expulsion–​within and across borders–​as an ontological incapacity that hinders the Jewish people from responsibly inhabiting the “home” of the modern nation. Mexican migrants to the US are represented, ontologically and politically, as border-​ beings, frequently accused of being “murderers and rapists” even before they can file their cases for asylum. Foucault makes a related point in Society Must Be Defended. When violence and “social death” become part of the procedures of biopolitical governance, as is visible in the treatment of migrants and minority populations today, it is the imperialist “right to kill” (genocide, terror, torture, slavery, repression, violence, etc.) that is being revived and justified within the authoritarian practices of ethnic nationalisms unleashed by tyrannical global leaders, all male to a man. HAV: I’d like to now dial it back. Let’s go all the way back. Go to high school. Go to middle school. Go to elementary school. What was it that drew you to literary study or however you would describe your work? HB: It all goes back to my mother’s disorderly love of literature. My 95-​year-​old mother, Naju Bhabha, lives in a Bombay apartment lined with bookshelves

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that carry a lifetime of unstructured reading. Yes, my mother’s love of books exceeds her ability to read deeply within them or choose judiciously among them. My mother had no formal literary education, and her university experience was brief. She fell in love with my father when she was very young and abandoned college. But her autodidactic enthusiasm communicated an infectious sense of the serious value of literature, although her habits of reading were eclectic, erratic, even errant—​books half-​read or left unopened, bookmarks flagging chapters she meant to return to but never quite made it. My mother had no literary education, but she had great taste. When she read aloud in her theatrical tremolo, which was often unsuited to the mood or the style of the writing itself, I was captivated. Although neither of us had even an inkling of it, 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. HAV: But how do you make an eight-​year-​old love James Joyce, say? HB: That wouldn’t be a wise choice. Mother never taught me, but she incessantly read to me. And she read aloud to herself. And her sense of the value of literature lay more in the sound than the meaning. Nothing was too complex or too difficult for the voice, even if it was difficult to decipher as text. For my mother, enunciation, rather than interpretation, was the real communicative pleasure. It was the reverse of most pedagogical priorities. I have never been able to understand why she had a strong attraction to things that were obscure and obdurate, modernist texts that did not easily yield their meanings. The greater the resistance to her grasp, the more passionate was her desire to read aloud. Unknowingly, I absorbed a lesson from my mother’s struggle. She ingrained in me the belief that a work’s obscurity or inaccessibility is an invitation to return to it, to go back rather than move on. If you don’t give things a second chance, you don’t know what you are missing in the first place. HAV: Did she structure your experience? HB: Not in any self-​conscious or structured way; my mother’s great qualities were spontaneity and serendipity. But as I  think more carefully about your question, I think she did, in unexpected and unconscious ways. I said my mother was entranced by the sound of literature, the echo of words, and, thinking back on it, I can see how it reflected a kind of postcolonial pedagogy. Our education in school, and the early years of college, was grounded largely in rote-​learning. We were rewarded for exact repetition; our skill in learning things “by heart,” as it was known, required us to remain as close to the text in hand, and rote-​learning was more than a method; it was evidence of unusual promise, but more than that, it was a sign of good

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character, of obedience, of precision and respect for the authority of knowledge. Our English teacher would make us recite definitions from Nesfield’s English Grammar, and if we failed to recite the definition “word for word” [as he put it], we were punished. Rote-​learning, despite its avowed emphasis on the pedagogy of the ear, was, in fact, an erasure of the sound and style of language as a medium of

Image 13. “My mother”

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interpretation and interrogation. Learning “by heart” was an extractive kind of education style: mode, mood, and meaning had to be rushed past in order to grasp “content” which, if properly memorized, would dictate pedagogical “good practice” and would foster controlled obedience in the classroom and in society. My mother’s delight in recitation, she was trained in “elocution,” was a sign of her devotion and duty to literature. But the primary value she placed on the sound of language rather than its semantic substance—​her langorous lingering with the signifier for as long as possible—​was an affective riposte, and a quiet resistance, to the pedagogy of rote-​learning. My reading of postcolonial, minority, and migrant literatures (and I  am being utterly random here)—​whether it’s Toni Morrison’s Home, Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Walcott’s Omeros, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Refugees, or Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone—​convinces me that these works of “world literature” are immersed in discursive practices of cultural translation that depend as much on the affective aesthetics of the “ear” as they do on the visual perspective of the “eye.” To understand minority discourse you have to listen to difference. The eye is a measure of cultural difference, always looking for mirror images or semblances, polarites, or binaries—​self or other. The ear is alive to the difference-​within-​ the same, the alterity of translation. The ear is the auditory instrument that registers the double signification of dialect, patois, or the vernacular; it is the uncanny iteration of a cultural language that is “known” but frequently “unheard” in the inscription of literary language. It is by listening to the sound of the “signifier”—​the word in process, enunciation in performance—​that you can hear the minority voices of vernacular cosmopolitans rising above the din of “sovereign” citizens whose voices rise to the top, assuming their own authority and authenticity. The trick is to make the eye hear and the ear see. HAV: As you move along through the chronology, were there other epiphanies, powerful experiences, turning points that you can recall? HB: Yes, I remember a turning point at Oxford. After I graduated, I took the newly founded MPhil examination and stayed on to do a DPhil. I chose to write my dissertation on V. S. Naipaul, whose work had attracted scant scholarly attention, despite great literary acclaim. I was, however, having an unproductive summer trying to find a theoretical approach to Naipaul’s  work. I vividly remember sitting at my desk overlooking the Oxford canal, trying to frame my thoughts on V. S. Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas, and feeling lost. The novel kept freeing itself from the various conceptual models I  tried to impose on it. Things took a turn when I realized that my inherited frames of reference—​critical and conceptual—​were not working for me, and I  would have to hammer together a hybrid critical approach for myself.

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Here was a work built on the temporal scale, and the serial structure, of nineteenth-​ century “empire-​ style” omniscient realism, with the ghost of Dickens hovering over the narrative. However, in contradistinction to the expansive frame, there exists a fictional armature that is contingent and episodic, written in the picaresque tradition. When you have a picaresque anti-​hero, mischievous and morose, knocking around in the grand house of nineteenth-​century European fiction, you get an intriguing and intricate postcolonial hybrid form. Inserted within the temporality and teleology of social Darwinist progress—​ empire’s failed promise to its colonies—​is a poignant and powerful account of the afterlife of colonialism in the world’s marginalized societies. Political dominion leaves behind a psychic state of dependence and displacement, fostered by the political diktat of the IMF and the Washington Consensus. New nations survive their own disconsolate conditions of poverty and powerlessness through the migratory transfer of their working populations to service the labor markets of the metropolitan world. And to eke out their meager existences through foreign remittances sent back home:  Caribbean health workers in the United Kingdom, and teachers and transport workers in the US. Naipaul’s readers frequently, and rightly, take him to task for his imperious arrogance and elitism, but his picaresque, performative characters know better; they simply turn the tables on him. At first, Naipaul’s characters seem hopelessly bereft, half-​made peoples, who, suddenly and surprisingly, turn into the most consummate literary creations. I  am struck by the forbearance of Naipaul’s characters; inspired by their resilience; and instructed by their ability, against all the odds, to create worlds that are intricately communitarian, busy with activity, noisy with stories, garrulous with grotesquerie, gossip, humor, aspirations, fantasies—​these are signs of a culture of survival that emerges from the other side of the colonial enterprise, the darker side. But the darker side is always there. A gallows-​humor plays across the frame of Naipaul’s every narrative, and his ironic insouciance will not hide it, nor can his comic hauteur cover it up. And, for once, the joke is not on the hapless native, the hopeless coolie, the failed postcolonial writer, or the preposterous, puppet-​like Caribbean politician. Naipaul’s dark side represents his deep dive into the history and psyche of migrants, refugees, and displaced peoples. Naipaul, for sure, is not on their side, don’t get me wrong, but poetic justice is served because the specters of slavery and the ghosts of indenture won’t leave his side. HAV: What were your big interventions? HB:  This is not a question for me to answer—​certainly not with a straight face. So I  will be brief and leave you and your readers to reflect on the

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question. I will limit myself to simply listing issues that have emerged in my reading of Naipaul above and are somehow directly linked to my theoretical “interventions”: the third space; mimicry as psychic and political resistance; hybridity and ambivalence (rather than “contradiction”) in the analytics of power and agency; cultural translation. To be effective an intervention has to be imminent: it has to be impending, hanging over your head or your text as if it is about to happen. An intervention must emerge, in the field of interpretation and social action, as if it brings the past to a kind of fruition even as it meets the necessity and the unknowability of the future. The interventions that I value most are the diverse translational uses of my work—​not the influence of my theories. To the extent to which you are able to provoke translation and displacement—​mistranslation and untranslatability are part of the process—​in the work of others, to that extent your own work lives in a state of revision and renewal, in the company of a kind of solidarity. HAV: From my encounters with your prose, I would call it a lyricism. I’ve tried to identify with the different people I’ve interviewed a favorite trope. In your case, there’s an element of the paradox. For example, we’ve got sentences like—​ this is a Sir Thomas Brownian sentence: “The difference in space returns as the same difference of time, turning territory to tradition.” HB: Yes. Paradoxical structures, juxtapositions, montage […] I hadn’t thought of lyrical paradox, but I like it. Thanks, for the thought. I think you’re on to something. For me the impetus to theory is the struggle to find a trope, an image, a style, that carries the thought with it, not only as a form of analytic exposition, but as a vehicle of poetic prefiguration. The theoretical intervention is as much in the enunciation as in the idea; the analytical has to be mediated—​or metaphorized—​by the agency of affect. The labor of writing theory consists in carrying the concept or argument to a place beyond its “conclusion”; to take the work into a realm of time, meaning, and realization that may not have been mastered as yet, but exists as a realm that it is anticipated as a virtual horizon of thought that anticipates the next iteration. There are people who find this frustrating, which I regret, but that’s where “lyrical thinking”—​thank you!—​takes me. Lyrical thinking is a process by which I make my vulnerability, as author and interpreter, both evident and expressive. The wayward desire to get where you aren’t, that internal displacement of confronting something you can’t actually quite grasp or say, but you know that it is going to be the next place to which you will be compelled to go. When you ask me about breakthrough moments, another great moment comes from Lacan when he says, “The question to ask is not ‘What are you saying?’ but ‘Why you are saying this to me?’ ” HAV: An offbeat question. Whom would you have wanted to plagiarize? HB: Walter Benjamin.

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HAV: Can you elaborate? HB: How do I begin to answer this question, except to take on from where I  ended my last answer. It is difficult to think of any other writer more adept than Benjamin at finding an apposite form for representing the process of thought—​and thinking as a process—​than Benjamin. His Konvoluts in the Arcades Project continually open up those iterative interstices, the spaces in-​between, his citations, reflections, quotations, apercus, as the mobile places from which to think of the constellation of “concepts” as connective texts and tissues. Benjamin’s Konvoluts, his conceptual and material montages, are held together in jurisdictions of juxtaposition. Benjamin repeatedly forces me to find my own place in the midst of his thinking; to take a stand at the crossroads of history and theory, puzzling on my next move. Take this, for instance: Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-​scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. [Walter Benjamin, “Convolutes” ‘N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’ The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 456–88 at p. 461. Originally published in German as Das Passengen-Werk in Volume 5 of Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.] Following Benjamin’s method of Konvolut constructions, let me indulge my plagiarist phantasies a little further and give you some randomly chosen “precisely cut components”: If I had to define myself I would say I am in expectation; I am investigating my surroundings; I am interpreting everything on the basis of my findings. I have become a sensor. […] I define myself as absolutely and sustainedly open-​minded. […] That which has been shattered is rebuilt and constructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands. Frantz Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008, pp. 99–117. Originally published in

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the French language under the title Peau noire, masques blancs by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1952.] Our fathers’ enchantment with humanity […] did not even conceive of the terror of the idea of humanity. […] For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or other men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. […] To follow a non-​imperialistic policy and maintain a non-​ racist faith becomes daily more difficult because it becomes daily clearer how great a burden mankind is for man. [Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Ed. and intro. by Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books, 1994, pp. 121–32 at p. 131. Originally published in Jewish Frontier, no. 12, January 1945 as “German Guilt.”] The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete. [Toni Morrison, Paradise, Vintage International 2014, p. xv.] A citizen trying to wake from the burnt out dream of Innocence […] To remember […] That blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth to meet again in mourning that the internal emigrant is the most homesick of all women and of all men that every flag that flies today is a cry of  pain. Where are we moored? Where are the bindings? What behooves us? [Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 23] HAV: Has theory been productive and regenerative? Are there waste products that should be discarded? HB: No waste products. Theory is translational and can be repurposed. We should treat theory like Duchampian artists treat “found objects,” and not give it the ritual status of sacred objects set in stone. The temporal structure of many theories is iterative, which makes them good materials for recycling. And […] ride as many cycles as you possible can! HAV: Yes. May I ask about the future of theory? What’s the next big thing?

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HB:  There was a time when the generic word “theory” was immediately recognizable as Marxism, post-​structuralism, feminism, the Frankfurt School, gender studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, deconstruction, etc. etc. etc. These schools of thought have now been disseminated and redistributed across the humanities and film studies, and they have lost their following as disciplinary “schools” of thought to which people belonged with the fervor and loyalty of schools of faith. You could say that “the next big things” may be human rights studies, migration discourse, environmental studies, and the anthropocenic archive. I don’t find the “next big thing” useful or interesting as a way of talking about conceptual developments or the political stakes involved in the ethics of pedagogy. The “next big thing” might well be the attention given to “small things”—​ small, sharp interventions; flexible thoughts; and mobile things that are capable of puncturing the vanity of global discourse and big data, while using their sharp edges to make new marks, carve new patterns, display new adjacencies, and initiate new forms of affiliation. Think of the field of South Asian history and the way in which subaltern studies—​what Ranajit Guha named “the small voice of history”—​swiftly supplanted the grand narratives of Imperial history and nationalist historiography. The next small-​big thing might be the restructuring of scale in theoretical thinking. “That is,” as Benjamin writes, “to assemble large-​scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” While our eyes are focused on capacious transnational narratives of global networks—​whether we are for or against them, we have neglected to think patiently and productively of the “precisely cut components” of our historical contemporaneity—​the crystals of our contemporary histories. Benjamin’s emphasis on the small-​cut “crystal” as the essential component of the construction of the “whole event” must not be confused with the binary dynamic of the global and the local, or read in terms of the epistemology of part and whole, or cause and symptom. Each of these theories of the formation of historical self-​ consciousness proposes a vertical, transcendent measure of knowledge scaled from the small to the large, from the specific to the general, from the source to the symptom. Benjamin’s montage-​history is assembled in relations of adjacency (not verticality), rather like jig-​saw puzzle pieces whose component parts “join together” because each carefully cut shape is held in place by a relational, mutual tension with its asymmetric, and yet affiliated, neighbor—​side by side. The Arab Spring of 2010, started with a vendor in Tunis who set himself on fire in protest at rising prices, and that tragic act of self-​immolation lit the torch of freedom across the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle

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East. The Arab Spring was cruelly quelled, but not silenced. In 2019–​2020, the spirit of the Arab Spring reemerged in widespread protests in Lebanon, Somalia, and other countries in the region, before the Covid-​19 lockdown. How do we discover in the analysis of “the small individual event” the potential for historical iterability? This is not to subscribe to the cyclical and cynical truism that history repeats itself. As I conceive of it, iterability is a temporality that binds together large historical assemblages from the smallest components of time, to produce events that echo earlier ones but are, in themselves, remediations rather than repetitions. The adjacent regional and temporal events we associate with the Arab Spring remind me of the digital technology of remediation, which produces a mosaic-​like process that echoes Benjamin’s montage-​history: The work [event] becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, inappropriate setting. In this kind of remediation, the older media [events] are presented in a space whose discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible. [Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 2000), 47] Montage-​history—​“the analysis of the small individual moment in the crystal of the total event”—​provides a scale of representation appropriate to some of our most significant forms of political resistance. Blacks Lives Matter emerges out of the terror meted out to urban black youth at the hands of racist neighbors and racialized neighborhood policing. The “total event” of the nation’s discriminatory criminal justice system is revealed in the small “crystal” of the rough justice of the street:  white paranoia now polices the “thin blue line” between public order and racial paranoia: because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying [Claudia Rankine, Citizen, 135] #MeToo is another “individual moment” (or a movement assembled from the narratives of millions of abused and exploited women) that represents a “total event.” The movement as a whole is a remediated mosaic or montage of “individual pieces” of fragmented life stories spread across diverse social institutions and geopolitical locations where the abuse of male power is treated as “business as usual.”

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Small events—​ precisely cut components or individual moments—​ may seem episodic or ephemeral in the “large scheme of things.” Their transformative potential is often underestimated because their velocity as lived is fast and furious. And yet, these moments of “heightened graphicness,” where literary montage meets the historical event, have a way of flashing up in moments of emergency, as Benjamin would say, in their resistance to “states of exception” imposed on us by tyrannical leaders and dictatorial, democratically elected governments. These narrative moments of “assemblage” are also are sites of the assembly of peoples claiming their rights. HAV:  Do you see that as connected to other things that other people are working on? HB:  It’s certainly connected to—​centrally connected to—​the work done on internal and international migration, and the displacement and resettlement of refugees and minorities. The scale of global displacement is immense—​over 70 million people around the world; people the size of a country, but without a nation; people who live in differential conditions of agency and alterity yoked together by a common political or legal title: refugee, migrant, stateless, displaced. The “total event” as named by legal conventions or political treaties emphasizes the inadequacy, and even the injustice, of the narrowness and negativity of such namings. The mosaic-​like crystal of the migration event resists the historic condition and consciousness of the citizen as “one”—​e pluribus unum. The montage-​history of migration reveals the citizen to be a double and split human subject: the vestments of political and civil rights assure the citizen’s public standing, her autonomy and agency, her freedom and agency, but just beneath the vestments of the state lies the citizen’s unadorned body as a migrant who claims the right to movement and hospitality and displays a stubborn, optimistic belief in the good life. This, in brief, is the burden of my work.

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Chapter 9 WILLIAM JOHN THOMAS MITCHELL  Born: 1942. Education: Michigan State, BA, 1963; Johns Hopkins, PhD, 1968. Mitchell was a professor at Ohio State University (1968–​77); then at the University of Chicago, where he served as chair of the English Department (1988–​91). Currently, he is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago. As the editor of Critical Inquiry since 1977, he has had a decisive impact on the growth and direction of literary and cultural theory. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics.

Publications Blake’s Composite Art (1977), Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology [(1986), Japanese translation, Korean-​language edition, Sizirak Publishing Company,  2004], Picture Theory (1994), Landscape and Power, ed. [(1994); 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, with a new preface (2001)], The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998), What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (2005), Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/​11 to the Present (2011), Seeing through Race (2012), Image Science: Iconography, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (2015), Metapictures:  A Cloud Atlas of Images (forthcoming 2020), and Mental Traveler:  A Journey through Schizophrenia (forthcoming 2020). His most influential articles include “The Pictorial Turn,” ArtForum (March 1992); “Style as Epistemology:  Blake and the Movement Toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism (1977); “Intellectual Politics and the Malaise of the Seventies,” Salmagundi (1980; coauthored with Gerald Graff); “The Language of Images,” Critical Inquiry (1980); “Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “What is an Image?” New Literary History (1984); “The Politics of Genre:  Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon,” Representations (1984); “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tells Us,”

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Image 14. “Mad Magazine”

New Literary History (1988); “Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation,” Poetics Today (1989); “Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s the Prelude,” ELH (1990); “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism,” Transition (1992); “Ekphrasis and the Other,” South Atlantic Quarterly (1992); “The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said,” Boundary 2 (1998); “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and

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the American Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry (2000); “Seeing Disability,” Public Culture (2001); “Romanticism and the Life of Things:  Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry (2001); “The Surplus Value of Images,” Mosaic:  A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (2002); “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” Modernism/​Modernity (2003); “The Commitment to Form; Or, Still Crazy After All These Years,” PMLA (2003); “The Future of Criticism: A Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical Inquiry (2004); “Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation,” Critical Inquiry (2005). W. J.  T. Mitchell was interviewed by Veeser in a hotel room on January 8, 2016, in Austin, Texas. HAV: From your point of vantage, which was an excellent one, what were the big events in the history of theory, decisive moments, decisive confrontations? WJTM:  First is the structuralist symposium of 1966, which I  attended as a graduate student in English at Johns Hopkins University. The graduate students divided into two teams. One had tee-​shirts printed that said “space” on them; the other team’s tee-​shirts said “time.” I was part of the space crowd, which roughly corresponded to being a structuralist versus post-​structuralist theorist. We felt that Derrida was the true anarchist and revolutionary. He was challenging the entire regime of structuralism, as you well know, and that seemed to be a deeply radical gesture, at a very abstract level. I was deeply committed, at that point, to structural analysis, which made me one of the space cadets. My more progressive classmates identified post-​structuralism with time, though truth be told, it was equally an issue within phenomenology. So that was the defining moment for me personally, and I think for the entire profession of the humanities, not just English but comparative literature, anthropology, linguistics; it had already begun to filter into history in the work of Hayden White and later into art history. HAV: Professor Macksey omitted that detail about the shirts, when I interviewed him in September. WJTM:  It was not a bitter debate. None of us knew what we were talking about. It was an inchoate sense that a wonderful flowering of intellectual play was occurring in our time. “Structure, sign, and play” were just magic words for us, because we thought the rules of this game were being rewritten, and we needed to think about fundamentals. And our professors were struggling with it, too. It was really a moment of joy, I felt, but also anxiety. Don’t forget: this was 1968. The Vietnam War was still raging and political leaders like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were being assassinated, and our rock stars were dropping from drug overdoses. For my own career as a scholar, the whole onset of the “theory debate” decisively influenced my first book on the relation of William Blake’s visual and

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verbal art. Theory made it possible to see this relation as more than a specific issue to Blake, but led me into the fundamental interdisciplinary questions about images and texts, the visual and the auditory, that have informed all my work since then. It led me into a double, or perhaps triple, career involving investigations of intermedial relations in art history, cinema studies, and visual culture. When I moved to the University of Chicago in 1977, I found myself moving from a peripheral position as a reader of theory to a central role, as editor of Critical Inquiry, into evaluating, promoting, and disseminating a wide variety of theoretical approaches to culture, society, and politics. Within a few years of my arrival at Chicago, Critical Inquiry published the first special issues on feminism (Elizabeth Abel’s Writing and Sexual Difference) on race (Henry Louis Gates’s “Race,” Writing, and Difference) along with a whole series of special issues: On Narrative, The Language of Images, The Politics of Interpretation, and (in one memorable episode) Against Theory, an issue comprised of responses to an article by Walter Michaels and Stephen Knapp. Other critical moments in the history of theory quickly followed in the 1980s. One key episode was the Paul de Man controversy, involving his journalistic work for a fascist publication during World War II. Derrida’s defense of de Man against dozens of hostile critics felt to many like the end of the golden age of theory, or at least of deconstruction. And as a sidelight to that, Derrida also wrote an essay in our pages on apartheid and received a severe critique from a pair of South African scholars, who accused him of not understanding the internal history and politics of South Africa. He responded in a characteristically gentlemanly, kind, and absolutely ferocious way. It was in the 1980s that the prefix “post-​” began to appear everywhere: most famously in the period concept of “postmodernism,” but also in the emergent concept of the postcolonial, brought into our pages by our newest editor, Homi Bhabha, and contested vigorously by a member of our editorial board, Edward Said. “What is this ‘post-​’ bullshit?” Edward would say. “Colonialism is alive and well in new, more virulent forms. The prefix should be ‘neo-​colonialism’, as financed by neoliberalism.” I have never been happy with the “post-​” myself, either as a period concept or a polemical maxim (see posthuman, postracial, post-​structuralist, postapocalyptic, post-​theory, etc.). It announces little more than the end of something, while failing to specify what is taking its place. It is only a slight improvement to add “the new” or “neo.” I have argued particularly against the postracial in Seeing through Race (Harvard, 2012) and for an alternative account of the postmodern era in the concept of “biocybernetic reproduction” as the technological determinant of the late twentieth century. My essay “Post-​colonial Literature, Post-​Imperial Theory,” in the London Review of Books, was an attempt to reframe and relocate

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the post-​around the processes of globalization and its antithesis, planetary and environmental thinking. In the ’90s, Derrida began moving into a new phase of his career, with Spectres of Marx and his essay “The Animal That Therefore I  Am, More to Follow,” which appeared in Critical Inquiry and decisively influenced the emergent field of animal studies. This was absolutely captivating work, and it deeply influenced my own book on the history of the dinosaur as a cultural icon, the most famous animal in the modern world. The Last Dinosaur Book was even reviewed in Parade Magazine (the Sunday supplement to most American newspapers) and soared onto the best-​seller lists for a brief period. It brought me into the worlds of histories of science and the status of images as the central objects of scientific research, a project I have pursued with the paleontologist Norman Macleod in London. But I  don’t mean to suggest that Critical Inquiry’s interventions in theory were all led by me or were all focused on Derrida. Critical legal studies, media studies, new departures in cinema studies, aesthetics and art theory, literary formalism and hermeneutics, semiotics, phenomenology, historicism, pluralism, queer theory, and reflections on cultural translation were flowing through our pages continuously. The key to Critical Inquiry’s success has been a small team of devoted co-​editors who put an amazing amount of energy into the journal with 11 face-​to-​face meetings per year (we take August off for vacations) and lots of work in between. Special issues like Canons (Robert von Hallberg), The Trials of Pyschoanalysis (Francoise Meltzer), Intimacy (Lauren Berlant), Questions of Evidence (Arnold Davidson and James Chandler) positioned us at the center of debates about gender and queer theory, and the nature of disciplinary knowledge as such. The next moment I would single out would be 2004, when the US invasion of Iraq was launched. At the same moment that the final decisions in the Congress about that invasion were going forward, Critical Inquiry staged a summit conference of our extended editorial board, which had never met in one place in the entire history of the journal. I  remember saying at the time, that as a 1968-​er, I thought there would never have to be an anti-​war movement again like the one that I was part of in the ’60s. Hadn’t we made our point back then? Hadn’t we made it clear that you just cannot do this kind of thing, that Vietnam was this horrible mistake. And in 2004 it dawned on us that the American people hadn’t learned a thing from Vietnam. All those lessons had been forgotten. And the United States was plunging into a terrible, a historic mistake which would destabilize the Middle East for many years to come. And the question was, What could theory do about it? Of course, pessimistic conservatives like Stanley Fish said, “absolutely nothing, and let’s keep it that way.” But September 11, 2001, had produced a trauma to the

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American psyche, and 2004 seemed like the acting out of that trauma, when the United States launched this invasion of the Middle East and basically created the conditions that we are now living with. These events produced a significant body of theorizing directed at war and conflict, terror and torture. My own work on the so-​called war on terror offered another challenge for theory, asking what could possibly be meant by a phrase like “war on terror.” The phrase echoed a long series of metaphorical conflicts:  wars on tuberculosis, on drugs, on poverty. The study of figurative language, from Hans Blumenberg’s Metaphorology to Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, was making it clear that to dismiss an expression as “merely metaphoric” in the context of state power was to completely miss the point. The idea of a war on terror is, of course, logically impossible. How do you wage a war on an emotion? What would victory look like? This insane notion was official, stated policy until Obama’s election, when Obama retired the phrase and substituted a bureaucratic euphemism—​“overseas contingency operations.” No metaphorics there. Just the blandest kind of neutral, euphemistic language. Nevertheless, the war on terror continued under that disguise. HAV: So do you think that your conception of Critical Inquiry helped to shape theory as it developed. WJTM: I think it may have, in the sense that we did not subscribe to any particular theoretical school. At one point I  called it an ideology of pluralism, but that is too bland and neutral a word. It has an association with a certain kind of mealy mouthed liberalism that I have never found particularly attractive. The only principle I  really adhere to is the one that was suggested by Kenneth Burke in a private correspondence with Sheldon Sacks, who was the founding editor of Critical Inquiry. Burke wrote to Sacks and said, “I don’t like the slogan on your masthead.” The first volume of the journal had a slogan on its masthead which said, “Critical Inquiry: a voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit.” Burke was emphatic. “Bullshit. I don’t want to hear that,” he wrote to Sacks. “Critical Inquiry should define its role as ‘restoring criticism to its rightful home, a perpetual state of crisis.’ ” We did not put that on the masthead. We just removed all evidence of a slogan and resolved to make the journal a place where the crises could occur between covers in a kind of a relatively safe context of dialogue and debate, what my poetic mentor William Blake called intellectual warfare. And so, you asked how I felt doing this. It felt good. It also felt scary at times because we were staging encounters between formidable intellectuals who disagreed quite vehemently. Some of the debates that Edward Said was involved in provoked admonitions from old friends and esteemed colleagues: “You shouldn’t be publishing such inflammatory

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rhetoric.” This, of course, sparked secondary debates on the nature and limits of polemic, the language of violence, and the whole question of civility. HAV: You mentioned playfulness as the reigning spirit of the ’66 conference, as opposed to being at loggerheads. Do you feel that loggerheads came to be the ruling ambiance later on in the ’70s and ’80s? WJTM:  Yes, I  think it did. There began to be more passion and negative feeling. And some of that is still in play. This Modern Language Association meeting of 2016 has been, I think, the year of Palestine. There are something like 8 or 10 sessions on the boycott of Israel, and on the responsibility of the MLA toward the question of Palestine—​unthinkable years ago, but it was already there since the 1980s. Said was a voice crying in the wilderness. And as we now know, it resulted in several members (including past presidents) resigning from the MLA in protest over what were seen as manipulative tactics by the association’s officers. HAV:  You mentioned also that Said was a very active part of the editorial collective of Critical Inquiry, and I’m surprised to hear that. WJTM: Why? HAV: I don’t think of him being involved in any kind of committee work. WJTM:  That may have been true at Columbia; I  don’t know. But as the president of the Modern Language Association, he was very involved in getting literary and cultural researchers to take seriously the political, worldly dimensions of their work. And he was deeply involved in the intellectual debates staged in Critical Inquiry. I talked to him at least once a month for over 20 years. Sometimes more often. And whenever I went to New York, we would play tennis, then go to lunch or dinner, and argue endlessly over the direction of literary and cultural studies. He was really a dear friend. HAV: How did the tennis go? WJTM: It went very badly for me, for the first 10 years. And then I began to get a little better, and he began to get a little sicker. It didn’t diminish one bit his fighting spirit. He hated to lose. He also practiced ruthless gamesmanship. I would show up with a knee brace and he’d say, “Why are you wearing that ridiculous knee brace? Get rid of that! It’s slowing you down. It’s why you can’t handle my backhand.” He was a fantastic tease and loved a battle of wits as much as the battle of the tennis court. If you tried to “give up” in a debate with him, he would urge you to keep fighting and not give up too easily. You’ve read the collection of essays that Homi Bhabha and I put together on Edward, Continuing the Conversation. He had many friends, but he was also deeply involved with Critical Inquiry. He read the journal faithfully and often gave advice as a member of our board. When these calls would take place, they were often prompted by something we’d published or something we should publish. “So and so is writing this thing. I told him to send it to you. Don’t let it get lost. It’s

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very important.” And, of course, I would listen to that. That’s what an editor does. You engage in conversations and listen. It’s part of checking the winds and the breezes. HAV: Fascinating. Can you say what were your own turning points? WJTM: Absolutely. I devoured the Classic Comics. I read them all. But my real formation was as a reader of Mad Magazine, which I think just kind of imprinted me with a sense of what words and images could do together. I subscribed to Mad when I was 13 years old. And when my son was 13 years old, and he subscribed to it, we made a pilgrimage to the offices of Mad Magazine, to see how the magazine operated from inside. So that was a formative thing for me. Now that it has, alas, closed its doors, somebody needs to write a history of Mad Magazine as the pioneering journal of American film and social criticism. Every Hollywood film was subjected to parody. The actors, characters, scenes were laid out in vivid graphic representations, in which every cliché was pilloried and savagely undercut. Westerns, sci-​fi, romances—​they didn’t spare anybody. And that was true of politics. The election of Jack Kennedy. I don’t know if you remember the special issue they had for the election between Nixon and Kennedy. On the day after the election in 1960, their newest issue appeared on the newsstands with the cover blaring “Congratulations JFK: You’ve Won the Presidency.” How could they have known and prepared the cover so soon? Then you turned the magazine over and saw the other side, “Congratulations Dick Nixon.” [laughs] They were ready for anything. HAV: It was a very New York kind of magazine. WJTM: But it reached out all the way to Carson City, Nevada, and to Saginaw, Michigan, where I was in high school. So, yes, it reached the hinterlands. HAV: But it began as a critique of advertising. WJTM:  Yes. And they even satirized radio. The first issue was about “The Shadow” (“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows”). Mad called him Shadowsky Boom-​boom. HAV: Did that magazine lead you on to further explorations? WJTM:  Mad Magazine? It made me understand that culture is conveyed by words and images, sights and sounds, the entire fabric of media. When I went to Michigan State as an undergraduate, I  didn’t know I  was going to be a scholar of literature and culture. I  was a mathematician for the first three years. I slowly came to the realization that, in mathematics, I had some talent, but I was not gifted the way my fellow students were; some of them were real geniuses. They had a very high-​powered math program at Michigan State. So when I switched over to English in my junior year; one of my first classes was with one of the luminaries of the theory world, Hazard Adams, who later went to Irvine and the University of Washington. And he introduced me to Blake, and that was like the road to Damascus. I saw Blake as a kind

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of visionary artist using words and images together in a way that transcended the comics medium, that predated it, that reached back into the world of the illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, toward manuscript culture, and also went forward toward a kind of visionary cinema. Harold Bloom, for instance, wrote a wonderful little essay, “The Visionary Cinema of William Blake,” and I said, “Yes, okay, for once I agree with you, Bloom, this is really right,” that sometimes media are anticipated before they are invented. It’s one of the things media do. They say, “Suppose we were able to see this and to say that. Things we can’t do yet. But suppose we invented a way to do it.” HAV: What was the life-​world you were inhabiting that led you from mathematics into the English Department your third year at Michigan State? Why not the History Department or the Philosophy Department? WJTM: Because my move into English was from the beginning a double move. It was also a move into art history and visual culture, which was a kind of what I  call an in-​disciplinary formation that I  helped to inaugurate in the early ’90s, sparked by my often-​cited essay called “The Pictorial Turn.” In Europe, whenever I’m introduced to give a lecture, they always say, “And here’s W. J. T. Mitchell, the author of ‘The Pictorial Turn,’ who announced this in 1992.” There were conferences, symposia, everything on this concept, which built on Richard Rorty’s notion of a linguistic turn. Rorty famously said, “Philosophy has gone through several phases. First philosophy looked at things. Then at ideas—​idealist philosophy. And now language.” So Rorty came out of analytic philosophy, out of Wittgenstein, and the ordinary language philosophers. And so I said, Well, there’s a pictorial turn now, where philosophy has to turn its attention to the image as the big problem. Language has a science called linguistics. But images did not have a science associated with them. They had a historical discipline, art history, focused primarily on artistic images, not on the larger world of vernacular and everyday images, not to mention “visual culture” and what Tom Gunning was to call “cultural optics.” So I  turned toward the fundamental questions: What is an image? How are images related to language? What difference does it make how images and language interact? My first real “theory” book, Iconology (1986), tried to answer those questions. And my most recent book, Image Science, is still trying to get at this fundamental question of how to understand the role images play in culture, society, and politics. HAV: Can you remember one political moment in particular? WJTM: In 1968, it was probably our futile effort to encircle the Pentagon and to levitate it by chanting, “Out, demons, out!” [laughs] About 20,000 people gathered for this demonstration, but we were prevented from linking hands and encircling the Pentagon and chanting to raise it into the air. HAV: Norman Mailer wrote about it.

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WJTM: Yes. HAV:  So do you feel that personal encounters mattered as much as, more than, or less than the books that you read? WJTM:  Well, yes, I  think the personal has been really essential to all this. I  have mentioned Edward Said. Derrida became a good friend. […] The Laocoon Group was named after Lessing’s great critical essay “Laocoon on the Limits of Poetry and Painting.” It met sometimes frequently; sometimes a month or two would pass without meeting. But we were good friends. And it was art history, philosophy, and literature. That was the agenda. “Let’s think these disciplines together and read across them.” And we had occasional visitors. Gayatri Spivak dropped in and helped us read her translation of Grammatology. We discussed grammatology itself as a convergence of word and image around the question of writing. Because the grapheme is a kind of bridge between the word as an acoustical phenomenon and the word as a visual entity—​writing. And so we just coalesced and started reading together, discussing these books. HAV:  Do you have a theory of this hothouse grouping of people. Walter Benn Michaels talked about a parallel kind of situation at Hopkins, when he was there the first time. There was also a crucially important set at Berkeley. Michaels described working with his coauthor Steven Knapp: “Well, we talked about this for a year, and then we wrote the article.” WJTM: And we published it in Critical Inquiry as the essay “Against Theory.” Which generated a special issue, comprised of responses to Walter and Steve’s essay. This set a pattern for a different kind of special issue, one that is provoked by a single essay. As was the case with Derrida’s defense of Paul de Man. HAV: You kind of lead me into this question about the impact of theory on prose style, because my favorite writer, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, is Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine. I remember your statement about Critical Inquiry that “one of our problems was never an excess of clarity and perspicacity of prose.” WJTM: [laughs] First, just as an editor, I’ve always wanted Critical Inquiry to be a place where a nonspecialist could dive in to theory and be enlightened, not mystified, so I’m on the fence about the old jargon question because I recognize the occasional need for jargon. New terms make the possibility of new thought; in fact, I’ve invented a few myself, “the metapicture,” “the hypericon.” My first confrontation was with my dear, beloved colleague Francoise Meltzer, who introduced the terms diegetic and non-​diegetic in an essay, one of the first essays we published by her. She’s now a member of my editorial group. And she said, “Why do I need to explain those?” And I said, “Because I don’t know what they mean. And I’m the fucking editor!” So. I feel it’s my role as editor to be in the place of the general reader. If I don’t understand something—​I

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had the same principle when I started as a writer myself. I would always show stuff to my mother who was a very intelligent woman who never had a college education. I said to myself, “If my mom can’t read this and get something out of it, then I’m off-​base.” HAV:  Each of the people I’ve interviewed, there’s been a prejudice favorable toward certain aspects of language or tropes. Did anything like this ever cross your mind? WJTM: The first thing that comes to mind is the “both–​and,” versus the “not this–​but that,” and the “neither this–​nor that.” And connected to that is the trope of chiasmus. “The interpretation of politics, and the politics of interpretation.” “The language of images, and the image of language.” The dialectical reversal of field. “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.” William Blake. “Without contraries is no progression.” HAV: What is the next big thing in criticism and theory? WJTM: One possibility is a new phase of gender studies incited by the trans-​ gender movement. It’s an astonishing revolution, and I’m sure somebody any day is going to say this is the post-​sexual or post-​gender era. We no longer have a clue about how to label, name, classify any human being. Things that used to be dismissed as self-​evidently perverse or crazy are now being normalized. My own work has turned toward the representation of mental illness in the arts and media in a book called Seeing through Madness. Disability studies, and the study of “Outsider” writing, is opening up a whole new archive. Sound studies arose at least partially as a reaction to the traditional dominance of the visual: “Visual studies thinks it does everything. Not so fast! Sound studies is here, and we have something to say.” I’ve been involved a lot in the work of contemporary artists, a few contemporary artists, particularly my colleague at Chicago, Theaster Gates. We taught a course together called “Art and Public Life” last year, where I  learned that one of the frontiers of contemporary art’s theory and practice is the relation to actual communities. Issues like food deserts, red-​lining, and precarious neighborhoods can be addressed quite directly by certain kinds of artistic practices and require a multidisciplinary approach, combining all the skills of art-​making with urban planning, real estate, social work, and gentrification, right alongside aesthetic theory. The writings of the “Decolonizing Architecture” group in Palestine make it clear that beautiful theories and beautiful public spaces are sometimes interdependent. Critical Inquiry engaged in a critique of the Occupy movement featuring a political critique by legal theorist Bernard Harcourt, combined with an ethnography of Occupy by anthropologist Michael Taussig, and my reflections on images and political activism. I am just as interested in the role of images in political movements as in high-​level theory, and in fact, I am convinced that the linkage of theory and practice has never been more necessary.

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When people talk about the end of theory, then, I  want to reach for my revolver—​or my wallet. This often comes with the rhetoric of the post-​and the feeling of futile belatedness. I have been especially appalled by the idea of the postracial, which seems ridiculous to me. Anyone who believes that we are in a postracial era just needs to read the paper. The racism in this country is so violent and conspicuous, it just can’t be denied. Gender, on the other hand, seems to occupy a different sphere. So the question for theory and history is, what’s the relation between these two? They go back to the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, which experienced a rebirth roughly at the same time (the ’60s) in this country. Why has one brought us to this astonishing moment, where what looks like sexual and gender discrimination and bigotry is really fading, although packing the Supreme Court with conservative Roman Catholic judges threatens to roll back women’s reproductive freedom. So, the next big thing? Who knows? Do you have an idea? HAV: No. I’m struck by the arguments in Walter Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity and Ken Warren’s question What Was African-​American Literature? These debates seem entirely different now from their moments of origin. WJTM: And to pick those two out, I think those are not the next big thing. Not even close. And I  have had long arguments with Ken, very friendly, I  mean, he’s a colleague and a friend, and we’ve discussed this at length. I think Walter’s “trouble with diversity” argument is deeply problematic, and I said so in Seeing through Race. I wanted to ask Walter, “when you call race ‘a myth’, haven’t you forgotten what literary theory and history has taught us that a myth is?” A myth is not merely a false opinion. It is not merely an incorrect view which can be replaced by a correct view. That’s why you call it a myth, and it does no good to precede it by calling it “merely” a myth. (There should be critical essay on the use of “merely” as a substitute for critical engagement). Myth and metaphor are very closely allied, and both resist the “merely.” Myths and metaphors are the things we live by. And it’s not clear that we have a choice about that. So it’s a fun debate to have. But I think they’re on the wrong side of  it. HAV:  What about the impact of this cohort of theorists on the status and role of the profession? People—​millennials and recent PhDs—​will say, “The greatest generation? You must be kidding. They ruined the profession. It’s now 70 percent adjunct taught, and, you know, we can’t get jobs, and there’s been a disaggregation of the field.” WJTM:  I really think that’s barking up the wrong tree. When people talk about the rise of adjunct teaching, I don’t think that can be laid at the door of theory. I think that it can be laid at the door of neoliberal capitalism and the corporate university’s priorities. But the one thing that theory and area studies and new kinds of studies and new archives made the humanist professions vulnerable to was downsizing. “Oh, we don’t need an 18th-​century Alexander

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Pope scholar.” The “field” slots that guaranteed continuity in the old-​style English Department no longer have the same kind of automatic authority. And that was what the joy of the structuralist symposium anticipated. Suddenly we were thinking about linguistics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, and literary criticism as integral to a new kind of enlightenment. The real symptoms to look at are the archives, the fact that the great memory bank of the human species is being opened up to resources that were hidden, buried under what the profession in its traditional form thought was important. Colonial literatures, third world literatures, women’s literature, black literature, the writings of the whole underground world of gay and lesbian and transgender writing. The theory revolution enabled all that. So I think the theory revolution was emancipatory for knowledge. The young people that I  am working with these days at the University of Chicago—​ Patrick Jagoda in game theory and digital humanities and Hillary Chute in comics and graphic narrative—​dragged me kicking and screaming into their project for a Critical Inquiry special issue, “Comics and Media.” They said, “Tom, we know you’re not a specialist” when I objected that there are specialists in comic studies whose work I admire greatly. They said, “No, sorry. We want you. And we want you to interview Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco and do these interviews for the special issue.” So I gulped and said—​ HAV: So that’s coming. WJTM: No, it’s out! It’s Summer 2013. It has a hilarious cartoon by Robert Crumb on the cover about transgender confusion. To people who say, “What happened to English lit?” I  remind them of the way things were when the University of Chicago was an old-​boys club. When I arrived in 1977, there were two women in the English Department, one tenured, out of 38. Now I think we have a majority of women. So I think there is a kind of reaction-​ formation to that; I wouldn’t say that it’s just become the common sense. And, of course, young people can come along and say, “I want us to go back to that, too.” There was that moment when people started saying, Beauty is back. Remember? That was going to be the big new thing because we have too much political reading of literature. HAV: Professor Mitchell, thank you very much.

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Chapter 10 WILLIAM GERMANO  Born: 1950. Education: Columbia, BA, 1972; Indiana University, PhD, English, 1981. William Germano’s career has spanned academic publishing, teaching, scholarship, and administration:  1978–​85 Columbia University Press, editor-​in-​ chief 1982–​85; 1986–​2005 vice president and publishing director, Routledge publishers (Taylor & Francis group); dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, professor of English literature, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 2006–​2016; and professor of English, Cooper Union, 2016–​present. As editorial director of the leading theory publisher during two key decades, he had decisive impact on the direction of literary and cultural theory. He was a force in establishing queer theory, cultural studies, and the New Historicism.

Publications Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (3rd ed. 2016), From Dissertation to Book (2nd ed. 2013), Eye Chart (2017), and Syllabus:  The Remarkable Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (2020). What Opera Knows is under contract to the University of Illinois Press. He has also written on Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 film The Tales of Hoffmann (2013) in the British Film Institute Film Classics series. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Minnesota Review, Scholarly Publishing, SPAN, Publishing Research Quarterly, PNR, Opera Quarterly, University of Toronto Quarterly, The Critical Pulse:  Thirty-​ Two Conversations with Contemporary Critics (2012), and The Humanities and Public Life (2014). His influential articles include “Why Interdisciplinarity Isn’t Enough,” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999); “Colloquy Live: When Bad Titles Happen to Good Scholarly Books,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2001); “Choosing the Right Title for Your Book,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2001); “The Way We Read Now,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2001); “Surviving the Review Process,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing (October 2001); “In Writing and Publishing, Think Inside the Box,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2002);

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Image 15. “Theory was a big key”

“If Dissertations Could Talk, What Would They Say?,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2003); “The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2003); “Parlez-​Vous Anything?,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2004); “Passive Is Spoken Here,” PN Review (2005); “Passive Is Spoken Here,” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. LI, no. 33 (April 22, 2005); “Final Thoughts,” Profession (2005); “What Pictures Don’t Do,” CAA Newsletter (2007); “How to

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Be an Author,” Chronicle of Higher Education (2008); “The Art of Noise,” Opera (March 2008); “Wagner in Pieces,” Opera Quarterly (forthcoming). William Germano was interviewed at Cooper Union by Veeser on July 9, 2015. HAV: What is your sense of the highs and lows and the trajectory of theory? WG: I never had an “overview” of what was going on theoretically. Nor do I think that I would have anything to say about the big breakthroughs without going back and reading or rereading many of the important books from the era. But I wonder whether there aren’t always local events, local conferences, local interventions that galvanize a group of scholars who say, “This is something I want to hear more about. I want to write something more about it.” There are things that were important for me, but I have no idea whether they map in any way onto larger pictures. Part of what was happening was, of course, demographic. Younger, emerging scholars wanted to work on new things. That is always true. Publishers want to work with younger scholars working on new things or on old things in new ways. In the 1980s, the Cambridge History of American Literature was planned to be structured so that the contributors were all under 40. I don’t think they were all under 40 when it was finished, but clearly Cambridge had some belief in a generational knowledge or a generational flexibility that would be the basis for a new idea of American literature. That’s necessarily theoretical, but it certainly has a sociological and ideological substrate, and it’s tied to a belief in generational knowledge. After doing my PhD at Indiana (which despite the presence of some terrific scholars, including the young Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, was hardly a theory-​heavy institution), I came back to New York. I met some graduate students who said to me, “You should read this, and you should read this.” I did not know who Paul de Man was. I got myself a copy of Blindness and Insight and began reading it and realizing that there was a whole set of conversations about literature that were deeply grounded in continental thought, most of which was new to me. I began studying up. I’m still studying up. I was an editorial assistant at Columbia and then began commissioning books. I was given the reins for the lists in literature. So I just began listening to people, saying, “Have you read this and do you know this?” Of course, I didn’t know any of these things. I had to find time to dip into them enough to feel familiar with the conversation. That’s a very different level of exposure than one would have if one were writing a book on Deleuze or Irigaray. The theory movement in publishing was really a collective project. I looked around at what Lindsay Waters did at Minnesota and then later at Harvard. What Joan Catapano was doing at Indiana, Bill Regier at Nebraska, Bernie

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Kendler at Cornell, Bill Sisler when he was at Hopkins. I’m not at all comfortable with the “next big thing” idea, which is marketing’s self-​confident anthem. I  think the next small thing is probably what one should really be looking for. Because if it’s the right small thing, it will spread either virally or rhizomatically. Yes, the invasive plant theory of literary analysis. There are things that simply catch on. One cannot program their catching on, though one can give them exposure through publishing. HAV:  You mentioned that graduate students unnamed began telling you about these developments in theory that impelled you to look at Paul de Man. You and I both went to Columbia. I had the same experience of being taken aside by fellow graduate students and told, “Hey, man. There are important things going on. Are you aware of  them?” WG: In many ways this continues today. The graduate students are the confirmation of the utility. I ran into people at the MLA. I would ask them, “What are you excited about?” It was kind of a vulgar question. I wanted a vulgar answer. They would point to this, and they would point to that. Frequently, I found that those fingerposts led to someone else, to another scholar who was working on something that might not yet be identifiable as theory. For me, literary theory was primarily a philosophical project or a project grounded in philosophy—​a philosophy of communication, a philosophy of art-​making, and a philosophy of relating literature to the rest of human experience. It could be psychoanalysis. It could be gender studies. Ethnicity and racial formation. These are subjects and philosophical windows onto subjects. HAV: The other interviewees have often pointed to nodes, networks, circles of two-​three-​four colleagues or friends. With your point of vantage from Columbia or from Routledge, did you make contact with these nodes or these little groups of people? Was that part of your publishing strategy? WG: Being an editor—​and I’ve said this before—​is like being given a deputy badge. You could reach out to anybody, and people would return your phone calls. I was calling up some of the most important scholars in the world. People were very generous with ideas and suggestions. At Columbia the publication board included Edward Said, your teacher and mine. “Talk to so and so” was a common last part of a conversation. So I  would go to New Haven, Berkeley, Cambridge, Irvine a lot. I was able to bring the Wellek lectures to the Columbia list. You will note that most of the theory names I’ve mentioned were men, though I also got to work with Julia Kristeva on some of her many Columbia projects. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was a special case. She was put on my radar screen by Jonathan Culler and by my friend Tom Leitch at Delaware, who was also in our class at Columbia. I read Sedgwick’s manuscript. It was so smart and so ridiculously gorgeous, I thought “I really have to publish this.”

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HAV: She wasn’t too well known at that point. WG: No. Her dissertation, called The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, had come out from Methuen in a small print run. People didn’t really know her. She had done some articles. I remember getting in touch with W. J. T. Mitchell about the manuscript and suggested that Critical Inquiry take a piece of it. Which is something I very, very rarely did. HAV: Of Between Men? WG:  Yes. The book was published just after I  left to start up the US list at Routledge. But as to networks, there is always, as Heidegger would say, the question of technology:  the theory era was dependent on phone conversations—​letters, if you can believe, actual pieces of paper that go in the mail—​and conferences. I think that the conferences were more important than they are. The best work enabled sets of conversations. That’s for me the most exciting thing. It’s also the insistence upon seeing literature as participatory in the social without simply seeing it as the demonstration of a particular class arrangement. HAV: Why did that happen? I remember asking you around 1993 what was selling, what was the best seller that year at Routledge, and you said without hesitation, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. WG: Gender Trouble, which was signed up by my colleague Maureen MacGrogan, has always been one of Routledge’s best-​selling books. The difference with queer theory or feminist studies at that moment is that, at least at the beginning, there was a certain nervousness among some presses as to whether this would pass muster with the faculty board, whether it would create discomforts of certain kinds. It’s probably true for some of the other books we worked on. Donna Haraway’s brilliant work, which I was lucky to be able to publish, might have startled the horses elsewhere. At least back then. I clearly remember going to the fax machine and picking up the day’s pile of faxes and seeing a course adoption for bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress—​ in a course in an economics department. It was the next small thing. It was an opportunity where I  never would have imagined the book would have that far of a reach. To put it another way, I could never have envisioned that someone in an economics department —​probably a graduate student—​would have found something in hooks’s book generative of a conversation he or she wanted to have in an economics classroom. Even she was surprised. So much successful publishing is really not plannable. You wind up discovering what people are interested in. It was also the long AIDS moment. It was devastating, and one of the consequences of that devastation was the articulate rage and analytical insistence upon truth-​telling that produced so much compelling historical and sociological work about gay life and, by productive extension, about all of our lives.

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Is that theory? Again, for me, theory is really a philosophical project. Cornel West’s work is for me philosophical work. You could arrange theory by people. You could arrange it by texts. You could arrange it by a menu of concepts. Weirdly, I suppose you could do it geographically or by institution. I think there are a lot of ways. You could even do it by dates and choose symptomatic moments. HAV: To what degree was the theory evolution in the United States a rehashing of ideas imported from France and Germany and to what degree is there new thought contributed in the course of this aftermath, the arrival of all these thinkers from the continent? WG: Theory was a big key that unlocked a big door. Theory is more like a container of some concentrate that fell into the ocean. It’s like fluoride. We have fewer cavities because of it. I’m thinking at the moment of a critic like D. A. Miller, who started off as one kind of writer and then absorbed Roland Barthes to such a degree that sometimes it seems difficult to see where Roland Barthes ends and David Miller begins. Master prose stylists, both. HAV: Did theorists come up with concepts of hybridity and anxiety of influence in order to define their own predicament respecting continental philosophy and theory? WG: I don’t know. Bloom’s a funny example because he’s the antitheorist who’s had probably more theoretical influence—​his whole anxiety thing—​than anyone else. But as for the broader undertaking of Anglophone theorizing, I  never had the sense that critics were much concerned with distinguishing themselves from continental theorists. As to hybridity and such (which would be a good book title), a part of the American recalculation of theory was the response to urgent American concerns. Take Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality—​just that fact that her theoretical model exists speaks to the need to understand the lived complexity of racialized, gendered lives. Crenshaw’s work might be a good example of theory that is needed to help us see what’s already there. Maybe that’s a good objective for all theory. HAV: How about your personal interventions over the course of your career? What were the most important? WG:  Every time an editor publishes anything, that’s a personal intervention. What am I  happy about having had a part in, theoretically speaking? Broadening the conversation of feminist criticism in the mid-​80s. Signing up Carolyn Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller to edit a gender series for Columbia. Queer studies was coming into the spotlight in the ’90s. Doing the big gay and lesbian studies reader at Routledge was probably one of the most important pieces of publishing that I did. I reissued books with Raymond Williams early on. Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor, a work in sociology, was an important book. One field that has changed

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a lot, and that I  felt was close to, was film studies. Lots of theory. And, of course, this was built on the enormous Routledge UK list, edited by my colleague Rebecca Barden. Working in the United States, I did some books in film studies that I was excited about—​David Bordwell, Dana Polan, Tania Modleski, Manthia Diawara, Mary Ann Doane, Thomas Elsaesser, a series with Chuck Wolfe and the late Edward Branigan—​some of them quite theoretical, some of them not very, but all fueling a vigorous conversation in the field. HAV: Were you tempted to subscribe to the idea of a market logic when suddenly you publish a book, and the market would tell you, “This is really important.” It would confirm your judgment. It would certify it. WG:  And the reverse. Sadly, even in resisting such a programmatic understanding of market value, everyone in publishing is contaminated by it. HAV: What was the impact of theory on contemporary prose in English? WG: You know, for all the not unjustified complaints that theorists wrote difficult prose, one thing you could count on was that readers of theory—​and that meant a significant section of the academic reading public—​were working their way through complex ideas. They had to. So is today’s literary criticism as carefully read as was the difficult writing of the theory era? I don’t think it was ever a question of “difficult theory” vs. “reading.” It’s more likely that the internet offers so many shortcuts that any kind of sustained, attentive reading feels like a lot of  work. HAV: This is an offbeat question. Don’t be put off by it. Who would you have wanted to plagiarize among the available—​ WG: Who would I want to have plagiarized? Whose books do I wish I had written and convincingly passed off as my own? HAV: I asked—​ WG: [Eye roll] You see, if you’re a publisher, and if you’re really connected to books you’re putting out into the world, you’ve already, well, infiltrated them in some way. Editing isn’t just selecting and tidying up. There’s infiltration, too. I can find my fingerprints in some books I published 30 years ago. They’re invisible to everyone but me, but they’re there in a choice of title or the jacket copy, or sometimes in the arrangement of chapters or a turn of phrase. Or sometimes even the cuts. From time to time I’ll pick up a book and remember where the cuts were made (this is the editorial equivalent of knowing where the bodies are buried). All decisions reached with the author, of course, but sometimes originating with the editor. HAV: What do you think are the lasting contributions of theory? Will any of them last or will they be swept aside? Have they become common sense? WG:  Well, on one level they’ve become common sense. The notion of the hermetic text has not been the only game in town for 50 years. It’s meant that

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there are lots of ways of looking at things, that theory has encouraged people to imagine multiple perspectives, multiple lenses. Theory was a big key that unlocked a big door. We found a lot of things behind it. It’s a philosophical attitude toward the ways ideas work and manifest themselves. How does one write a history of that? In a weird sort of way, the project—​your project—​of laying out the facts and dates would seem to confirm that it’s over. I’m not sure that (a) there was an it and (b) that it’s over. HAV: This is a question about your own prose. Getting It Published is filled with jokes. Is there some other feature of prose style in this period that was opened up by our moment? WG: For some readers of the theory era, there were too many jokes, too much winking, too many personal anecdotes inflated to arena-​sized claims. That was a criticism of the New Historicism moment, as you know better than I.  But there are jokes in everything, as whoever wrote the Bible knew. The joke is a mechanism of surprise. For all its difficulty, literary theory has a deep connection to registral shift, to the pleasure of language, of the sly nod, even the wink, the knowing engagement of the audience. That’s crucial if you’re going to write compellingly in the theory vein. Come to think of it, it’s also crucial if you’re writing lyrics for musical comedy—​Hart, Porter, Sondheim. HAV: So putting text to music is like putting text to theory. WG: That’s interesting. I’ll have to think about that—​ HAV: My final question is about what this generation has done to the English Department. Has our generation destroyed the English major? Has it caused the adjunctification of the profession or allowed it to happen on their watch? What’s been the impact on the English Department in the past 30 years? WG: We have been bruised by a national retreat in support for higher education, a lack of faith in the value to society and to the country that emerges from an educated citizenry. The shocking exploitation of students through a system that allows their debt to become a source of profit for individuals and for governments is scandalous. These are separate problems: costs that drive debt and the profit made on the backs of the debtors. As a function of these things, students and their families have pushed harder and harder for an education that will be immediately monetizable. Don’t blame theorists for shifts in enrollments. There certainly was a moment when we thought there would be more jobs for teachers, so more graduate students were brought in. That still continues, but the justification has disappeared. HAV: So I’ve reached the end of my formula of questions. Before I thank you and tell you what was so interesting about your conversation in the interview, do you have any other things that you’d like to say? What are your reflections? WG: I look at the lists that are being produced now, and I think that there are tremendously stimulating things that are coming from a range of houses.

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I  would be hard-​pressed to imagine that editors in more than one or two would say, “I do the theory list.” The language, the rhetoric, and the terms of debate have been so fully transformed over the past 40 or 50 years that these are the ways we talk now. The larger questions about the future of the study of literature demand a new level of theorization, and I don’t know what it will be. Right now, though, more important than theories of literature and culture are the larger goals of education—​teaching, inclusiveness, the generosity and attention necessary to make what happens in the classroom meaningful in people’s lives. HAV: Does theory swing in and out of fashion? WG: I don’t really like the pendulum theory because part of it would be to imply that if it’s “over” then we are ready to go back to drawing the blinds and just reading Tennyson. Theory has always been about maps and frameworks. Generations redraw maps, rebuild frameworks. Theory is always at work, whatever name we give it. HAV:  Let me ask a selfish question. Are there things I  should be doing differently? WG:  Your project is an attempt to make some sense of what “a moment” was about and the continuing consequence of that aboutness. How to assess today the “consequences of theory,” to cite the title of a collection edited by Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson 30 years ago? Asking emerging scholars what shape of theory is of consequence to them now. The next generation of scholars—​more diverse, more engaged, more debt ridden, more bruised than ours, but no less hungry and ambitious—​will have their answers. HAV: Thank you very much, William Germano.

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Chapter 11 STEVEN MAILLOUX  And you could kind of—​in my memory anyway—​see Said gather himself because here’s the opponent and now he’s going to respond. And de Man then asked a question about what counted as radical within theory, and Said answered, but then de Man replied, and then Said responded, and this went back and forth for like 15 minutes. I still have my notes. And it was just extraordinary, as these two approaches, battling for the soul of the future of the theoretical humanities, were being performed in front of  us. Born: 1950. Education:  Loyola University of Los Angeles, BA, English; University of Southern California, MA, English, PhD, rhetoric, linguistics, and literature. Steven Mailloux was assistant professor of English, Temple University, 1976–​ 77; assistant professor of English, University of Miami, 1977–​79; associate professor of English, University of Miami, 1979–​82; professor of English, Syracuse University, 1982–​86; professor of English, University of California, Irvine, 1987–​91; Chancellor’s Professor of rhetoric, University of California, Irvine, 1991–​2010; 2009–​present; President’s Professor of rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University. His work in reader-​response criticism and American New Pragmatism reengaged contemporary literary theory with ancient rhetoric. Rhetorical hermeneutics was his invention.

Publications Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989), Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006). His influential articles include “Evaluation and Reader-​ Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics,” Style (1976); “Stanley Fish’s ‘Interpreting the Variorum’:  Advance or Retreat?,” Critical Inquiry (1976);

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“Reader-​Response Criticism?,” Genre (1977); “The Red Badge of Courage and Interpretive Conventions: Critical Response to a Maimed Text,” Studies in the Novel (1978); “Literary Criticism and Composition Theory,” College Composition and Communication (1978); “Convention and Context,” New Literary History (1983); “Truth or Consequences:  On Being Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry (1983); “Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” Critical Inquiry (1985); “Judging the Judge:  Billy Budd and ‘Proof to All Sophistries,’ ” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (1989); “Persuasions Good and Bad: Bunyan, Iser, and Fish on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Literature,” Studies in the Literary Imagination (1995); “Rhetoric Returns to Syracuse:  Curricular Reform in English Studies,” English Studies/​ Culture Studies:  Institutionalizing Dissent (1994); “A Pretext for Rhetoric:  Dancing ’Round the Revolution,” PRE/​TEXT:  The First Decade, a Retrospective (1993); “Rhetorical Hermeneutics Revisited,” Text and Performance Quarterly (1991); “The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-​Century America,” boundary 2 (1990); “Articulation and Understanding: The Pragmatic Intimacy of Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” Hermeneutics and Rhetoric in Our Time (1997); “Thinking with Rhetorical Figures: Performing Racial and Disciplinary Identities in Late-​Nineteenth-​Century America,” American Literary History (2006); and “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding: Eloquentia Perfecta in U.S. Jesuit Colleges,” Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies (2015). Steven Mailloux was interviewed by Veeser on January 9, 2015, in Vancouver. HAV: When did theory emerge? SM:  I don’t think the emergence of theory can be located in one singular event like the Structuralist Controversy conference at Hopkins in 1966. For me, the advance of theory in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s is kind of a long-​drawn-​ out explosion, little explosions that are mostly identifiable by particular names like Derrida or, for me, Stanley Fish, that get associated with movements like deconstruction or reader-​response criticism. In graduate school at the University of Southern California in the early ’70s, I remember getting interested in this new stuff that was coming along and going in to the professor who taught literary criticism and asking him about his course, thinking that we were going to be reading Lévi-​Strauss and Barthes and phenomenology and such. And he hands me a book, and I look at it and it’s the history of the neo-​Aristotelians—​about R. S. Crane—​and that was the latest literary theory the course was going cover. I said, “No, that’s not what I meant at all.” And so for me that was a little event, which showed where theory’s resistances were already starting at the micro level. But the theory events that I associate with particular key figures involved late-​ ’70s MLA sessions on various new critical approaches, such as reader-​response

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criticism, and I still remember Iser and Fish and Norman Holland and David Bleich on panels talking about the reader in literature and how the rooms were just packed. Or the first time that Gayatri Spivak came to talk about deconstruction and the excitement in the room, the feeling that you were participating in some kind of revolution in thought. I mean there was your own personal, individual experience developing as a graduate student coming into the profession and seeing what the cutting edge of the profession was, and there was the collective experience, the changes going on throughout academia, especially in the humanities, an intellectual shifting of the ground. And it was not only an intellectual but an affective kind of experience. HAV: Can we go to your personal epiphanies? SM: I started with an interest in a kind of moral approach to literature that was, at least in the form I was trying to develop, already kind of passé. Hershel Parker was the person I wanted to study American literature with, and though one doesn’t think of Hershel as a theorist, he was, in fact, a theorist of textual editing. By reading current textual scholarship on theories of authors’ final intention, I began thinking through what theory was. Then I was fortunate that W. Ross Winterowd was establishing a new PhD in rhetoric, linguistics, and literature, the first program of its kind to train people to run composition programs. So I went to Ross and I said, “You know, I’m interested in composition but I probably don’t want to go on to specialize in that. I’m going to specialize in American literature, but I’m interested in reading contemporary theory. If I came into your program, would I be able to do that?” And lucky for me, he opened his arms and said “yes.” And it was in that program that for the first time I met people actually thinking and speaking theoretically. The third really important mini-​event for me in all of this was Stanley Fish coming to teach at USC for one year in 1974. I took his critical theory course, which was primarily structuralism, phenomenology, speech act theory, and reader-​response criticism, and not post-​structuralism. The particular brand of reader criticism promoted was Fish’s own affective stylistics and Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological criticism rather than the psychological models of Holland and Bleich or other reading models à la Gerald Prince and Michael Riffaterre. I adopted and developed the Fish–​Iser model of reader-​response criticism along with Jonathan Culler’s structuralist poetics, and that framework eventually became the center of my dissertation. And I was again very fortunate. I was going to do a dissertation on Thoreau, an annotated bibliography of Thoreau criticism with a long critical introduction, and Hershel got me a contract with a now-​defunct publisher. So going into the MLA interviews my first year out, without the dissertation done, I had a contract for my dissertation. I received two job offers and accepted the one from Temple University. I then had seven or eight months to finish my dissertation

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before I  went to Temple. But around April or May, I  realized there was no way that I was going to complete the dissertation on Thoreau in time. I’d been publishing articles on reader-​response criticism, one in Genre and a response to a Fish article in Critical Inquiry, and I thought I had enough material to do a dissertation on a reader-​oriented approach to American fiction, taking up textual scholarship, literary history, literary criticism, and literary theory from a reader-​ response perspective that I’d developed based on Fish, Iser, and Culler. HAV: Did you abandon the Thoreau project? SM:  So I  went to Hershel and said, “You know, I’ll do this eventually, but I’m not going to get it done in time. I think I could do this other dissertation. Would you let me do it?” So he, to my great gratitude, allowed me to make the switch. I finished by September 1977, defending in August. HAV: Excuse me, but that sounds a lot more difficult than the Thoreau project. SM:  I was totally immersed in reader-​response criticism of a certain time, before Fish made his turn to interpretive communities, before Iser made his to literary anthropology. I was able to stake out a territory in literary theory and then work through textual scholarship on author’s final intention from the point of view of the reader, literary history as a form of reader reception study, a literary criticism focused on readers reading, and interpretive conventions as a way of organizing a kind of map of critical theory. And so even though it sounds like it was more work than the Thoreau project, it really wasn’t because I had it all basically figured out and actually had a couple of chapter versions accepted for publication. So I  got my first job at Temple University, and again, these mini-​theory events kept happening. Monroe Beardsley, coauthor of “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” was there at Temple and had a reading group. And that was the first time I  read—​seriously read—​Derrida. That reading group was a really interesting experience, and I enjoyed teaching at Temple and talking about theory with colleagues like Jane Tompkins. But from ’77 to ’79 there were really cold and snowy winters in the East, too cold for this Californian. And so I accepted a job at the University of Miami in Florida. I applied for an NEH grant to turn my dissertation into my first book, which I was going to need to get tenure, and Monroe Beardsley was extremely generous in writing me a letter of recommendation, even though one of the first chapters in the dissertation—​and then of ultimately the book—​was basically a reaction against the very new critical formalism that he was such an articulate spokesman for. While at Temple, another important event for me, again associated with a figure, was when Edward Said came to lecture. I  still remember driving him to the airport and asking, “One of your colleagues in political criticism, Noam Chomsky, is very different from you. Chomsky keeps totally separate

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his politics from his linguistic expertise, and these are two different kinds of activities that he does, whereas you seem to bring yours together.” And that’s when I  first heard the story of how Said’s Palestinian background became incorporated into the kind of humanist critical theory work that he was doing. A couple years later, when Said was going to give a seminar at the 1982 School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern, he wrote me a letter of recommendation that got me a fellowship to attend; the same summer Cornell published my first book Interpretive Conventions. This leads to the story about the confrontation between Said and Paul de Man during that summer session of the School of Criticism and Theory. Witnessing that debate was just an amazing experience that combined political conflicts on a global scale with intellectual struggles within the humanistic disciplines. The conflicts on the global scale had to do with Said being on the Palestinian National Council during the Lebanon War and the invasion of Beirut. Flying to meetings out of town, Said moved around his seminar class. I was thus able to go to some of de Man’s class sessions. During the first part of the summer, de Man and Said were never in the same room at the same time. All the while a disciplinary struggle was taking place between their students:  Said versus de Man, political criticism versus close deconstructive reading. We felt like this was a battle for the future of critical theory. A  lot seemed to be at stake. HAV: Would you briefly describe what the confrontation felt like? SM:  The rhetorical setup for this was a weekly public lecture. Instead of holding just individual classes, we would have a session in which a lecturer gave a paper to the whole School: either one of the four seminar professors—​ de Man, Said, Ralph Cohen, or Michael Fried—​or a visitor—​Hazard Adams was one of the visitors. And de Man was at all those lectures. He would sit back listening, wait till all other questions had been asked, and then would finally raise his hand. Geoffrey Hartman, who was the director of the School, would call on him, and he’d ask this penetrating question getting at the basic premises of the person’s paper, and I remember it as kind of blowing-​them-​ out-​of-​the-​water kind of thing. But he and Said were never in the room at the same time because Said was constantly out of town. He wasn’t there when de Man gave his paper. And so when it was Said’s turn, there was a great amount of anticipation. What would Said say? Would de Man engage? Would he ask a question? How would Said respond? I still vividly remember Said walking into the lecture hall, and he just looked bedraggled and tired. He proceeded to the podium and gave this very un-​invigorating, monotone reading of a paper on “criticism between culture and system.” The subject was interesting, but his performance was just not very vital at all. Then came the question-​and-​answer period. Hartman calls

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for questions, and the first hand that goes up is de Man’s. And you could kind of—​in my memory anyway—​see Said gather himself because here’s the opponent and now he’s going to respond. And de Man then asked a question about what counted as radical within theory, and Said answered, but then de Man replied, and then Said responded, and this went back and forth for like 15 minutes. I still have my notes. And it was just extraordinary, as these two approaches, battling for the soul of the future of the theoretical humanities, were being performed in front of us. Unfortunately, at a certain point, Hartman intervened and said, “I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two of you,” and that was like a pin bursting the balloon. All the energy went out, the debate stopped, and they went on to the rest of the questions. After the session ended, plans began for a further debate, but then de Man left the school early with what turned out to be his final illness and he died the next year. HAV: How did your work change after 1982? SM: The kind of reader-​response criticism that I was doing previously, and especially that form of criticism that privileged the individual reader privately responding to the independent text in a kind of political vacuum, was effectively criticized and dismantled by both sociopolitical approaches and post-​structuralist critiques. Reader-​oriented theorists such as Fish, Iser, and Culler moved on. For example, though Fish kept doing reader-​response interpretations in his critical practice, his theory was no longer reader-​response but rather a neo-​pragmatist theory of interpretive communities, and I found that very attractive. That’s when I moved away from a sort of reader-​oriented, idealist interpretive theory to what I came to call rhetorical hermeneutics, a kind of a rhetoricized form of pragmatism by way of Fish and Richard Rorty and going back further to Dewey and James, and combined it with a cultural rhetoric approach to doing literary criticism and cultural studies. At that time the teaching of rhetoric and composition was dominated by underpaid contingent faculty without benefits and with limited professional opportunities. By working under the sign of “rhetoric,” I became a fellow traveler with compositionists, and worked to support them, helping establish tenure-​track positions in the field and programs first at Syracuse, where I  went as English Department chair in 1986, and then at UC Irvine in 1991, where I  was hired as a bridge between the composition program and the critical theory and literary criticism components of the department. HAV: You started out wanting to do moral criticism in early grad school, and in a way that’s a continuous thread. SM:  I think that’s absolutely right, especially at Syracuse and UC Irvine, where politics became more explicitly part of my intellectual projects. That

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moral, ethical, political thread goes all the way back and up through what I’m doing now on Kenneth Burke and the Jesuits. HAV: I want to follow up on the continuity of your moral or ethical concerns. You wished to somehow combine those interests with your development as a writer and as a professor. That could be interpreted as something as hardwired in you that was there for whatever reason from the beginning, and then it was unaltered by the various theoretical breakthroughs and innovations and revelations and epiphanies that you had. I mean in a way it’s an argument that theory didn’t affect your growth and development. Is that a correct reading? SM: Only in a certain sense. I admit to being a child of the late ’60s. That was the time, the event that defined me as a subject with a certain kind of interiority in which the political and ethical and the intellectual and affective developed together, sometimes quite self-​consciously in terms of theory. The best example of that self-​consciousness is my experience at Syracuse, where I was hired as department chair to lead a complete revision of the curriculum, trying to work with the senior faculty who weren’t especially interested in curricular change and with the supporters of radical revision, primarily members of the Theory Group, made up of young full professors, associate and assistant professors. A  complex departmental politics emerged:  traditionalists versus theorists; then within the Theory Group, roughly, politically oriented theorists, including materialist-​feminists versus language-​oriented theorists, including Derridians and Lacanians, and then everyone being critiqued by the Postmodern Marxist Collective, which viewed any form of curricular revision as not radical enough. It was, to put it mildly, an intellectually challenging and emotionally draining three years of work, but in the end as a department we did adopt a new major in English and textual studies organized around critical theory and cultural studies. HAV: These debates are hair splitting, say members of the Radical Caucus. Theorists oversaw the adjunctification of the profession; they would put to me, as Heather Steffen did yesterday, the probing question: When you call this group the greatest generation, are you being ironic? SM:  At Syracuse my colleagues in rhetoric and composition, led by Louise Wetherbee Phelps, tried very early on to address the contingent faculty question by empowering non-​tenure-​track faculty within the writing program, not only improving their immediate material conditions but giving them leadership positions, research opportunities, professional development support. I learned a lot from observing and supporting these initiatives as department chair. In fact, the knowledge I gained helped me get hired at UC Irvine. At the end of the ’80s, the UCI English and Comparative Literature Department was still a major force in critical theory with Murray Krieger, Hillis Miller, and other fulltime faculty along with the courses taught each year by Jacques Derrida,

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Wolfgang Iser, and Jean-​François Lyotard. But unlike Syracuse, UCI had not yet recognized rhetoric and composition as a legitimate research field and had not yet hired tenured faculty in rhet-​comp. I was hired as kind of “halfway house,” someone who could be a bridge between the literature and theory faculty and the freshman composition program run by lecturers. They saw me as a safe person, even though my hiring turned out to be somewhat controversial, I was told later, perhaps because of my particular combination of theory and rhetoric and the kinds of theory and cultural studies that I was doing. HAV: You were offensive to everyone. SM: Well, I was less desirable to half the department than someone with a more traditional literary-​historical focus. But everything worked out. It took a couple years, but the department faculty as a whole came to see composition as a scholarly field and voted to make tenured appointments of rhet-​ comp faculty. So there were some of us in the—​ironically or not ironically labeled—​“greatest generation” who were in fact working to improve the situation of part-​time instructors, doing it inadequately and incompletely, but working strategically wherever we were to improve the material conditions of contingent faculty there. What we certainly didn’t see was how bad the situation would become, with 70 percent tenure-​track faculty teaching humanities courses versus 30 percent non-​tenure-​track turning into just the opposite 30–​70 percentages  today. We’re in a privileged position as academics, especially most of the academics that will be interviewed for your book. We’ve benefited greatly in all kinds of ways that the next generation won’t, including tenure-​track professors. Therefore, it makes it all the more imperative for us now to pay attention to and try to give voice to contingent faculty. And that’s what the MLA is slowly but surely doing. There’s going to be more contingent faculty serving on various committees and more sessions on rhetoric and composition—​a field whose courses continue to be taught primarily by non-​tenure-​track faculty. The field is going to have more guaranteed sessions because of five new forums in place of the past two divisions. HAV: Rhetoric and composition? SM:  Actually, “Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies” is the general rubric and includes the forums on history and theory of composition, history and theory of rhetoric, writing pedagogies, literacy studies, and creative writing. HAV:  That brings us to the next question:  Your own sense of your key contributions. So you have kind of invented your own field in the Rhetorical Power book. SM: Rhetorical hermeneutics. Rhetoric—​and especially rhetorical theory—​is a great passport for traveling across disciplinary boundaries. I think rhetorical

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hermeneutics has made some contributions to the fields of critical theory, cultural studies, and American literature and been applied effectively in law and biblical studies among other disciplines. Some people in composition have used it. In rhetorical studies broadly defined, Jack Selzer has done some excellent, related work on Kenneth Burke. There was a collection Bill Cain did on my rhetorical approach, in which people applied it in history, philosophy, and gender studies, and Dale Bauer did a great article on rhetorical hermeneutics and feminism. I hope to continue doing interdisciplinary work with rhetorical hermeneutics in my current project—​writing an intellectual and cultural history of rhetoric, critical theory, and political theology in the twentieth century. HAV: How would you characterize the relationship between the generation of, say, post-​1970 and their immediate predecessors? SM: For many of us, what seemed most important was theory as itself a privileged practice. Instead of just producing another interpretation of a literary text, whether from a New Critical, Neo-​Aristotelian, Freudian, or whatever perspective, instead of just doing literary criticism, doing theory became a legitimate thing, theory for the sake of theory, with all of the dangers that brings on as well as the opportunities. So for a short while, people could be hired just as theorists. The new theory journals in which you wanted to publish included Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, diacritics. My generation saw theory as a good thing, for the self-​consciousness it encouraged so we could do better work and for uncovering the political implications, negative or positive, of what we were doing. So foregrounding your theory was what you did even if you were doing critical readings. My generation felt that theory in its performance was a replacement or displacement of literary criticism, theory as a practice with value in itself, not just something you apply to a text but something you argue over, theoretical debate as such, with all the attendant dangers and opportunities of such activity. The late ’60s and early ’70s was a phenomenally significant intellectual and political period. Later I  would ask new assistant professors, “What’s comparable to the ‘theory boom’ or the rise of post-​structuralism in the ’60s and ’70s? In the ’80s or ’90s or beginning of the 2000s, what would you say are the comparable events, the significant intellectual events where thought is pushed forward, where we as academic and public intellectuals are doing something for the advancement of thinking?” And for the longest time, my respondents would suggest things like the unionization of graduate students or, more recently, recognition of the contingent faculty situation. Now I agree that those things are really, really important. But are they really intellectual events that are resources for changing our forms of thought and frameworks of experience? It doesn’t seem that they’re in the same category, more like apples and oranges.

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HAV: So, winding down, two questions. You’re a rhetorician who has thought about stylistics and prose. Has theory made possible, for the first time, prose with an epigrammatic style. Take for example the prose style of Gayatri Spivak, where you go through some fairly dense prose but then, like crossing a river and stepping from stone to stone, you can stabilize yourself by leaping from one epigram to another. Or maybe if not an epigram, from a pithy rhetorical question such as “Can the subaltern speak?” to a pithy condensation of Western self-​regard into the phrase “white men saving brown women from brown men.” The world of the tweet and the six-​word memoir—​has this new mediatized soundscape called forth the unanticipated prose innovations of Theory? SM: I think that what I would call the rhetorical analysis that you just did on Spivak’s style is a useful way of trying to work through what really good theoretical critics are trying to do. But just as you can write stupid things with a clear style, you can write stupid things with a difficult style. HAV: Yes. SM: But I haven’t done the kind of analysis that you just did, but others in rhetoric certainly have. HAV: You’re a very lucid writer. So a final question. What are the benefits of the theories that you lived through, and what do you think the next five or so years hold for the future of theory? SM: On the first part, one benefit certainly is a very useful self-​consciousness and self-​reflectedness about our assumptions, both intellectual and political. That’s one of the legacies of theory. Second, Theory provides models for thinking, and the economic and other cultural challenges to the university are so overwhelming that we need to have multiple models to think through what this institution is going to be and how to modify the traditions to keep it viable. And, third, I think theory can contribute to a rethinking of disciplinarity in relation to interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, even postdisciplinarity, though I’m very skeptical of that last. So I’d say those are the three things that come most readily to mind about the viability of theory and what its current and future contributions can be. HAV: Where do you think that theory is going? SM: I’ve been thinking about the move I made from Syracuse to Irvine. At UCI first literary theory and then critical theory enabled a university campus that was only 10 or 15 years old to develop a world-​class humanities school with an English and Comparative Literature Department, a French Department, a German Department, all ranked in the top 20 of such departments at research universities in the United States. Theory allowed that to happen. Then, in the early 2000s many of us were thinking, “Well, what next? What’s the next thing that UCI humanities is going to be able to do?” And initially that was thought

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of in terms of theory. “What’s the next theory going to be after deconstruction, post-​structuralism, queer theory, postcolonial theory? What’s going to be the next important, field-​changing theory?” Before I left UCI for LMU, we didn’t come up with anything close to an answer to these questions. For myself, political theology became a partial answer. There’s a long tradition of religion tied to thought and especially philosophical thought, and there was sort of a “religious turn” among some major theorists near the turn to the present century. There was the later Derrida and the more recent work of Agamben and Žižek and Badiou and various others. In the decade after 9/​11, we needed to address the question of religion, the notion of the post-​secular, the various ways people have re-​theorized the secular. I still think that that’s one possibility for the future. That’s the area to which I hope to contribute in exploring Jesuit rhetoric and political theology. But I still don’t think that we’ll soon reconstitute the kind of transformations that were personal, political, professional, and intellectual in the theory revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. HAV: Thank you, Steven Mailloux.

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Chapter 12 WAI CHEE DIMOCK  I’ve heard from so many people—​at OSU, UVA, UNC Chapel Hill—​that their health-​related classes have huge enrollments. Science and social science students are as likely to take these classes as English majors, because they’re not speaking to a small subset of the population. They’re for everyone. Just look at the two of us. We both have disabilities that are likely to recur. Everyone can look forward to that. It’s guaranteed. Born: 1953. Education: Harvard University, BA, 1976; Yale University, PhD, 1982. Dimock was assistant professor of English, Rutgers University, 1982–​88; associate professor of English (with tenure), Rutgers University, 1988–​90; associate professor of literature, University of California, San Diego, 1990–​92; associate professor of English, Brandeis University, 1992–​94; visiting associate professor of English, Harvard University, fall 1994; professor of English, Brandeis University, 1994–​97; professor of English and American studies, Yale University, 1997–​2002; William Lampson Professor of English and American studies, Yale University, 2003–​present. She currently serves as editor of PMLA and a film critic for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Dimock’s lecture course, “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,” is available through Open Yale Courses. Dimock was a consultant for “Invitation to World Literature,” a 13-​part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing.

Publications Empire for Liberty:  Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (1989); Residues of Justice:  Literature, Law, Philosophy (1996); Literature and Science:  Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (2002); “Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges,” special issue of American Literature, co-​ed. (2002); Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006); “Transnational Citizenship

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and the Humanities,” special issue of ALH, co-​ed. (2006); “American Literary Globalism,” special issue of ESQ, co-​ed. (2006); Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, co-​ed. (2007); “Remapping Genre,” special issue of PMLA, co-​ed. (2007); and Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020). Her articles include, “Melville’s Empire,” Raritan (1987); “Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson,” boundary 2 (1990); “Rightful Subjectivity,” Yale Journal of Criticism (1990); “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader,” American Literature (1991); “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History (2001); “Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review,” American Literature (2004); “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative (2006); “Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” Introduction to the special issue “Remapping Genre,” PMLA (2007); “The Egyptian Pronoun:  Lyric, Novel, The Book of the Dead,” special issue on “Literary History in the Global Age,” New Literary History (2008); “Hemispheric Islam:  Continents and Centuries for American Literature,” American Literary History (2009); “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” English Language Notes (2013); “Low Epic,” Critical Inquiry (2013); “Weak Theory,” Critical Inquiry (2013); “Infrastructure Art,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2017); “Experimental Humanities,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2017); “Climate Changed,” New York Times Book Review (May 5, 2017); “Education Populism,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2017); “Climate Humanists,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2018); “Historicism, Presentism, Futurism,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2018); “Humanists as Builders,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2018); “Endangered,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2019); “Collateral Resilience,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2019); “Hanging with Chefs,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2019); and “Opioid Education,” Editor’s Column, PMLA (2020). Wai Chee Dimock was interviewed by Veeser on October 9, 2019, in New York City. HAV: Which event had the greatest impact on your life? WCD: Probably the event that had the most effect on me—​on my past, present, and future—​was becoming editor of PMLA. I’ve just completed a three-​ year term and have signed on for two more years, so this is a good moment to look back while still pretty much in the middle of things. It’s a good moment to do some reckoning, for the field and for myself. I’ll begin with the journal’s mantra:  the “ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind.” It’s a bit of a joke, of course. The first thing people would say about PMLA isn’t how great the essays but how long the review process. I’d like to suggest, though, that there’s a connection between the two. It’s because the review process is insanely long that each submission has a shot at being the best that it could be.

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Here’s how it works. In the first round, the essay goes to two reviewers. If these two disagree, it goes to a third. All the reports tend to be several pages long. Then, it’s the author’s turn to write several more pages to explain all the revisions being done. All of this is anonymous, and all of it goes into the final manuscript. The back and forth between the author and the reviewers can be as long as the essay itself. It’s a lot to wade through, but it really says more about PMLA than anything else. The journal isn’t just the finished product; it’s also those pages and pages written by the reviewers for the benefit of the author. It’s incredibly labor intensive. Sure, sometimes it feels like labor wasted, because so few of the essays actually get accepted by PMLA, but that’s the point. All this care is given to the articles especially because there’s no guaranteed happy ending. And because nothing’s guaranteed, nothing is impossible either. Even when an essay gets rejected, there’s every chance it would appear in a different journal and still end up being the best of its kind. “The best” isn’t an innate quality, what’s been there all along. It’s what emerges at the end, after rounds and rounds of revisions, with a lot of input from other people. That’s what gives me hope about the humanities. There really is something special about us, something we’re doing right. HAV: Do you think over time that the PMLA review process has changed your own work? WCD: Well, I know firsthand that most essays aren’t that great to begin with, even essays that end up being stunning in their final form. It gives me the idea that imperfection ought to be our starting point. We don’t expect ourselves to be perfect, and we shouldn’t expect our authors to be perfect either. Of course, the text is a mess the first time around. It’s the job of other people to give it a second chance. For me, the second chance is what distinguishes the humanities. In the sciences, things can be cut and dried: you do an experiment, you hope for a certain result, you fail to get the result, and that’s it! You have to do something else. In the humanities, that isn’t the case. We pitch in when we see a text with something missing and turn it into a long-​term remedial project. HAV: Were there any particular moments that shaped or changed your own writing style? WCD:  Once I  was on a panel with Hershel Parker, a card-​ carrying Melvillean, someone who had dedicated himself to just one author, who knew Melville inside and out. Well, he was outraged by my first book, Empire for Liberty. He thought it was the pits, just abysmal. We were on that panel together; I  wasn’t especially terrified, but it did bother me that he hated the book so much. Because, in an odd way, even though he had no respect for me, I  had considerable respect for Hershel Parker. I  was never going to be his kind of scholar, even as a graduate student I  felt that way, but I could see the purpose of what he was doing. So the fact that he thought

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I was a despicable human being really made me take another look at myself. My work wouldn’t have been the same without this outrage from Hershel Parker. HAV: Can I just ask what were his complaints or objections? WCD:  He said 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, and I was very good at it. My basic argument was that even though Melville might seem to be sympathetic to democracy, in fact, it was the other way around. Hershel Parker had a visceral reaction to that kind of argument. His revulsion did register very strongly on me. HAV: Very helpful to hear that. That captures something about the time. WCD:  Yes. And another person who had a big effect was my colleague Richard Poirier at Rutgers. He published one of my essays in Raritan; it was a huge deal. He probably didn’t like the piece all that much, but what he said was, “You just have to write in a different way, because otherwise I’m going to go to the movies.” Up to that point I hadn’t thought of myself as a bad writer. Dick Poirier made me wonder, and it seemed that it was me against the movies, and I’m going to lose every time. So I guess I’m still working on my writing even now because Hershel Parker and Richard Poirier once made it known that they weren’t thrilled by what they saw. I needed these two to keep going. And that’s the argument of my new book. It’s called Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival. It’s about how one person’s shortcomings can be taken up by others and turned into a kind of long-​running remedial project. I discuss all these great writers—​Melville, Faulkner, Joyce—​all with something missing and needing help from a repair team, an ad hoc network made up more or less of strangers. HAV: I’m struck by the weakness and the tangential relationships to strangers that are the foundation of this kind of  work. WCD: I was inspired by the sociologist Mark Granovetter, who coined the oxymoron “The strength of weak ties.” He says that while strong friendships are great, tangential relations to strangers are no less crucial. I  take that idea and try to read literature through that lens. Faulkner, for instance, had no idea some Native American authors are going to come along and add sequels to his unsatisfactory representations of Choctaws and Cherokees. He had no idea these people would show up and help him in this way. That’s what I  mean by “assisted survival”—​even the greatest authors can use some help. The phrase came to me when I was in a wheelchair, in Spaulding Rehab, after being hit by a car while crossing the street. Without a team of nurses, nurses’ aides, and physical therapists, I would still have been in that wheelchair. So “assisted survival” has a very literal meaning for me. But

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I think it’s also generally true of literary history: texts can be seen as a team undertaking, benefiting again and again from a second chance. As it happens, Weak Planet has given me a second chance as well. It has enabled me to go back to my books and do a bit more with each of them. You’ve probably guessed that I’m not particularly happy with Empire for Liberty. I wasn’t crazy for students to read that book, because in fact there was considerable disparity between what the book was saying and what I would be saying in class. Even though I knew no undergraduate would ever read that book, nonetheless, just thinking about them sort of made me cringe. Now I get to try one more time; I get to write a whole new chapter. HAV: On tragedy. WCD:  Watered-​ down tragedy. I  read Moby-​Dick as being diluted by the company of C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh, becoming less and less catastrophic through these nontragic readers. HAV: That chapter also extends some of your thoughts on genre, doesn’t it? WCD: Yes, I’ve always been interested in genre, though it’s kind of a nonacademic interest for me. I’ve always been curious whether tragedy is the bottom line, the most fundamental reality in the world, whether everything comes down to it. In Weak Planet, I try to show that’s not the case. There’s something outside the jurisdiction of tragedy, which we don’t usually get in a pure form anyway. HAV: It’s going to be fascinating to read about C. L. R. James in that context and Frank Stella, whom we saw at the Whitney, I think in 2017. WCD: Stella’s abstract installations have opened up a lot of things. Not only do I get to revisit Empire for Liberty, I also revisit Residues of Justice. That book is about punitive justice not being the last word. Punitive justice has been front and center in our profession for some time. Stella is about the opposite impulse: reparative justice based on mediation and remediation. HAV:  The mediation that grabbed me was the fracturing or multiplying of networks that go into creating a work of fiction. The incredible layering of media. Can you say more about how your book addresses that kind of question? WCD: Weak Planet stands or falls on the efficacy of ongoing mediation, which for me is almost always a networked effect, with layers and layers of media supplied by generations of readers. Stella does it in a very peculiar way. He really thinks Moby-​Dick is a book where every line leads up. It’s a very peculiar interpretation. HAV: Leads up in what way? WCD: Trending upward, getting better and better. [laughs] I mean that’s got to be the most counterintuitive reading of Moby-​Dick. All his Melville-​ inspired works are less than tragic, a weird takeaway from the novel. I think

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Stella himself understands that every time you recycle tragedy, it becomes a bit less tragic. And that’s really why tragedy isn’t the end of the story. There’s always a way to recycle it. And, of course, recycling is central to Stella, scraps of the cheapest industrial material made into major artworks. How tragic can that be? Catastrophe does happen, but something comes after it. HAV: Would that apply to the state of the profession? Could you look back and apply those thoughts to the trajectory of literary theory from 1966 to the present? WCD: If you’re thinking of deconstruction and the New Historicism, I don’t think they would survive in exactly that form. With surface reading and post-​ critique gaining ground, even New Historicist readings have to be framed differently now. So maybe that’s how Theory will continue, heading not to a disastrous end but a not-​so-​tragic metamorphosis. And the same goes with Jameson’s always historicize. HAV: Since you brought up that famous oxymoron, may I have your take on the fortunes and adventures of historicism in your own work. You mentioned that the seminar you attended with Michael Fried and Walter Benn Michaels was a shaping experience. Can you say a little more about that? WCD: In the early ’80s, I’d just gotten my PhD and gotten a job. I sent out a hundred applications and got one job offer, and that was the Rutgers job. So there I was, an assistant professor trying to turn my dissertation into a book. I  went out to Berkeley for an NEH seminar with Walter and Michael, two people who couldn’t be more different, yet they were the closest friends. That left a huge impression on me. So I completely rewrote my dissertation, turning it into a New Historicist argument that I hope the two of them wouldn’t be ashamed of. HAV: You have described it as almost a conversion, something like the conversion of St. Augustine’s. WCD:  What was odd is that the conversion was total when I  was writing Empire for Liberty. But it didn’t last too long. When I wrote Residues for Justice, I was already backing away from that style of argumentation without making a big point about it. In all the chapters there’re some features that could be called New Historicist, but then there would be something else. I don’t think that Walter would be ashamed of this book either, although I  don’t know. I haven’t talked to him about it. HAV: It’s often said that a New Historicist article or chapter begins with an anecdote. Would you say that’s also true of your PMLA editor’s columns? WCD: It’s true, my columns are anecdotal. But there’s no attempt to use these anecdotes to make broad generalizations about power. My pieces are pretty modest. First of all, they’re low-​budget, or rather, no-​budget, written with not

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Image 16. “The NEH seminar”

much time, with no travel expenses or research assistant. So they have to be anecdotal, because it isn’t within my power to do anything more comprehensive, any kind of big-​data survey. I’m simply reporting on whatever interesting work that comes my way. One of them is called “Humanists as Builders.” It’s about a building at Haverford College, an old gym turned into a Humanities Center. HAV: I hope a lot of administrators read that wonderful column.

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WCD:  Everybody at Haverford read it. Don’t worry, I  sent it to them! But even without my sending, most of the pieces get noticed. When I wrote about the Kelly Writers’ House at Penn, they posted my column on Jacket 2. I don’t usually get that kind of instant feedback to my writings. HAV: This kind of out-​of-​the-​way topics, is there some theoretical relationship to arguments in Weak Planet? WCD: Yes, the piece begins with the idea that there’s no way Laura McGrane, an associate professor of English, could have put up a building by herself. At every stage she needed help, needed people who know something about physical structures and how to convert a gym into classrooms, maker-​spaces, and media labs. She had to work with architects, sound engineers, IT people. Her need for others is true of the humanities as a whole. We can’t build anything on our own, and that’s a good thing. Being dependent means that a network would have to be brought in to help. The Haverford Humanities Center was a collaborative hub when it was being built, and it’s a collaborative hub now because people from all over are coming to use its maker-​spaces and media labs. HAV:  Elsewhere you’ve talked about these networks in terms of Bruno Latour’s mediators, but you haven’t adopted his ideas whole hog. How have you modified them? WCD: Much of Weak Planet is about Native Americans; they are the best example of people who have come very close to extinction, but have bounced back through improvised networking. I highlight this in a column called “Collateral Resilience.” It’s about the revitalization of Native American languages at the University of Washington and Brigham Young University by piggybacking on other campus initiatives. And we see the same thing outside the university. Indigeneity is a significant presence at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, energized by the museum’s new non-​Western focus. Two of the most memorable works are Commonwealth and Council, a reproduction of three Mojarra Stela by Gala Porras-​Kim, a Columbian-​ Korean artist, and White Noise, American Prayer Rug, by Nicholas Galanin, an artist of mixed Tlingit/​Aleut/​Caucasian ancestry. Porras-​Kim showcases a currently untranslatable glyph, emblem of a Meso-​American history maybe forever lost. Galanin features a static TV screen, channeling whiteness in America, tweets from the White House, and the melting ice sheets from his native Alaska. HAV: I wonder if your choice of field, as American studies, was connected to presentism, that you were seeking something that had relevance to here and now, that you wished to be speaking to the situatedness of ourselves. WCD: Presentism is probably more important to me now than when I went to grad school. Back then there was nothing about the world I was especially

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worried about. I  was worried about my own future, not the future of the planet. Now the future of the planet is on my mind and the minds of a lot of other people. The young climate activists staging their “extinction rebellion” are saying to older generations: you’ve had your future, we want a future, too. There’s a desperation in the presentism of today, a sense that maybe time has run out, that there’s no future ahead of  us. HAV: If you look back on your major interventions, you went through a period when you were looking at legal theory, a period when you were looking at analytical philosophy, a period in which you were looking at Einstein’s theory of relativity. Do these all add up in some way? WCD. In the 1990s I was much influenced by an empirical kind of legal theory, especially The Transformation of American Law by Morton Horwitz, a book that argued that, even though constitutional history might seem the legal foundation of America, it was, in fact, the more mundane kind of law—​contract law, tort law, criminal law, commercial law—​that was actually the driving force in American history. This on-​the-​ground legal empiricism made me look at theory in a different way. I started reading analytic philosophy, which, as you know, is almost science-​like in its style of argumentation. The boundary between analytic philosophy and history of science is fairly permeable. I got very interested in the relationship between explanation, evidence, and the scope of theorization. I spent a lot of time in science libraries actually. I was pretty lost because I have no math and really couldn’t be said to understand relativity or quantum mechanics as any physicist would. But I guess I did understand Einstein in my own fashion. Time is not an independent given. It is relational and conditional. It’s the emotional claim of a historical event and its varying proximity to the present. That’s beginning of my thinking about deep time, about literature as one of those conditions which produce this variation. In Through Other Continents there’s a chapter on Newtonian physics and how it’s modified by Einstein relativity. Pretty much everything I’ve done since has been an attempt to translate the fluidity of time into arguments that would make sense in the humanities. Thinking about deep time also got me thinking about transnationalism, with interconnected space going hand in hand with interconnected time. So then I suddenly found myself doing work that was actually quite mainstream, a recognizable movement. I think people arrive at transnationalism in different ways, but that’s how I got there. HAV:  Empiricism, materiality, temporality:  do all of these topics suggest science to you? WCD:  The Humanities Center at Haverford was built using a recycled old gym. The preexisting physical structure came with a lot of empirical

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constraints. It also came with the cumulative weight of time. Science is shorthand for all these things that we can’t afford to ignore. And that’s even more true when it comes to the science of climate change. HAV:  One of the final questions I  would ask of all the theorists is, How would you assess your own responsibility for the changes in faculty hiring and the ratio of part-​timers to full-​timers. These changes happened without too much protest from tenured faculty. With the MLA job list for October advertising fewer than 200 jobs, it does look as though we are in for an extinction event. To what degree is your generation of theorists responsible for that? WCD: I think that we are responsible in the sense that we’ve collectively made the humanities less compelling to the general public. And not just the general public but also university administrators and students. I’m not sure they know what exactly it is that we are contributing to society. To reverse the hiring trends, we need to think more strategically about how to make a case for ourselves in a way that takes into account the particularities of the twenty-​first century. HAV:  This trend toward less and less comprehensible work—​ was that somehow inevitable? At a certain point in the ’60s or ’70s people no longer wanted to write just at the level of New York Times book review appreciations. So there seemed to be a kind of trajectory or inner logic that led further and further away from comprehensibility. Would you have wanted it to be different? WCD: Back in the ’60s or ’70s, using a very technical vocabulary was a way of making a claim for the discipline—​that we weren’t soft, that we were experts. I think we need to demonstrate our worth in a different way now. Reinventing ourselves as interdisciplinary hubs, along the lines suggested by the Haverford Humanities Center, seems one way to go. HAV: Have I overlooked anything that you might have touched on earlier? Is there anything you would want to bring up? WCD: Since we haven’t really talked about my stint at Spaulding Rehab, I’d like to make a pitch for medical humanities and disability studies as interdisciplinary portals for the field as a whole. I’ve heard from so many people—​at OSU, UVA, UNC Chapel Hill—​that their health-​related classes have huge enrollments. Science and social science students are as likely to take these classes as English majors, because they’re not speaking to a small subset of the population. They’re for everyone. Just look at the two of us. We both have disabilities that are likely to recur. Everyone can look forward to that. It’s guaranteed. HAV: Yes, guaranteed.

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WCD:  So my next project is called “Not Paralyzed.” And its subtitle is “Disabilities and Climate Change.” I  want to argue that, starting out from bodily weakness and the need for supporting infrastructure, disabilities have a lot to tell about us about species thinking, about adaptive resilience and assisted survival. HAV: Thank you, Wai Chee Dimock.

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Chapter 13 RITA FELSKI  Born: 1956. Education:  Cambridge University, honors in French and German literature; Monash University, German literature, PhD. Felski has taught at Murdoch University in Perth, chaired the Comparative Literature Program, University of Virginia, 2004–​2008, and is currently William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and concurrently Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–​2021).

Publications Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (1989), The Gender of Modernity (1995), Doing Time:  Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000), Literature After Feminism (2003), and Uses of Literature (2008). The Limits of Critique (2015), an assessment of the role of the hermeneutics of suspicion as a mood and method in literary studies, has been widely reviewed. Her most recent book, Hooked: Art and Attachment, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Felski is the editor of Rethinking Tragedy (2008) and co-​editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013) and Critique and Postcritique (2017). She was influential as editor of New Literary History. Some of her most important articles are “The Doxa of Difference,” Signs (1997); “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations (1999/​2000); “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA (2000); “Being Reasonable, Telling Stories,” Feminist Theory (2000); “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies,” Modernism/​Modernity (2003); “Everyday Aesthetics,” Minnesota Review (2009); and “After Suspicion,” Profession (2009). Her articles have been published in PMLA; Signs; New Literary History; Modernism/​Modernity; Cultural Critique; Theory, Culture and Society; and New Formations. Rita Felski was interviewed by Veeser on January 9, 2015, in Vancouver.

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HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory since 1966? The 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins was important, for example, bringing to the US the French theorists that later had such an impact. Were there other such moments that you can think of: conferences, confrontations? RF: Not that many conferences. I guess in terms of conferences really the only other big conference that comes to mind would have been the ones in Illinois. The one in the early ’80s and then the one in the early ’90s that made that big cultural studies volume. So those were kind of pretty major interventions in the kind of intellectual arenas that I’m familiar with. Of course, the Johns Hopkins thing comes to be cited in every book on theory that you read, but I only know that through hearsay really. I wasn’t in the States. It was when I was very young, so it had very little in terms of intellectual impact on me personally. But apart from that I don’t really see much in the way of specific conferences apart from these cultural studies, ones which I think were really important. HAV:  The Marxism and interpretation of culture conference was in 1983. Was that a turning point in some way? RF: I was not in the United States at that time, but I think that was pretty important, right? In terms of making cultural studies visible in the United States. And then that was all further boosted by the cultural studies volume of the early ’90s which had a massive impact on everyone. There was some blurb on the back you know, that said everyone has to buy this book from Grossberg or Stuart Hall or someone, so I just think those books were important in putting cultural studies on the map, and of course, with the earlier one there was still a very close association between Marxism and cultural studies. I think by the early ’90s that connection was not quite so strong. HAV: I think you’re right. Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson, and Larry Grossberg were the principals of the Marxism conference of  1983. RF: Okay, wow, you remember it better than I do. HAV: I was there for the whole thing—​four weeks. Has the new or Marxist left somehow been eclipsed over the succeeding period? RF: Well, I don’t know. I think pretty much everyone you talk to would say that, right? Marxism, as you well know, always had a very minor presence in the US scene, I mean compared to England. The English/​Australian context is the one I  know best, and certainly when I  was in graduate school in the ’80s, the Althusserian model was the model. In fact, I always hated Althusser because I  came up with a kind of Habermasian training. But surely in the early ’80s, mid-​’80s, late ’80s, you had to be completely familiar with both the Althusserian moment and the critique of Althusser through Hindess and Hirst and these kind of really quite technical debates about levels of, you know, relative autonomy in Marxist theory and the limits of Althusser. And I don’t know

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if it was ever the case in the United States. There was the fantastically important influence of Fredric Jameson, and he’s just really carried things single handedly. And then, of course, there are people in Syracuse and various other places who are doing Marxist work and being associated with cultural critique, like Timothy Brennan, or the younger folks, the guy at Illinois, Nicholas Brown. You know, there are obviously still significant Marxist figures, but my sense really in the United States is that it was pretty much carried by Jameson in terms of being the major influential figure. HAV: You’ve written about the middle class. Do you think that the transformation of the profession was owing to the ideology of the professionalism or its demography, shifting toward a more middle class cohort? RF:  So, when you say middle class, middle class can mean upper middle class or lower middle class, and when you say the professoriate became more middle class, you mean to include people from the larger social cohort. Is that what you mean? HAV: Well, especially lower middle class. In the sense that Stanley Fish is the son of a plumbing contractor. RF: I think that may have been true to some extent, but my sense is that certainly in the last 15 years it’s now gone very much the other way. I know certainly Irene and I come from a lower middle class background. Pretty much every professor I talk to has parents who are professors or doctors or lawyers, and I actually think that the current condition in graduate school has really exacerbated that. In the past I didn’t do particularly well as an undergraduate. I  wasn’t super polished. We used to take students who were perhaps rough diamonds and they hadn’t gone to Harvard or Yale or to an elite undergraduate school, and they turn out exceptionally well. HAV:  Would you describe your turning points intellectually, breakthroughs, things you’ve read, epiphanies, moments that you found particularly transformative to yourself. RF:  I think I’ve had only one major epiphany, and that was actually just a few years ago when I read the work of Bruno Latour for the first time. As an undergraduate I didn’t really do theory at all. I was at Cambridge in England and it was a very traditional syllabus, and then I went to Australia to do my graduate work and there I was kind of trained in the Frankfurt school where they have a mass in critical theory. And I actually found that very illuminating. It paved the way for my first book, Counter-​Public Spheres, and that idea which became quite important. But I wouldn’t call that really an epiphany because it was something I was inducted into. I would have been inducted into it whether I liked it or not. And then I read various things and found them interesting, but I was never really blown away by anything until I had read Bruno Latour three years ago, and that was really my road to Damascus epiphany.

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HAV: What was the particular book or article that you read? RF:  It was his book Reassembling the Social. I’ve actually read bits of Latour before, but they’ve never really spoken to me. And you know, suddenly I’d read Reassembling the Social, and it was the first time I thought, this is what I’ve always wanted to say and someone has said it so much better than me. HAV: How about your own most important contributions or interventions or insights? RF: Well my work sort of shifted a bit, on the one hand, in the sense that my first book was still drawing on kind of Habermas and Marxist theory and the second one was more influenced by Foucault and so on, and now I’ve shifted more to the work of Latour and I’m interested in phenomenology. But I do think there’s a kind of ongoing thread in my work in the sense that I think I’ve always been very skeptical about a certain kind of vanguardism in theory. You know, in the claims that certain kinds of language, or certain kinds of theories, are going to be rapidly transformative or disruptive. I’ve always been interested in thinking seriously about the politics of everyday life and trying to think about the relationship between academic work and the work of people, the lives of people, outside of the academy. My first book was about taking seriously popular feminist novels, right? And then I had a book on modernity, where I said that it’s not just enough to talk about modernity in terms of modernism, let’s look at suffragette speeches and popular fiction. Similarly, now I’m actually still very interested in, for example, the reading experiences of lay readers as opposed to academic readers. So, for example, what struck me is that people like Ellen Rooney in the MLA session yesterday were talking very eloquently about reading, but what reading do they mean? They mean a highly specialized kind of academic reading. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but that was almost being taken as synonymous with reading as such. And I’m really interested in the relations between academic reading and the kinds of reading people do in nonacademic contexts and trying to make better links between them. So guiding my contributions is a respect for and interest in the everyday lives of people who do not exist in academic contexts. A refusal to see that as purely ideological. A refusal to condescend to the views, whether political or anything else, of people who have whole different views to myself. And the rejection of theoretical models, whether post-​structuralist or Marxist, that see people outside of the academy as shrouded in some kind of unknowing discourse or ideology in that the eyes of theorists must somehow diagnose. HAV: In the session yesterday I was struck by the ways the presenters depended on certain conceits, especially on allegories of reclaiming ground, or tropes such as exposing a symptom, uncovering a symptom or clearing a fog, dispelling a fog. They were, in that sense, writing poems as well as giving papers. RF: Not very good poems, but yeah.

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HAV: Dependency on figures of speech and imagery that made me wonder about the bad press that theory prose has gotten. Has theory had an effect on people’s writing? RF: I think it has had an impact on people’s writing and I think not in particularly productive ways. And this is something I was talking about with Toril Moi the other night. We’re both people that once were very aligned with a certain kind of theory that required us to write in certain ways and I think we did so pretty much automatically and unthinkingly. And we both want to move away from that kind of theoretical writing. The standard model often says everyday speech is unthinking and ideological, and the argument is when we think theoretically we think more self-​consciously and knowingly and incisively and critically. The impact is rather contrary. When one gets inducted into a certain kind of theory speak as part of a kind of certain professional training, actually a lot of that theory speak is very repetitive and formulaic and not helpful. You know, the language of disavowal and problematizing and complicating and denaturalizing. I cannot use that language anymore. HAV:  To what degree did US theory develop French theory? Once theory made a beachhead on these shores, did North American critics develop those ideas further? Or was it a second time around for French theory? Were there really no new thoughts coming out of the academy? How were French discoveries, like Foucault, and Derrida, and Roland Barthes, modified when they were received in the United States? RF: Well, you know, I think it was neither; you would agree, neither a complete uncritical imitation nor was it a radically original departure, right? Latour says every mediation is a translation. As it was mediated in the United States, so certain things were emphasized and other things faded away. I’m sure you know the Francoise Cusset book, on the reception of French theory in the United States. Certain French thinkers were taken up in the United States. Others were ignored. Certain aspects of those thinkers were emphasized, other aspects less so. Whenever theory moves into a new context, of course, it’s going to do very different kinds of things. Cusset once said that the common hermeneutics of suspicion that were certain aspects of French thought then were kind of accentuated and solidified when they met up then with certain political commitments in the United States academy. But [impulses to read suspiciously] weren’t quite so emphatic in France. Whether it’s feminism or queer theory or race theory or whatever, that kind of politicization of the academy in terms of social movements moving into realms of intellectual thought is clearly much more pronounced in the United States than it is in France. When some of those political commitments then collided with and drew on French theory, I think that led then to rather different types of constellations than were happening back in France.

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HAV: Yes. RF:  That could be both productive in some cases, but then also could be somewhat negative. The combination of political commitments and a certain strand of suspicious theory and then actually a certain kind of Puritanism and kind of religious Puritanism combined to lead to the denouncing of counter-​ positions and this kind of hyper-​ policing of the critical nature of one’s own position and others. I  think actually it went beyond anything that was happening in France, really. Things like in American studies where, you know, the worst thing you can say to a colleague is you’re not being critical enough. There are strong links between this and religion. It’s like you’re constantly scrutinizing your own soul in order to weed out any potentially racist, or sexist, or exclusionary thoughts and it’s constant self-​flagellation, but you can never, you can never be saved, right? You’re never going to be pure enough. HAV: Given the metaphors you’re using, like self-​flagellation or, less judgmentally, critical introspection, was theory instrumental in, say, producing the autobiography of new interiority? RF:  That’s an interesting idea. I’ve just finished this book on the limits of critique. Theory, depending on which theorist you’re talking about, can lead to quite different dispositions. So the Rorty mood is very different to, say, the Foucault mood. But especially when you think about Foucault but also a certain kind of Marxism, it did go along with a certain kind of disposition or ethos or mood in the academy. In other words, it was not just a set of intellectual arguments, it was also a kind of affective stance or what I call a critical mood. HAV: What do you think has been the legacy of the last 25–​30 years of intellectual probing and tremendous effort? RF:  Well, yes, it’s probably more like 40  years now, really when you think about it, right? When you think about when these things start to become influential. Obviously, it means that certain kinds of things can no longer be written or argued or said. For the most part I think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t want to go back to the days of new critical argument even though Lionel Trilling was quite interesting. It led to a greater philosophical sophistication in terms of how people argued things. It led to a greater political awareness that people no longer make sweeping judgments about, say, the universality of certain kinds of criteria, right? It’s politically important, it’s philosophically important. It was aesthetically important insofar as it moved us away from, for example, notions of organic form and new criticism. And I think it made actually stronger links to a really whole European tradition of the avant garde, going back to Dada and the surrealists and so on. So it drew American theory into a much wider cultural constellation of aesthetic experimentation that really went back to the said avant gardes of the early twentieth century. There are some parallels to those early avant garde movements and

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Image 17. “Suspicious theory”

the development of theory in the United States. So all those are good things. I think my reservations would be about a certain kind of abstract obfuscatory prose that tends to become overly automatic. A  certain kind of automatic deference, where the citation of certain names becomes a substitution of an argument. You just say, “As Foucault would say,” and then you no longer have to make the argument yourself. Part of it is my cultural studies training and

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now my Bruno Latourian interests. I do think it’s important to pay attention to empirical and historical details, and I think it’s very easy to get swept away with grand claims whether they are claims about universality, which we can no longer make now, but we can also make very broad claims about transgression. As Toril Moi was saying yesterday, what are you talking about, in what context, and what allows you to make that kind of  claim? HAV:  As chair of the MLA’s criticism division and editor of New Literary History, you can see what’s coming down the pipeline. You’re in a very good position strategically to take a view of the future. What’s interesting about where we’re going? RF: I do see a systematic turning away from this model of suspicion. That’s still very much there, in a whole range of critical frameworks and developments. But I see a lot of other things going on, and it’s not that they’re concerned with doing a critique of critique; they’re not interested in critique of critique. They’re turning to different kinds of models to do different kinds of things. Something like object-​oriented ontology is becoming a really very major form of thought. Graham Harmon is a really major figure and has an essay in New Literary History about the importance of object-​oriented ontology. Tim Morton, too, that’s another big person. So, they are doing something very different. There’s all the kind of forms of new materialism; there’s a strong skepticism now about the linguistic turn. Certainly for my generation at least, we had this linguistic turn and that means nothing is the same, so theory is right and we can never say anything real about the world. That’s now being questioned quite a lot actually. The whole rhetoric of social construction, the whole argument about the linguistic turn, is coming to seem increasingly uninteresting. Again I think Latour’s work is very important here. Obviously another thing is digital humanities, right? I  mean that’s received some bad press, but there’s really interesting work coming out of the digital humanities that tries to think about the relationship between computational modeling and questions of interpretation and theory. HAV: Are you thinking of the kind of work, say, that Franco Morretti does, with sort of a Foucauldian analysis of masses of books rather than a close reading of one book? RF:  He is being fairly emphatic about seeing just reading as kind of really opposed to close reading or interpretation. Some of the more interesting stuff that’s coming out now is actually really arguing for the intertwining. So just to give you a couple names, we published an essay by Ted Underwood, who is becoming an increasingly major person in his field, and we’re also publishing in New Literary History an essay by Andrew Piper, who teaches at Montreal, and he’s a really major figure in these debates. He’s talking about the ways in which computational analysis of thousands of books is and was already

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involved with questions of interpretation, and these things are interconnected not opposed. So, Morretti clearly is still a leading figure, but I think there are now people coming up who are taking somewhat different perspectives on the digital humanities. Compared to a lot of narratives about the decline of theory, I’m actually very excited about where things are going now. I do think the object-​oriented ontology is exciting. I  think Latour’s work is incredibly interesting. I think the whole shift away from the rhetoric of unmaking and undermining and disrupting toward a language of making and proposing and putting things together is really important. You know, there was discussion of my work and Heather Love and Sharon Marcus and Steve Best in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, an argument there now about a new modesty in literary studies. And actually I  don’t think it’s about modesty at all, but it’s about trying to rethink what we’re doing and why. And I will say, when I have given my little spiel about the limits of critique, I’ve had such enthusiastic responses. Especially from younger faculty, which surprises me a bit, and graduate students. And obviously still the majority of people in literary studies are concerned with disrupting and being transgressive and undermining, so that’s still the dominant rhetoric. And it may well continue to be so for various reasons, you know, people like Bourdieu have explained very clearly. But there are other options now away from that dichotomy of either you’re transgressive and disruptive or you’re part of the conservative orthodoxy. Another way of unofficially saying these things is that theory in the United States always meant a certain kind of narrow canon—​post-​structuralist, feminist, Marxist—​and I think theory now is becoming a much broader thing. In my course on new theory, for 15 years I taught the standard canon. I don’t do that anymore. Now, the first half of my course is still structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marx, Freud, whatever, and the second half we do things like how do we theorize our attachments, as opposed to how do we underscore our own detachment by questioning and undermining. HAV: Do you have any thoughts on the professionalism debate of the early ’80s, when Stanley Fish squared off against Walter Jackson Bate and Edward Said? Fish advocated professionalism and opposed a set of beliefs that he named antiprofessionalism. RF:  What I  find useful about Fish’s arguments, for example, is the way he insisted on limits to the theoretical, against the grandiose theoretical assumption that you can keep undermining your own position. He says whether you’re at a supermarket or writing an academic essay, you’re always relying on certain unstated assumptions. So the idea that you can constantly undercut your own position in theoretical self-​reflexivity is a delusion. That I completely agree with. I agree with his argument that, you know, as a literary scholar you’re not going to bring about large-​scale political transformation.

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But I  think he underestimates the way in which political scholarship in the academy does have certain effects, even if they’re more limited perhaps than the practitioners would like. In other words, the university is itself a kind of modest public sphere, whereas I think his line seems to be I should go teach and I shouldn’t bring these other issues into the classroom. HAV: But one thing that activists are condemning is how the adjunctification of the profession was allowed to happen on our watch. Theorists wrote and argued, but meanwhile, the material conditions of their jobs were being really transformed. Little or no resistance to this transformation came from people leading the theory revolution. Do you have any thoughts on that? RF:  Well, on the one hand, there’s obviously the issue that compared to Australia, the academic unions here are virtually nonexistent right now. They have very little power. People don’t automatically belong to them. In Australia, you pretty much had to belong to an academic union and the academic union would do certain things. You’re certainly right. It’s a terrible thing that has happened. I’m not saying we should be exonerated, but I  think it’s more a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. It’s not that the English Department chairs sat down and said, “Let’s create adjuncts.” It’s more that they were told. The powers that be said, we’re not going to give you any more budget, this is what you’re going to have to do. You’re saying we allowed this to happen on our watch as if we were the prime figures responsible. But English Department chairs do not run universities, right? I mean, they can certainly speak back to deans and to presidents, but it’s not that they themselves have the power to resolve this crisis. It hasn’t been an issue so much at Virginia actually, because we haven’t really used adjuncts at all. HAV: Really? RF: I think just about in the last three years we have; we’ve introduced something like four lectureships or something, but basically all teaching is given either by professors or by graduate students. So I actually don’t know much about the distribution or basis. Does your institution use adjuncts? HAV: Yes, and we have a good leftist union, the Professional Staff Congress. So there’s a paradox. The union has not been able to reduce the number or improve the lot of adjuncts. Even though we have a very activist left group leading the union, the president is a farm workers organizer and Miltonist from the ’70s, Barbara Bowen, yet we are well up into 75–​80 percent teaching done by adjuncts. RF: Wow. And, this is coming because of decisions at the presidential level, at the dean’s level? HAV: I’m not sure. RF: I think it’s like Jameson says, the decision making is so opaque, and that doesn’t obviously excuse us from the responsibility of trying to find out more

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and do things about it, but it’s not like you can point to this one guy and say, they’re responsible. One of the things that Latour is good at too is that agency is distributed among multiple actors, right? And trying to work out the chain of command and, who has, it’s very easy to point at some fat cat president, and say, “He’s the bad guy,” but there are multiple levels of interaction and multiple people holding partial responsibility. And that’s why it’s kind of hard to collect those groups together to actually do something. The MLA could certainly do more than it is, but the MLA too doesn’t exactly have power by itself to change this whole situation. Because why do American university presidents have to listen to the MLA? They don’t. The MLA might do more and try and punish departments that have too many adjuncts, not allow them to speak at the MLA convention. Well do read Latour; Latour is God as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never said that about a theorist in my whole life before, but he’s really changed the way I think.

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Chapter 14 KENNETH W. WARREN  The irony is that while the intellectual force of so much that was going on was decentering, the result within the profession was that theory actually created the sense of a center around which all of us were orbiting, in one way or another. Born: 1957. Education: Harvard University, BA, 1980 (class of 1979); Stanford University, PhD, 1988. Kenneth W.  Warren is Fairfax M.  Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at Chicago since 1991.

Publications Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), So Black and Blue:  Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003), and What Was African American Literature? (2011). His edited books include Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E.  Griggs (2013) and Renewing Black Intellectual History:  The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (2009). Some of his most important articles are “Still on the Lower Frequencies: Invisible Man at 50,” The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation (Fall 2002); “As White as Anybody: Race and the Politics of Counting as Black,” New Literary History (2000); “An Inevitable Drift?: Oligarchy, Du Bois and the Politics of Race Between the Wars,” boundary 2 (2000); “The End(s) of African American Studies,” American Literary History (2000); “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1993); “Thinking Beyond Catastrophe:  Leon Forrest’s There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden,” Callaloo (1993); “The Problem of Anthologies, or Making the Dead Wince,” American Literature (1993); “From Under the Superscript: A Response to Michael Awkward,” American Literary History (1992); and “Frederick Douglass’s Life

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and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency,” Frederick Douglass:  New Literary and Historical Essays (1990). Warren is a frequent contributor to https://​nonsite.org/​author/​kwarren. Professor Warren’s work has opened widespread debate over the nature and identity of African American literature. Professor Kenneth Warren was interviewed by Veeser on July 29, 2015, in Chicago. HAV: Professor Warren, what is your experience of the literary theory era? KW:  I began to get a sense that writing about literature was something other than appreciation and interpretation in the last year of my undergraduate education at Harvard. Reading The Structuralist Controversy in a seminar, Introduction to the History of Theory, I remember moving away from what something meant to the way in which meaning was constructed. That crucial shift remains an interesting and ongoing discussion in the profession. Whether you were an Americanist, or a Romanticist, or an African Americanist, theory created the sensation that there was a shared sense of what events mattered, of what discussions you had to attend to at a given moment, of a center. Terms or notions like authorship and reality were all up for grabs. People [were] recognizing that “When I say representation, I know all of the problems with using that term.” Or “If I say reality, I know all the problems with using that term.” To show that they very much knew that these things had been redefined such that they had to appear in scare quotes and the like, if you were going to use them. But then nonetheless much of the operations that went on were more or less standard kind of operations with respect to texts. The irony is that while the intellectual force of so much that was going on was decentering, the result within the profession was that theory actually created the sense of a center around which all of us were orbiting, in one way or another. HAV:  The feeling that there was a center in this conversation:  Was that a function of the conferences and journals? KW: The journal published here at the University of Chicago, Critical Inquiry, operated in a way that seemed to center the discussion. Two major special issues, Writing and Sexual Difference [ed. Elizabeth Abel] and “Race,” Writing, and Difference, the Henry Louis Gates special issue. The race one was a kind of echo of the first one: the question of how race and deconstruction came together. What you had clearly was a subfield, African American literature or feminist studies, articulating itself with the central questions of this moment of theory. So there’s sort of an event-​ness of a publication like that. HAV:  Would you say that the center has not held because, as in Vincent Leitch’s current survey of literary theory, there are now 94 subfields, many of them just entitled “Studies of … [X]‌”?

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KW:  I find myself wanting to say a kind of “Yes and no.” Even the term “English Department” is something of a misnomer. What you often find are people within the department who spend most of their time engaging with colleagues and work that falls outside of what we think an English Department to be—​a kind of centrifugal pressure. It’s harder to find something that seems to be a center. And yet! Across these subfields and new versions of studies, many of the issues feel familiar, regardless of the subfield. We are still raising problems of what is meant by representation, what kind of work representation does. We are still debating what interpretation means. The rise of something like affect, for example, is exerting its force across a variety of subfields. But because that conversation takes place in such a fragmented kind of way, there’s a sense of simply reproducing the same discussion in different locales rather than a sustained engagement across these locales. HAV: You have warned us that there is “the taint of injustice to periodization” itself. Nonetheless, I will make bold to ask you, if theory is a period, where would it begin, where would it end, what was its shape? KW: Many people 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. African American literature and literary study was not at all anomalous but was in some sense representative of this moment. I think it’s no accident that Critical Inquiry, that feminist studies and African American studies were indeed the topics of these two important special issues. Those fields seemed to represent the absolute identity of doing something like literary analysis and doing political work. I was a public high school kid, but I spent my entire professional and academic experience in elite, selective institutions, beginning with Harvard, then Stanford; I taught at Northwestern, and I’ve been here at the University of Chicago. Yes, I’m coming in with two parents who didn’t complete college, and this is an opportunity to move up the ladder. But increasingly higher education across the board is really more of a mechanism for producing and sustaining and justifying inequality, has really become something other than the engine for producing equality. HAV: You make a powerful argument for the historical determination of literature in What Was African American Literature. Do you think it’s true of other fields as well? KW: I think so. HAV:  But how about something that has no obvious political traction, like J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of “The Secret Sharer,” as an example of American deconstruction?

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KW: No discursive act could escape its potential implication, within either the history of, or the analysis of, or the persistence of forms of domination of one sort or another. Not that reading this particular text was tantamount to doing political work but that politics at some level became inescapable. HAV: I felt early on in high school, way before I ever heard of theory, that there was something destabilizing or subversive in those books that we were reading in the English class. Literature seemed like an opening to express asocial, non-​normative views. Would you accept that? And if literature already opened that door, then what did theory add to that? KW:  I would accept that. Our English classes in high school and even in junior high were reading stuff that seems to go against the currents of other things that we were told to believe and respect. I think theory did two things. One was, of course, to enhance the significance of literary engagement, of reading. To engage with texts was to do something more than entertain oneself. The other thing, though, cut a little bit in the other direction. The extent to which we isolated those values as literary values was hiding the extent to which literature operated like any other discourse. It was an ideological act to hive off what literature does from what other kinds of texts were doing. So theory pushed against the sense that you can only get that thing, that feeling, by going to a set of texts designated as literature. It opened up the possibility that the things we value or see as operating in literature were not exclusively literary values. The other thing was ideology critique. You get something out of literature that sort of isn’t really there, is a way of accommodating you or producing a kind of accommodation to the world rather than a cri de coeur against the world. Ideology critique could be the very means by which you are simply being inserted back into a structure of domination. HAV:  When you were forming a relationship to reading or to literature, in junior high school, were English teachers already in the business of isolating literature as the one area where you could have this experience? KW: No, no one was doing that in my experience, in an explicit way. I was a public school kid, my dad a non-​commissioned officer in the Air Force, both parents grew up in rural Arkansas, and it was really through the military that they moved away from there. My mother did have a couple of years of college in Little Rock; she didn’t finish. And so in a way my love for and interest in literature was just part of the process by which a high-​achieving public school kid can end up going, on scholarship, to Harvard. So you can say it’s a way up out of a certain set of circumstances. HAV: Well, you must have been pretty good at literary study to get to Harvard on that basis. What were your moves?

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KW:  [laughs] I  don’t even know if I  had any moves [laughs] at that point. Literature was a way to comprehend the world and to transcend the limitations of one’s immediate surroundings. The kind of magic of that feeling was real enough. HAV: Do you remember using literature to define yourself against your fellow and sister students in your high school English classes, for example? KW: No, I was in such a big, kind of comprehensive high school that one felt enough room—​I didn’t feel the pressures of conformity. But because I ended up attending three different high schools because of my father being shipped to different places—​ HAV: That must have been difficult. KW: Being able to connect to each school via the work that I liked, the classes that I liked, was a way of smoothing the transitions from one place to the next. It wasn’t so much defining myself against, but it just provided continuity across the various educational institutions or schools that I found myself  in. HAV: Continuity and discontinuity are big themes in your work. KW: [At Harvard] I became a history-​and-​lit major rather than an English major. It was a separate concentration. As much as I was still compelled by literature, I was also at that point developing a certain kind of skepticism for its capacity to explain the world—​and the need to see it in something of a dynamic relationship, too. HAV: In this major did you have to write about the relationship between history and literature? KW: The beauty of it was that your sophomore seminar was taught by two advanced PhD students, one from history and one from literature. You were reading primary and secondary historical documents and learning about historical argumentation and the like, as you were doing the literary work. So right from the outset, it was the kind of conversation that I really felt I needed. Rather than just taking history as a given and as a background, seeing it in a dynamic and contested relationship with literary texts. HAV: Yes. Would you say there was some distant cousinship of method in your later handling of literature written under Jim Crow? KW: Probably so. One cannot think about the shape and function of that literature without understanding the political-​historical moment that produced it. African American literature is not a set of formal, textual strategies. One can examine the textual strategies and the like that are attached to these texts, but those literary operations are not what produce the defining features of what we take to be African American texts. It really is a political-​historical formation. HAV: What were the high points of your undergraduate or even high-​school literary experience?

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KW:  The key figure when I  was in graduate school was Jay Fliegelman, who became my advisor. He had an 1840s seminar that was just sort of mind blowing in that way. You come in with the expectation that you’re just, “Okay, we’re going to be reading the usual suspects of early American literature.” But then the stacks and stacks of Xeroxed texts from all—​political documents—​and suddenly it’s, “Oh, yeah, this kind of goes back in a way that’s on steroids to the kind of bringing together of things in the way I did in History-​and-​Literature.” In the literary history of criticism and theory course that I took during my senior year at Harvard, I was already writing my senior honors thesis. It was a comparison and contrast of Joyce’s Dubliners with Jean Toomer’s Cane. Both writers were using images of darkness, Joyce in relation to the various epiphanic moments in the text, and Toomer in terms of what’s happening at moments when the sun is going down, what’s happening at the ends of seasons. I wanted to argue that because both writers were dealing with subordinated or dominated cultures at a crucial moment, that the result of that was an ambiguous relation to images that were typically associated with decline and death. I didn’t have the language to step back and do anything other than say, “Look, here’s how it looks here. Here’s how it looks there. Here’s how it looks there.” So I ended up feeling as if I was producing a kind of a catalogue of effects. I remember feeling a great deal of frustration as I was writing this because I didn’t think I had the chops to kind of do the comparative thing that I was inchoately seeing. I felt as if I was working with transistors or something at the moment that the new computer technology came into play. I took the seminar only as I was finishing the honors thesis. And so suddenly I said, “Oh, wow, intertextuality, discourse.” He was very good at just letting you see what kinds of questions they would enable you to ask. So I suddenly got a sense of what Marxist criticism would look like. We would read a little bit, and “Let’s talk about what the implications of this are, how you might structure an engagement with the text if you’re doing it this way.” And that was really illuminating at that moment. “Oh, I should have been doing these other sorts of things.” HAV: What have been your interventions and how do you now see them? KW: With the first book, Black and White Strangers, there’s been an acceptance of the book’s claim that one can often track the effects of something like race, and track it most effectively, at moments where the writer or a text is otherwise unaware that it’s doing something racial. So that a writer like Henry James, who at that point had not been someone that scholars who were interested in race were paying much attention to, now suddenly became available as a writer who could be seen as very much implicated in the significant political transformations around race at the end of the nineteenth century. Certainly George Frederickson, the third reader on my dissertation and author of The

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Black Image and the White Mind, said it’s important to look at the way in which white writers represent black characters and subjects. I  was able to extend this point:  one did not explicitly have to look at the moments when these writers are setting out to represent African Americans. Other features of their work were often implicated in the way in which race was operating at that moment. The other feature of Black and White Strangers was my argument that the rise of realism as the dominant American form was inextricably part of the way race and racial subordination and domination were working at that moment. Suddenly then, to talk about realism also is to think about its relationship to race at the turn of the century. That book has had a kind of staying power. The second book, the one on Ellison’s work, noted the extent to which Ellison had become available for a variety of kind of appropriations, from the ’60s forward. These various arguments about what kind of writer Ellison was missed the extent to which he really was a Jim Crow writer, by which I mean he wrote with the assumptions of the Jim Crow era in place. These assumptions shaped his understanding of what a literary transcendence of that moment might look like. His achievement and power could only be fully appreciated, I wrote, by understanding the extent to which the Jim Crow era was the era of what gave us something like Invisible Man. And that argument did rub certain Ellisonians the wrong way. But I  could see in retrospect it was a kind of run-​up for the argument of What Was African American Literature? And I think that book is still having its moment. Right now there have been a variety of forums on it, beginning with Black American Literature Forum, PMLA, Los Angeles Review of Books, discussions within American Literary History, Callaloo, most recently diacritics. So I think that book came along at a moment when it was clear that we need to do some rethinking, that there was just a lot of incoherence about what people thought they were talking about when they were talking about African American literature. The goal of the book was to clarify the terms under which that could be a kind of coherent phrase. HAV: Why would that have such uptake in a journal like diacritics or NLH or other places that are heavily theory dominated? Isn’t yours more of a historical argument? KW: Yes, it was ELH rather than NLH. But yes the book is making a historical argument. Why would venues whose interests go along theoretical lines be so interested in this? There’s a presumption that an intervention within the domain of race is automatically theoretical. So an argument that says, “Actually, it’s just a Jim Crow phenomenon”—​and when I say that I don’t mean it to be reductive, I  mean it as a powerful point to make—​that means that precisely what you don’t need is a kind of further elaboration of whatever theoretical account you want to produce about what race is and how race works in literature. In the wake of the moment of theory, there’s no simple

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historicization that one can do any more. And that’s a good thing. One has to undertake these kinds of studies with a great deal of reflexiveness and reflectiveness about what it is that one is doing. HAV: Much of what you argue in this book might well be extended to theory. For example, Is theory a way of claiming an identity for a generation? KW: That’s an interesting way to put it. African American literature of the Jim Crow era, a relatively elite bourgeois practice, gathered its progressive force by the fact that it functioned as an attack on or repudiation of Jim Crow itself. Jim Crow as a form of domination affected, though in uneven ways, the poor black sharecropper as well as the doctor who’s forced to ride in the Jim Crow car. However much the African American doctor hated or didn’t care for the sharecropper, nonetheless, by striking a blow against Jim Crow, he’s actually in some sense engaged in a struggle that’s articulated politically at that moment. That’s only because given the terms under which Jim Crow was promulgated and justified, the breaking down of barriers by blacks in schools and professional offices was all something that could be assembled under and battled against, the battle against Jim Crow. In our moment it’s just no longer true. It’s not true that you can look at the appointment of the first African American senior vice president at Goldman Sachs, and somehow argue that breaking down racial barriers in the upper levels of a firm like that really counts as part of a political struggle of your postal workers or something like that. HAV: Is theory another doctrine like African American literature, an idea that used to have some political impact but now has lost it? KW: [laughs] You asked about theory as an identity for people at this moment and whether there were certain kinds of parallels. There was a way in which a left political analysis rooted in political economy felt as if it were potentially compatible with the kind of analysis that we associate with post-​structural theory. What we’ve seen has been the loss of political economy as the standard feature. The sort of leftist claims associated with theory end up being more or less posturing rather than deep rooted in analysis of where we are now. HAV: Would it be fair to sum it up by saying, Why can’t New Historicists talk about subversion anymore? KW: [laughs] Why can’t they? The question would be, Should we even pay attention to the “subversion” if those claims don’t understand themselves as already inflected by the neo-​liberal moment that we are currently inhabiting. Suddenly, the entire language of liberation looks something that is very compatible with the terms of entrepreneurial innovation. HAV: Why would people of color who had been promoted to VP at Goldman-​ Sachs claim that this promotion was an advancement for all African Americans? You offer this reason—​“to differentiate their odysseys of personal success from the odysseys of their white class peers.”

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KW: Right. HAV:  Are the liberationist claims of the theory generation equally self-​ deluding in light of rising inequalities at the workplace? Some struggling adjunct professors would say, Duh! KW: I guess I wouldn’t object to that. Though it’s hard to see how a different history of literary study in the ’80s might have ended up any differently with respect to thinking about the conditions of labor in the academy during this moment. What it might have done would have been to remove the illusion that, I think, many of us labored under: that we were really doing the political work at the moment even as the conditions under which we were doing it changed very dramatically. Terry Eagleton made the observation that however much one enjoys or approves of what goes on in English departments, you would not want to plan a social movement with the presumption that the English Department is in the vanguard of it. We know that [laughs] that what we do is not the hard work of political organizing and strategizing that you actually need if you’re interested in significant political change. HAV: As undeniable as it is, I still feel that as harsh. [both laugh] Switching back to the issue of prose style, Whom would you have plagiarized? KW: That’s a good question. Auerbach’s literary “A Book and Its Public.” For me, reading Mimesis, the range of reference and the ease with which you move from discussing syntax to various social mores and belief systems and the like, and doing it all with a kind of just elegance—​I felt very much impressed when I read it. Actually I think I read it in that Peter Dale undergraduate literature class that I took. HAV: Auerbach really grabbed you. Mimesis. KW: Yes. The other book, Barthes’s S/​Z, was just mind-​blowing—​the erudition, the playfulness, the very idea that critical writing could be entertaining. What it was doing analytically and intellectually was very much tied up with the way in which it was doing it. To feel the power of that was really compelling. HAV: Looking at your book, I found homology to be a very important move. And here’s a classic Ken Warren sentence: “Although Early’s optimism places him apart from Chiles, the two arguments put forth by both men are really of a piece.” KW: Yes. HAV: What would you say about the element of rhetoric and tropologies in your own writing and thinking? KW: I’m pausing in response to your observation that homology is something that figures in my writing. I see that a writer’s rhetorical choices and habits are anything but accidental and insignificant. I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re talking about my work, saying, “Let’s talk about what rhetorical figures are significant to you.” But I realized I hadn’t really thought about that. [laughs]

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I do agree that from the outset, the moments that grabbed my attention were moments where things that I thought were more or less unrelated or autonomous suddenly emerge for me as actually implicated in one another. It raises the question: am I really seeing an analogy, or is there really a homology here? HAV: In an MLA talk last year, you analyzed Fredric Jameson’s discussion of homology and the New Historicism. You pointed out that the further apart the two poles of the homology, the more dynamic, even spectacular, the homology became. KW: The demand of this kind of work is to determine whether or not you have actually located a connection that is a justifiable one, or have you merely created a kind of interesting set of associations, whose power is only generated by the fact that you’ve just kind of put them together. In a smoke-​and-​mirrors sort of way, as with false cognates in language translation, you can assert an identity or a relation that is more illusory than real. HAV: Can you think of anything you would want to add? KW:  I find it a challenge to figure out the question of what I  feel students really ought to know or helping them figure out the kinds of questions they ought to be pursuing. HAV: Do you feel that the books that are available, the various anthologies and primers from Terry Eagleton all the way up to the Norton collection of theory, are not adequate because they are more taxonomies and we need to do it in a different way? KW: Yes. Walter Michaels and I last year did a seminar on the ’70s, which is kind of interesting in light of, we called it, “The Pivotal Decade,” the title of a book by a historian, Judith Stein, really nice account. So we used that as a kind of moment. And we talked about the rise of theory, rise of African American studies, rise of creative writing, as a feature of this moment. I worried about enthusiasm more, making too many easy leaps from what I’m doing with this analysis to Occupy. No. Let’s really look hard at the kinds of claims and the kinds of connections you want to make, to see whether they are sustainable. The problem of false homologies is the temptation is to make all kinds of leaps, many of which are not sustainable. HAV:  Was erotic bonding a big part of the theoretical education? Theory couples like Jane Tompkins and Stanley Fish and Gerald Graff and his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-​Graff, suggest that maybe there was. Fish observed to me, “Well, there’s always been an erotics of teaching.” But then he went on to tell anecdotes about the early days of the School of Criticism and Theory, or the shift in 1968 that brought more women to the MLA. KW: The other term that is coming to mind here would be the celebrity of literary theory. There’s always a bit of erotics in celebrity. Part of the appeal

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of this moment was that the one book, the one essay, could be the thing that just did the trick, changed everything. HAV: When I ask people now, in interviews, what’s the next big thing in theory, some of them say, “Oh, that’s such an ’80s question!” KW: Yes it is. Although despite the apparent balkanization of subfields and the like, there are probably more continuities than not, even if they don’t kind of add up in a coherent sort of  way. HAV: Do you have anything to add? KW: You mentioned Jane Tompkins. The one book I thought of, when I saw your questions, was Sensational Designs, what she did with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That was very important to me. H: Well, thank you, Professor Ken Warren.

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Chapter 15 CARY WOLFE  The power of the work they did needs to be brought back into the contemporary conversation. And the cool thing is, like, I’m in a position to do that. And I think that otherwise you’re just a scenester. Born: 1959. Education: BA, interdisciplinary studies in English, philosophy, and comparative literature, 1986; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA, 1986; Duke University, PhD, 1990. Wolfe taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, University at Albany (SUNY), and is currently Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor, Department of English, Rice University. Wolfe also directs the Center of Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice, 3CT. Professor Wolfe has made fundamental interventions in animal studies and posthumanism. His most recent projects are Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’ Birds (Chicago, forthcoming 2020) and a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, on “Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity” (forthcoming 2020), focused on the work of the multidisciplinary, multi-​institutional Ontogenetics Process Group, of which he is a member. He is founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press.

Publications The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson (1993), Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” (1998), Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and the Posthumanist Theory (2003), What Is Posthumanism? (2010), Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2012), The Politics of Systems and Environments I and II, ed., special issues of Cultural Critique 30 and 31 (spring and fall 1995), Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (2000) (rpt. of the above in a modified form with new introduction), Critical Ecologies, special issue of EBR: Electronic Book Review

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4 (Winter 1997), ed. with Joseph Tabbi. http://​www.altx.com/​ebr. The MSN issue: Music/​Sound/​Noise, special issue of EBR: Electronic Book Review, ed. with Joseph Tabbi and Mark Amerika. http://​www.altx.com/​ebr, Zoontologies:  The Question of the Animal (2003). The Other Emerson, ed. with Branka Arsic (2007). Animal-​studies scholar Jamie C. O’Reilly interviewed Cary Wolfe in Winter Park Colorado on August 10, 2019. JCO: Professor Wolfe, what do you think were the big events in the history of theory, turning points, defining moments that have informed why and when you got into theory? CW:  Theory was very tightly tethered to literature back in the ’70s and ’80s. [But] my relationship to theory is interdisciplinary, never tethered to literature. As an undergraduate, at UNC, I was taken by the ambition of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. You could talk about primitive art in Bali, you could talk about cetacean and mammalian communication, you could talk about how ecological crisis is tied to epistemological crisis, you could talk about double-​bind theory, you could talk about why Alcoholics Anonymous actually works. All of that stuff was in Steps to an Ecology of  Mind. After I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Gerard Manly Hopkins, I  took a course at Duke with Frank Lentricchia on modernism. I  was in a reading group with a couple of faculty members and a couple of students reading Marx. A serious reading of Marx. I found in Marxism the same kind of interdisciplinary sweep that I found in Bateson’s work. At Duke, Terry Eagleton was visiting faculty, Perry Anderson would come through on a regular basis, and Franco Moretti had done his collection Signs Taken for Wonders, an early book. Fredric Jameson was kind of the godfather of Marxist Theory in the United States. Frank’s work was informed by Marxism—​but not in the same way. You know, Frank used to joke that he was way too American to be a Marxist. JCO: Can you see your theories actually making more of a difference when you’re interdisciplinary? CW:  The expression that really captures it was “we’re more interested in problem-​driven than puzzle-​driven work.” The ’80s idea of theory was puzzle driven. Which is why you had the New Historicist backlash against the very predictable readings of British romantic poetry from a deconstructive point of view, where you always ended up in the same place. You were just running the same machine on a different text. That’s puzzle-​driven work. Problem-​driven work has a completely different orientation. JCO: Then, I wonder what you’ll think about Stanley Fish saying that, essentially, theorists are capitalists and they’re not doing it for ethical reasons,

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they’re doing it at the end of the day because it brings home a paycheck. That is essentially what he says in his interview, and I  think that’s more puzzle-​ driven theory, right? CW:  Yes, Stanley is very brilliant. But I  think Stanley’s wrong because it’s not about being a capitalist. It’s not that simple. It’s about saying “hang on a second” to the grandiose political claims that people want to hang on a theory article that you publish in some journal that maybe like, what, a thousand people in the entire world are going to read? What makes something political is the fact that you’re working on this specific site, under multiple kinds of determinations and constraints. That’s where political work gets done. Stanley’s understanding of that is really, really valuable. JCO:  Harold’s advisor at Columbia, Edward Said, says there’s no point in criticism that isn’t tied to a liberation movement of some sort. Do you agree? CW: No, I don’t agree. JCO: [Laughs] So, you don’t consider your work strictly tied to a liberation movement? CW: No. The value of the work isn’t reducible to the utility of that work vis-​ á-​vis some liberation movement. The best way to make social change is to not publish articles in diacritics but rather to engage in the kind of rhetoric—​rights discourse—​that you need in state legislatures and in other parts of the world. I just published this piece on Wendy Brown, arguing that there’s a through line from structural Marxism through Foucault to Luhmann. I’m actually trying to use Luhmann to radicalize Foucault. JCO:  So Bateson is kind of your Road to Damascus as far as getting into theory. And then once you’re there, you’re very influenced by Luhmann, by Derrida, by Foucault—​ CW: Duke was more interdisciplinary than UNC. Jane Tompkins, for example, had a prominent foot in at least two areas: American literature and feminism. Her reading of American literature has consequences and stakes for feminism generally, whether you’re an American lit person or not. Barbara Herrnstein Smith was writing what turned out to be her Contingencies of Value book, and we read Maturana and Varela, which was systems theory and eventually led to my encounter with the German Studies Luhmann people. I returned to Bateson’s first-​order systems theory. [By the time I] started reading second-​order systems theory, Maturana, Varela, and others, I  had at that point already become involved in the North Carolina Network for Animals. Animal studies did not exist then, although Marc Shell had written some stuff, and James Serpell had written his book on pets. Back in the ’80s and even ’90s the animal was functioning as some kind of figure, some kind of trope for a fundamentally human problem. The classic topoi were the grotesque, monstrosity, like the

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paradigm case would be Dracula. The Gothic was privileged terrain. A big shift in my own intellectual commitments was this unsponsored ethical leap that I took into the Animal Rights Movement. I said, “This is fucking wrong and I’m going to do something about it.” Figuring out the intellectual end of it came years later. In the early ’90s, the first piece I wrote, on what people now call animal studies, was this piece on the film The Silence of the Lambs, the Jonathan Demme film. My colleague at Indiana, Jonathan Elmer, we’d go out and drink pints. He loved that film like I did—​and the more we talked about it, the piece, at some point I just said, “Look, you have so many good ideas, we should just coauthor this thing.” So we did. And that came out, that came out in uhh—​in boundary 2 I think in, like, 1993—​I started writing it in, like, 1991. So that’s really the beginning. JCO: That’s really amazing. That you call that the beginning. Only because so many theorists call 1990 the end. The—​the complete end of theory as a movement, where it moves back to the background and—​ CW: No, animal studies hadn’t even been invented yet! JCO: Yes, and that’s a whole new beginning, really—​ CW: —​And the Derrida stuff was way off in the distant future. The Cerisy-​la-​ salle lectures in France weren’t that far off. But in—​in terms of that work making its way into the Derrida portfolio on the US side, that was years, years later. JCO: It’s so exciting for me, to be reading critical animal studies because I’m an undergrad these really academic, really intelligent professors that I look up to think that theory is on the downturn, and I’m seeing all of this new writing that they haven’t seen before. Do you think they turn away because it’s not what they’re familiar with? CW:  I would just say they’re totally wrong. I  mean, again, look at the Posthumanities Series. I mean, the Posthumanities Series has been going for 11 years. It was the inheritor of the Theory Out of Bound Series that Michael Hardt and Brian Massumi and Sandra Buckley edited. Which was itself the inheritor of the Theory and History of Literature (THL) series that published The Postmodern Condition and many iconic texts associated with that early, kind of comp lit-​y moment. The institutional commitment of a press like Minnesota, but also the interest of people out in the world, is just crazy intense right now. Look at other press catalogues, look at Chicago translating all of the Derrida seminars. I  think that would tell you that, no, actually theory’s never been more alive and well. JCO: With adjunctification maybe it’s a little more difficult to get those intense theorists like you were able to learn from at Duke. CW: The situation you’re describing is where theory is incredibly useful. Jobs, especially but not limited to small liberal arts colleges, want [new hires] to

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wear lots of different hats. This is why if you read the MLA job list it reads like a Chinese restaurant menu, like, one from column A, one from column B, one from column C. Theory, I think, is actually a fantastic resource for people in this situation because it enables you to work across different kinds of material. So you have something interesting to say about film or popular culture or literature or social movements. It’s completely bogus to say that there’s some organic relationship between theory and the adjunctification of the profession. There are so many problematic assumptions built into that charge that we wouldn’t have long enough to sit here and list them all. JCO: What do you think about the idea of the critic as parasite? You wrote the intro to the republished Michel Serres book, The Parasite. CW:  It’s a crazy book, isn’t it? I  published The Parasite as volume 1 in the Posthumanities Series. One of the projects of the series is going to be to excavate the genealogy of posthumanities thinking. We did a new translation of Jakob von Uexküll translated as A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. It used to be called “A Stroll.” We’re publishing a collection of essays by Siegfried Zielinski. We commissioned a translation, a fantastic introduction, to Ernst Kopp, published in the 1800s, Outline for a Philosophy of Technology. A  lot of people now look at Kopp as maybe the first Philosophy of Technology book, sort of a precursor to McLuhan. This is part of the completely posthumanist, path-​breaking books in the genealogy of posthumanism. So doing The Parasite as volume 1 in the series was a very calculated decision. Doug Armato, the director of University of Minnesota Press, who works closely with me on the Posthumanities Series, had been director at Johns Hopkins University Press, which published the original, you know, English translation of The Parasite. And then I just felt The Parasite, well […] if ever a book needed an introduction […] ha […] it is that book. We’re doing most or all of the Hermes Project by Serres in the Posthumanities Series as well. JCO: Harold and I kind of joke because we don’t see being a parasite as a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with being a parasite, a parasite is a very successful creature. Harold has a big thing with the critic as parasite. CW: Yeah and I’m in total agreement. Yeah it’s not, not a negative thing at all. Quite the contrary. JCO: What are your thoughts on the idea that you can be in your different fields and then put what you’re doing through this meat grinder of theory and see what comes out on the other side. CW: Students from different graduate programs—​anthropology, English, religious studies, philosophy, architecture, art history, et cetera—​use theory and relate to theory in very different ways and want something different out of it. The relationship between philosophical concepts and a writing practice is what philosophy is. This is related to the question you sent me about American

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versus continental thinking. When they call me a systems theorist, I’m like no, I’m not a systems theorist. And when they call me a deconstructionist, I’m like no, I’m not a deconstructionist. I don’t like labels of any kind. “So what are you?” I tell them I made this clear in my second book Critical Environments. I’m a pragmatist. My view of the value of philosophical concepts is within a pragmatist framework that stretches from Emerson up through Peirce and James. I read Derrida as a pragmatist, I read Deleuze as a pragmatist, I read Lyotard as a pragmatist, in addition to reading like Rorty or Stanley Fish as a pragmatist. Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy is a pragmatist description of what philosophical concepts are good for. I’ve always tried to work back and forth between the kind of American pragmatist tradition and the continental philosophy tradition. To come back to your question about architecture, you know the rap about architecture people—​they’re very sloppy with theory—​they just want enough theory to kind of sexy up their presentation boards so that they can get some project—​and it frustrates architecture professors: Architecture students really aren’t as serious about the theory that they’re mobilizing, as they should be. But for me, it’s okay. You don’t want to judge architecture students by the same yardstick you would use to judge hardcore, like, comp lit people using theory. They’re doing different things. The end game is different, right? For people studying architecture versus people who are, like, I’m going to write the book on Michel Serres. JCO: But also for so many literary theorists, the draw to theory is that it’s edgy and it’s sexy. CW: Well, I’ll stay with the ’70s discourse; 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. JCO: This is a hard question to ask you because it might not have happened yet, but what are your greatest interventions and what will they be or what are your goals for them to be? CW: If I gave you a kind of third-​person point-​of-​view answer to that, it would be helping invent what people now call animal studies. It would be helping invent what people now call posthumanism. JCO: Your take on posthumanism is very different than a lot of people’s takes on posthumanism. Katherine Hayles has a different take. And a lot of them are projecting more into the future, and yours is more about forgetting about humans as the center of everything. CW:  What Kate Hayles does with the concept of what she calls “The Posthuman” is very different from what I’m doing. I make a very firm distinction between the posthuman and posthumanism. Posthumanism is not just

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thinking about brains in vats or whatever. It’s how you’re thinking it. What is the place of nonhuman beings on the planet? What’s our responsibility to them? How do they experience the world? You’re not being posthumanist just because you have an ostensibly anti-​anthropocentric love of animals; you’re being posthumanist in terms of saying, okay, we need a different theoretical vocabulary that’s adequate to addressing those questions. Animal rights discourse got the utilitarian or neo-​Kantian question on the table for Peter Singer or the liberal-​justice tradition for Tom Regan. But fast forward to The Animal That Therefore I Am, we can see that, as important as those interventions were, they were not nearly adequate to the real challenge of the problem. This goes back to problem-​driven versus puzzle-​driven that we were talking about earlier. In What Is Posthumanism I have that table. There’s humanist posthumanism, there’s posthumanist posthumanism. Doug Armato, the director of the University of Minnesota Press, came to me in 2005 and said we want you to do an imprint or a series, maybe like a Zone Books sort of imprint. And to put it out there with a series, to put that into dialogue with the other books in the series. JCO: Because theory is a network. CW: Yes. You can’t engineer complexity. You have to create a space in which complexity can happen. JCO: People are more interested now in these barriers between human and animal. Do you feel like what you’re doing with theory has anything to do with climate change? CW: Uhh, that’s actually what I’m working on right now. JCO: Oh, really? CW: Umm, so […] I just finished a book that University of Chicago Press is going to be bringing out in the spring called Ecological Poetics or Wallace Stevens’s Birds. I’m working on a big art installation project that’s going to be shown at the Arizona State University Art Museum, a show that Mark Dion and the director of the ASU museum are putting together on ethics and land art. And it’s a project actually based up here called Experimental Forests, and it’s—​ JCO: Oh, I’ve heard of  it. CW: —​a thing up here called the Fraser Experimental Forest started in 1937; it’s part of the US Forest Service, studying the underground network in the forest that people for about 15 or 20 years have been calling the Wood-​Wide Web, not just a root systems of trees, but how the root systems are connected by mycorrhizal fungi, how we sometimes maybe get ahead of ourselves in thinking the concept of ecology in relation to networks as being a technological kind of management issue when, in fact, under our feet is maybe an even more sophisticated you know […] ecological network that’s […] actually monitoring us, monitoring it.

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Maria Whiteman and I  did a video installation project called Mountain Pine Beetle, which is based up here in Colorado, and it’s about the devastation of the Pine Forests beginning in the early 2000s up here by the Pine Beetle that came down here from Canada. What I’m doing right now is really more art and research than writing books. I’ve written a lot. Does the world need another book from me? Maybe I should just make art for a while. JCO: Where do you think the future of theory is? CW: Partly having the theoretical wherewithal to sit down with scientists or US Forest Service people and hear where they’re coming from and being able to redescribe it to myself. When Donna Haraway and I  did the Manifestly Haraway Project, I said, Donna, what would a cosmopolitical response be to the fact that we live in a country where apparently half the people in the country don’t believe in climate change? She said, in California you would never use the phrases climate change or global warming. You would say, We all agree that in California over the past 15 years or so we’ve had a drought problem. And we’ve had a wildfire problem. We all agree that we’d like that to change. So let’s talk about how we get there. JCO: I was going to ask you the Harold Bloom question: did Bloom have any impact on you? CW: I read all the Bloom that people were reading back when I was a graduate student, but Bloom’s work really had no influence on me at all. Then, when I  wrote the new book on Wallace Stevens, Bloom’s work, specifically in The Poems of Our Climate and on the Stevens–​Emerson relationship, was hugely important. Like the gesture I  was trying to make with The Parasite. I’m really engaged in an inter-​generational conversation with Bloom, Vendler, Roy Harvey Pearce, Hillis Miller, Joseph Riddel, this generation of critics. Stevens died in 1958, and at that point people thought of Stevens as kind of a dandy. [Then] that generation of critics really put Stevens on the map as a “philosophically serious” poet—​a major modernist of the first rank. Part of what I’m trying to do in the book is to say: look, we’re in a profession that, if you look back over the history of literary studies in the United States, you know it is a kind of Bloomian-​Oedipal model of killing off your predecessors. The New Historicists had to kill off the predictable deconstructionist readings of Romantic poetry. The deconstructionist readings of Romantic poetry had to kill off excessively sociological and historical criticism before. These systems reproduce themselves by producing novelty. Literary studies, academic knowledge production in general, would come to halt if we said, “Hey, you know what? We now know everything.” JCO: [laughs] Yeah […] we’re good now. CW:  Everybody can go home, we’re good now! The production of novelty sustains the autopoiesis of these systems and disciplines. And so in that context,

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it was really important for me to kind of reach back to this earlier generation of critics, who are so uncool, like, so uncool, and just say, You know what? I am actually just continuing and in a way completing the work that they started. It’s just, they didn’t have the theoretical tools. It’s the same impulse that made The Parasite as volume 1 in the Posthumanities series. JCO: I’m curious about your interactions with Derrida before The Animal That Therefore I Am. CW: We liked each other personally, but he couldn’t really tell if I was friend or foe intellectually. I kind of pulled him aside at one point and I said: “Look, in your work, terms like communication and information—​if you think about Limited Inc or if you think about Of Grammatology—​those kinds of terms are basically dirty words. But the way that those terms signify in second-​order systems theory, like in Luhmann’s work and Maturana and Varela’s work, also Gotthard Günther in a different way, those terms are totally consonant with what you’re doing.” Jacques was always looking around to see who’s friend, who’s foe. When you’re somebody of that stature, you’re constantly having to navigate that space. JCO: Right. CW: Once I explained to him that the second-​order turn around these terms was totally deconstructive, he realized, Cary can disseminate the significance of my work in systems theory, Luhmannian sociology, theoretical biology, animal behavior, et cetera—​he can expand the relevance of my work in these areas in a way that I could never do. From that point forward we corresponded and became friends. David Wills and I went down to New York when Jacques was doing his NYU seminars and met with Jacques, and I said: Look Jacques, the whole animal studies thing is really about to blow up in the United States, and we need to get this work out there in English as quickly as possible. He said I’ve got two chapters on Heidegger, this chapter on Lacan—​what became The Animal That Therefore I Am. So we talked about the stuff that was in the book, and he basically just asked me, Which one would you like to do? I said, well, for a US audience, probably the Lacan material—​which became “And Say the Animal Responded”—​would be better than the Heidegger material. And at that point David (the translator) was like, Well okay if I’ve done the Lacan chapter and I’ve done the introduction, I might as well just do the book. His whole career, but this is true of all these people, was a process of constantly rediscovering and reinventing his own relevance. JCO: And I think that’s really where Harold’s book has gone. Rita Felski called him a phenomenologist, but I think it really changed into being the Network of Theorists and how everyone is connected and a lot people name Latour or Derrida or Foucault as their Road to Damascus, the one that brought them in and made their careers, basically.

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CW: What’s funny for me is that Derrida was a latecomer for me. I didn’t get into Derrida’s work until I really started working on what became the book Animal Rights. That’s why I kind of resist being called a systems theorist or a Derridean. It’s like I know the High Church of Derrideans, I know ’em all, that’s not my party. I mean, I’m welcome at that party, but my relationship to Derrida’s work is—​has always been—​in conversation and dialogue with some other body of work. Mainly Systems Theory, but that can be Social Systems Theory or Biological Systems Theory. JCO: Well, and that’s problem versus puzzle again, right? Because if you’re only using one theorist, you’re just solving puzzles. CW:  That’s right. I’m not interested in making a career in proving how Derrida’s right. That’s never been my thing. JCO: Do you think he has any idea of his legacy? CW:  What’s remarkable to me about Jacques is an utter awareness of the importance of that legacy and yet an ability to be engaged. When we decided to do the Lacan piece in Zoontologies, he sent me the stuff right on time, I didn’t have to pester him, he was on point, it was never like, oh I’m dealing with some high maintenance superstar. JCO: I’ve heard the same about Foucault. One of my professors was one of his students. I always thought he would be a little more inaccessible, but that’s not what I hear. Actually he was really willing to sit down with students. CW: That’s almost as important as the content of the lectures; these people are actually aware of the kind of the politics of the space they were in. JCO: And their form matches their matter. They’re trying to make these new and seemingly difficult ideologies accessible and widespread, CW: Right, but you can still do that and be a stuck-​up asshole. You can be a quote unquote man of the people who walks straight to the lectern and doesn’t answer any questions. I mean, that was the great generation. 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’s generation. My whole generation, it’s the kiss of death to radiate this kind of self-​importance. And that was not the case at all for the generation of critics that Stanley came out of and was responding to. JCO: What do you think about HAP’s project, putting together this work of the Network of Theorists who are still around right now. Do you think that’s an important thing to do? CW: I think it’s a very important thing to do. That’s an ongoing project—​the reinvention of the past, trying to excavate and make visible the genealogy. There’s so much white heat all the time around the current moment. There’s a bigger, longer history here, an inter-​generation dance between me and this earlier generation of, at this point, extremely uncool critics. The power of the

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work they did needs to be brought back into the contemporary conversation. And the cool thing is, like, I’m in a position to do that. And I think that otherwise you’re just a scenester. JCO: Haha, and who wants to be a scenester. Alright, excellent. Well, thank you so much—​ CW: —​that might be a great way to end the interview, actually. JCO: I think so. No, thank you so much, that was fantastic.

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Chapter 16 MARTIN PUCHNER  We are going through a media revolution even more extreme than that of the 20th century. I  would say that an avant-​ garde for the 21st century would have to develop ways of using our own new media in critical, innovative, provocative ways. It would also have to be part of a political analysis of our moment, and translate that analysis into a new set of attitudes and ambitions. (Martin Puchner, “Interview” with Rain Taxi) Born: 1969. Education: Konstanz University, BA (equiv.) 1992, philosophy and comparative literature; University of Bologna, certificate; UC Santa Barbara/​UC Irvine, MA; Harvard University, PhD, comparative literature, 1998. Puchner has been assistant professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; associate professor of English, Cornell University; associate professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; H. Gordon Garbedian Chair in English and comparative literature, Columbia University; Professor of English and comparative literature, Harvard University; and is currently Byron and Anita Wien Chair in drama and in English and comparative literature, Harvard.

Publications Stage Fright:  Modernism, Anti-​ theatricality, and Drama (2002), Poetry of the Revolution:  Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-​Gardes (2006; winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award), The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (2010), The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017), and The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with the Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate (2020). He has published essays in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, N+1, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New

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Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal, among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (2003), Lionel Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheatre (2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (2007). He is the co-​ editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (2006) and The Norton Anthology of Drama (2009) and the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Influential articles include “Screeching Voices:  Avant-​Garde Manifestos in the Cabaret,” in Avant-​Garde Critical Studies (2001); “Kafka’s Anti-​theatrical Gestures,” The Germanic Review (2003); “Debord and the Theater of the Situationists,” Theatre Research International (2004); “Das Innenleben der Puppen: Neugier und Gewalt im unmenschlichen Theater,” Philologische Neugier (2004), reprinted in Umwege des Lesens: Aus dem Labor Philologischer Neugier (2006); “The Avant-​Garde Is Dead:  Long Live the Avant-​Garde,” Mapping the Neo-​ Avant-​Garde (2006); “The Performance Group: Between Theory and Theater,” Restaging the Sixties:  Radical Theaters and Their Legacies (2006); “Performing the Open:  Actors, Animals, Philosophers,” Animals and Performance, special issue, edited by Una Chaudhuri, TDR (2007); “Dramatism,” The Work of Genre:  Proceedings of the English Institute 2009 (2011); and “Drama and Performance: Toward a Theory of Adaptation,” Common Knowledge (2011). Martin Puchner was interviewed by Veeser in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2015. HAV:  Structuralism was always accompanied by post-​structuralism in the United States. MP: Yes, true. HAV: What were the big moments or the turning points or the signal events? MP: It was more like a wave that slowly gathered force. Looking back, what’s striking is that structuralism, post-​structuralism, and a whole bunch of other approaches, at some point, were called theory, and once this label was established, more theories followed. For example, reader-​response criticism in the ’80s; possible-​worlds theory in the ’90s. But on the whole, these other theories were drowned out by post-​structuralism in the sense that when people thought of theory, they thought primarily of post-​structuralism. Of course, there were various varieties of post-​structuralisms, but the main point was that all the other theories—​ hermeneutics, reader-​ response criticism, possible-​ worlds theory—​played second fiddle or third fiddle, although they were part of the same theory orchestra. HAV: When you said possible-​worlds theory, is that generally to one side of deconstruction and post-​structuralist theory?

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MP:  I only discovered possible-​worlds theory in the 2000s, even though this body of thought was mostly written in the ’90s, by Thomas Pavel in Chicago, by Lubomir Dolezel, as well as by theorists in Israel, such as Ruth Ronen. They imported the term “possibility” from analytic philosophy, which was intriguing to me because of my own background in analytic philosophy. HAV:  Let’s move on to the question of your own development and breakthroughs and moments of clarity or turning points. MP: When I was in college, I was a philosophy concentrator. That’s where it started for me. I  was at Konstanz, and the Philosophy Department there was pretty analytically oriented. So for me, what I later learned to call theory started as a type of philosophical reflection. I  was interested historically in people like Leibniz, Frege, Rudolf Carnap, the early Wittgenstein, Quine, and Hempel. Theories of explanation. They essentially amounted to German, Viennese, and Anglophone analytic philosophy, especially language philosophy. That was my introduction to theory, to philosophy, in college. It was my intellectual awakening. At the same time I was interested in the arts, especially music and theater. The problem for me was that my interest in the arts and my interest in analytic philosophy weren’t really coming together in any way, I didn’t know how they could be combined, and that’s when I became interested in aesthetics and literary theory. Because at Konstanz, there were Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfang Iser and around them a strong group of people studying literary theory and aesthetics, which for me became a bridge between philosophy and art. What analytic language philosophy and literary theory had in common was the belief—​and I have complicated feelings about that now—​that if you want to know how the world works, you need to know about language. Language somehow was the key to knowledge. If you wanted to study language, you studied language philosophy, the linguistic turn. Looking back now, that article of belief, that language is the key to everything, seems strange to me. But even though I’m more skeptical about these assumptions now, I’m also still very much in the thrall of this paradigm. [My new book, The Language of Thieves, is partly born from my enduring fascination with language.] HAV: Was your involvement with theater performing plays? MP: Mostly acting and directing, though I also composed music for theater. HAV:  You describe a kind of rift. You’re in philosophy. Analytic. You’re working in theater. No connection. Jauss and—​ MP: Iser. Wolfgang Iser.

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HAV: —​are a kind of a missing link. Then you’ve got the system worked out. You’re focused on the link. Literary theory through language as the way to deal with this contradiction. What about the subsequent issues? MP:  The paradigm in the literary theory of Jauss and Iser was hermeneutics and poetics. But then assistant professors started to teach Derrida and deconstruction. Jauss and Iser weren’t happy about it. Of course, the analytic philosophers were even less happy about it. But I was young, I was rebellious, what do you do? You needle your professors with Derrida. It was a lot of  fun. I came to America because I was on a scholarship that had an exchange program with California. I realized that Derrida was teaching at Irvine every year and that I could go, so that’s how I ended up studying with Derrida in the spring of ’93. It was a great experience. I went directly from there to get a PhD at Harvard in comp lit, working with Barbara Johnson. So there was a clear deconstructivist link. HAV:  Were there particular texts that you read of Derrida’s that made an impact on you? MP: The first text was—​the way it happened was funny. I was an undergraduate, but I talked my way into this graduate seminar on literary theory that was overseen by Jauss and his assistants. One of the texts on the syllabus was Dissemination. That was the first Derrida text I read—​not the easiest. The seminar was also my introduction to Paul de Man, and that was quite dramatic. On the first day of the seminar, the reading list was sent around because everyone had to present. Most of participants were doctoral students in literary theory. There was a day on the syllabus devoted to the debate between Jauss and Paul de Man. Of course, smart graduate students that they were, no one wanted to touch this day. They knew exactly what would happen. But I, the naïve undergraduate, I raised my hand. “All right, I’ll present on that.” I read the texts, tried to understand them, and presented on what I found, sort of even-​handedly. Here de Man is right, here Jauss is right. And I knew really nothing at the time; I was completely in over my head. Jauss got really, really mad. He tore into me. The problem was that, of course, everybody’s sympathies were with me, the victim. It made him look really bad. This led to whole little brouhaha in the department. Jauss came to regret it, or maybe he wanted to do damage control, and had me over for dinner. The anecdote showed to me the difference between Jauss and Iser. Jauss had just retired officially and was primarily concerned about his legacy. He wanted to defend reader-​response theory and was very hostile to deconstruction. Iser was different. He wasn’t into Derrida, but he wasn’t concerned about defending his legacy. Instead he kept developing new approaches all the time. I really admired that and now try to emulate it. Anyway, that was my introduction to deconstruction.

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HAV: You did the course at Irvine and met Derrida and went on to a PhD with Barbara Johnson. You were in a theoretical department here at Harvard. What about the ups and downs of that? Were there breakthroughs? Were there discussions about deconstruction during this period? MP: What happened at Harvard was that up until that point, I had mostly studied philosophy and literary theory. I had always read literature, and I had taken a few literature classes, but I had never really studied literature systematically. At Harvard I  continued to do literary theory, but what was really different was that I  also started to read a lot. I  got a feel for the canon of literature for the first time. I started to think more about literature and was becoming less certain about the connection between literature and theory, and this uncertainty has continued to this day. But my early theory experience—​or moment—​has nevertheless informed everything I do. HAV: You’ve worked on drama and you’ve worked on manifestoes. Did theory direct you to these particular works? MP:  My first book, which came out of the dissertation, was informed by theory. It’s really the second book, the book on manifestoes, where I tried to figure out what theory is because it was focused on The Communist Manifesto and other manifestos, a theory-​driven genre. What interested me about the manifesto was that it’s a genre that tries to turn a body of theoretical thought into action. It tries to operationalize theory to engineer some form of revolution based on theory. Marx was a philosopher, but one with the particular goal of having philosophy transform the world. HAV: How about your interest in drama? You did that at the beginning of your theoretical awakening. Did those two continue to play off each other? MP: They did. My book, The Drama of Ideas, is where I tried to address that. It had to do with my dual interest in philosophy and theater at Konstanz. But as I’ve said, they were very separate. Our little black box theater was directly underneath the lecture hall where I  was hearing big philosophy lectures. It was philosophy by day, and underneath, in the Platonic cave, the black box, theater by night. What did these two spaces have in common? That’s what I tried to address quite directly in this book. Of course, I noticed there was all this antitheatrical polemic in philosophy but also a lot of hostility toward philosophy in theater. I  wanted to document that and also move beyond it, and that became The Drama of  Ideas. HAV: You mentioned the debate between de Man and Jauss. MP:  Yes, this was my introduction to intellectual debates in my freshmen year: the debate between de Man and Jauss, which got me into so much trouble, but also the debate between Gadamer and Derrida. And then, it just kept going. The next stop was the debate between Iser and Stanley Fish. Stanley

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Fish’s polemic with Iser was held in a different register, with a lot of tongue-​in-​ cheek personal invectives and play. Back in the late ’80s or early ’90s, one of the graduate students gave me the two relevant articles, photocopied. It starts with a book review essay by Stanley Fish from I guess the late ’80s, called Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser. It’s a critique of the act of reading and reader-​ response theory, specifically Iser’s type of reader-​response theory. Then, Iser responded with Talking Like Whales, a riposte held in the same register, playing on Fish’s name. I didn’t think you could do that, make fun of someone’s name. But they, both of them, did. For me, that was a great example of academic debate. I  think Stanley Fish won that debate. He limited or derailed Iser’s influence in the States. His more radical form of reader-​response theory, encapsulated in Is There a Text in This Class?, won the day. HAV: Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser: great title! Did Stanley Fish’s influence tend to peak then? MP: I’m not sure; for me, this was his most important intervention. Iser wanted to have it—​according to Fish—​both ways. According to Iser, there were fixed structures in texts, and then there were gaps that would be filled in the process of reading, of reception. Stanley Fish thought this was a lame compromise, a way of having it both ways, fixity and flexibility at the same time. He thought, “I want to envision a theory in which reception is everything, with nothing fixed.” As with all radical positions, there’s a compelling simplicity to it, something immensely appealing. As opposed to a position that carefully tries to have a little bit for everyone, for those who want to think that there is a lot that is fixed, in a text, but also some room for the reader. Hence Fish’s point that no one is afraid of Wolfgang Iser. HAV: Not to belabor Stanley Fish, but subsequently to Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish went on to write about law and literature in Doing What Comes Naturally. Getting involved in things like the Hate Speech Rules on campuses. Was that a reflection of the main concerns of theory or why do you think that happened? MP: The kind of position [that Stanley Fish] started to write up for the Times was part of an attempt to bring a hermeneutic, theoretical discourse to a wider public. Which is an impressive thing to do; I  think the lit-​crit theory world became a little too small for him. HAV: Were there any other anecdotes from the period—​faceoffs, confrontations, showdowns—​that you would want to bring out for the benefit of those who weren’t there? MP:  In the early ’90s I  was introduced, very belatedly, to Derrida. He was supposed to get an honorary doctorate at Oxford. There was a rebellion against it among the faculty. And that for me—​my generation—​fueled our sense that there was something rebellious about deconstruction. In retrospect,

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it sounds ridiculous because in the ’90s, deconstruction had been around for at least two decades and quite established. But there was still something rebellious about it. You’ll have to look up when that was exactly, but that was certainly a clash around deconstruction that fueled the imagination of graduate students in the ’90s—​those who were already sympathetic to Derrida. HAV:  Looking back, what did you bring to the development of theoretical concerns? MP: What did I bring? Besides the book on manifestos, I wrote the book about theater and philosophy, The Drama of Ideas, and in a sense it is the most directly theoretical book I have written. I worried at the time that a book about philosophy and theater wouldn’t be of much interest to people in theater studies—​the main part of the field of theater studies was interested in other things. But I  had tenure, so I  thought, “I can write about whatever I want.” For the most part, people in theater didn’t have a background in philosophy. That’s what I  could bring to the field:  writing a double history of theater and philosophy and the strange, often contested relations between them. But then there was suddenly more interest in theater and philosophy. It turned out, which often happens in the history of ideas, that quite a few people were working on this topic at the same time, sometimes without knowing about the others. Now there exists even a scholarly association devoted to the relation between theater and philosophy, a book series, lots of big conferences, mostly in England and continental Europe, but also here in the United States I’m not saying it was all because of me. There were many others, and we were working more or less simultaneously; somehow it was in the air. The thing that’s disappointing to me is that this was, and is, mostly a one-​ sided conversation. People in theater studies became interested in philosophy and the fraught relationship between theater and philosophy, but few philosophers participated in the debate. It’s changed a bit; there are now some philosophers who do, but not many. HAV: Was that just a personal concern of yours or was that an accident of your European provenance? MP: I’m not sure that it was particularly European. That analytic philosophy thing I did in Konstanz was much more dominant in the Anglo-​Saxon world. At Konstanz, you couldn’t study Heidegger and continental philosophy. Paradoxically, you could say that the philosophy training I  got in Konstanz was more like what you would get in an American philosophy department or a British philosophy department. The fact that I was also doing theater added a different dimension to it. HAV: Do you think of the book on manifestos and your editing of world literature anthologies as interventions that have some relationship to theory?

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MP:  The anthology is something that’s become increasingly important for me as I think about theory. Theory of what? Theory of literature. Editing the anthology—​4,000  years of literature—​made me realize how much I  didn’t know about literature. My conception of literature was based only on the last few hundred years and a very limited canon. A  lot of the certainties I  had about literature were thrown into doubt by the experience of having to read and think about all these texts from other traditions, from thousands of years ago. It really made me realize that I had no idea of literature as a phenomenon in human history. HAV: Was the anthology a response to trends in theory that called it into being? MP: The trends behind these world lit anthologies is actually very interesting. The big courses in world literature are courses that are not usually taught in Ivy League universities, but mostly in second-​and third-​tier universities, many of them in the South. I’ve since visited many of these universities, which has been a real education. Many of these universities, which you probably have never heard of, have big world literature courses that are often requirements for all students. These started as great books courses in the Western tradition and then morphed into world literature courses. Part of the change had to do with the canon debates in the ’90s, advocating for more inclusion of women, of non-​Western literature, of a broader conception of what literature is or should be. The history of world literature anthologies certainly tracks these big debates, these theoretically driven interventions trickled down to anthologies. The experience of editing this anthology raised very fundamental questions about literature:  When did literature begin? How often was writing invented? This is what I  then worked on in my book The Written World:  The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. It is not a theoretical book, but a book about fundamental questions, and there is a connection between the two. I would not have written this book without the experience of editing the world lit anthology nor without my background in theory. Working on the anthology also made me want to address a larger audience, not just a few graduate students, and so this is what I tried to do in The Written World as well. HAV: The very strong presence of women in The Anthology of World Literature, at least compared to, say, a table of contents in other Norton anthologies of literature in the ’70s: Would you trace that to the theoretical development of feminism and then the various challenges to it and bifurcations and its splintering into identity of, say, third-​world women? MP:  Interesting question. The changes certainly had to do with different waves of feminism. But was it feminist theory specifically? To some extent it probably was. But also feminism—​and multiculturalism—​as broader cultural

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movements. The way to answer this is to ask “What’s the role theory played and plays in feminism?” “What’s the role of theory for multiculturalism?” This would be an interesting research project to pursue. HAV: Do you think it’s had a degenerative effect on English prose? MP: Ha! This is a fascinating question. I must confess that I feel ambivalent about the influence of theory on prose. On one hand, I would say, “Yes.” Doing the anthology and writing The Written World have been exercises in reaching a wider audience. I’ve never been a particularly jargony writer, I don’t think, but not using jargon has become absolutely central for me now. In a sense, I’ve had to learn how to write anew. So, based on my own experience I do feel a little bit that my writing had been derailed or even ruined by theory and that I had to dig myself out from under it. So part of me believes some of the negative press that theory has been getting. At the same time, there is a place for theory and it’s been formative for me and still plays a role in the background. And I do believe that all disciplines need to develop a technical vocabulary that’s not easily understood by lay readers or even by every member of the discipline. So, I’m genuinely conflicted here. If you ask me one day, I come down more on one side. Another day, more on the other. HAV: When you say your own prose or your writing was ruined by theory, are you tracing that to the desire to make shortcuts? MP: Yes, sometimes that’s the case, though you could say that shortcuts are the point of a jargon, not having to explain everything over and over again. But for me, the problem has also been imitation. You read a theoretical work that really speaks powerfully to you. You use the vocabulary and you apply it, and you stop thinking yourself. I certainly found myself doing that, and I realized I need to stop. When I  started to write my dissertation, I  shied away from using theory even though I was immersed in it. All my books have theories behind them; sometimes I discuss other theorists explicitly, but I don’t think of myself as a theorist. Sometimes I regret that. It would be great to have a theory to your name. But I certainly don’t. Ah well. Perhaps when I grow up. HAV:  Are there theorists whose prose you enjoy reading or fantasize about plagiarizing even? MP: I no longer do. When I started to read Derrida’s prose, I was really into it. There was a very specific sound and approach and a way of writing. It’s definitely rubbed off on English prose. If you look at someone like David Foster Wallace, he wrote papers on philosophy and clearly that had an influence on his prose. They’re all different kinds of writers in the last decades of the twentieth century whose prose style resonated with a certain kind of theoretical writing, whether that came out of literary theory or language philosophy or other forms of cultural reflection.

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HAV: Do you think the development of the workshop era for creative writing forced a marriage between theory and fiction? MP:  You should ask Mark McGurl that question. As far as I  can tell, the average MFA workshop never taught much theory. But because they were in universities, they were next door to the department where theory was taught. Probably where your enforced marriage happened was on the undergraduate level. Undergrads interested in becoming writers couldn’t avoid theory classes or philosophy classes in the case of David Foster Wallace and others. If you were an undergrad, in the ’70s or ’80s, it was impossible to overlook theory, even though the workshop itself, and the workshop era, developed its own dynamic, and theory was not what’s usually associated with the workshop era. One of the things the workshop era was totally against, for example, was the novel of ideas. When you think of the great novelists of ideas, the last was probably Saul Bellow. HAV: How do you think American theory related to French theory, on the one hand, and American New Criticism, on the other? MP:  People have pointed out that there’s a strange affinity between deconstruction and New Criticism. It’s this very close examination of literary texts unmoored from historical and biographical contexts. The procedures are very different, but that’s a big thing they share. That’s probably why deconstruction took hold in America as easily and fully as it did. Much more than, say, in Germany. HAV: I’ve heard the metaphor of the Trojan Horse. That close reading was the Trojan Horse by which deconstruction was smuggled into American English departments. MP: The more I’m removed from these moments, the more similar they seem in retrospect. So maybe it was just a shift in emphasis. Today I find that neither New Criticism nor deconstruction is a lot of help when I’m trying to inspire undergrads or the general public to care about literature. These two movements presume we already care about literature and that we are already fascinated with some form of exegesis that pays very close attention to these literary texts. I often ask myself, “What would we lose if there were even more of a decline in reading and literary study?” At the same time—​and I feel ambivalent about it—​when I think about The Written World, there is a lot about the history of writing in that book, and someone once said that I am just rewriting Derrida’s Of Grammatology. That hurt, at first. But it may be right. [laughs] HAV: Your use of the word history makes me wonder whether you think of the historical approach to literature and identity politics and the theoretical stance growing out of social movements or postcolonialism or feminism as counterweights to the formalist, as we used to call it, trend of deconstruction and post-​structuralist theory?

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MP: These movements you mention care primarily about social realities. They then developed their own theoretical and exegetical practices, some of which I never found particularly interesting, in part because when it came to literature, they tended to focus on content rather than form. I remain personally more interested in forms or genres. Sometimes when I look back at what I’ve done, it seems to be all about genres. The closet drama. The manifesto. The drama of ideas. That’s what literary criticism can bring to the table; it’s something we know really well. This is also part of the interest in world literature. Seeing how these big literary genres emerge and move from culture to culture like the frame tale narrative from India to Greece to the Middle East to Europe. Since I sit on many committees with different representatives from different disciplines, when we think about fellowships or other monies that get doled out, I  feel what literature can contribute, where other disciplines listen to us and defer to our judgment, is knowledge about literary forms. HAV: Are you indebted to Adorno and Jameson, who talk about the way the form of a literary work carries its real message and content? MP: Jameson—​the idea that forms have their own content and that they are indirectly related to social realities has something powerful to it. I  wouldn’t subscribe to all the Marxist assumptions underlying Jameson, but that observation about genre I find convincing. HAV: Is it true that the long, intense development of theory has been politically reactionary in its effect? It is a frequent accusation: “Well, you theorists allowed the adjunctification of the profession to happen on your watch.” MP: Allowed presumes they could have prevented it. The first answer is that the theory generation, the greatest generation, is the one that probably developed the biggest star system in literary scholarship. In that sense it was not a democratizing movement. I don’t know if they can be accused of having created it, but they certainly weren’t fighting against it. They liked it. Literary studies was taken seriously by other disciplines, and it had an enormous influence on other disciplines such as law and anthropology. It was an export moment for literature. We’re now mostly in an import moment. The biggest theories now probably come from sociology, history of science, people like Bruno Latour, or economics. The star system didn’t just happen in literary theory. It happened in other disciplines also. But they didn’t try to stop the star system, and they profited from it very handsomely. It happened on their watch. HAV: How am I handling this job of writing a history of the theory period? Would you do it differently? Would you come at it in a different way? MP: The way I would do it would be to focus on the question of language. The study of language and the promise that that held for a certain time.

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I sometimes think of the twentieth century as the language century. I don’t know if I ever will, but if I wrote about theory, I would do it as a history of the language century from the linguistic turn to deconstruction. What they all have in common is this idea that language is the key to everything. I still love this idea. Even though I no longer believe in it. HAV: Thank you, Martin Puchner.

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Chapter 17 MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ  Born: 1961. Education: Columbia University, BA, 1982; University of Virginia, PhD, 1987. Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He taught at the University of Illinois, Champaign-​Urbana, and he was the founding director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities from 1997 to 2001. From 2010 to 2017, he was the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State. He was the 2012 president of the Modern Language Association and served as vice president from 2010 to 2011. He served two terms on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors from 2005 to 2011, and three terms on the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2009 to 2018.

Publications Marginal Forces/​ Cultural Centers:  Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992), Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994), Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996), The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998), What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (2006), Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (2006), The Left at War (2009), The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (with Jennifer Ruth, 2015), The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (2016), Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (2016). His important articles include “Avant-​Gardes and De-​Author-​Izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism,” Callaloo (1989); “Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism,” Social Text (1993); “The Blessed of the Earth,” Social Text (1997); “The Yale Strike Dossier,” Social Text (Winter, 1996); “Against Subjectivity,” PMLA (1996); “Autobiography as

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Performative Utterance,” American Quarterly (2000); “Introduction:  Worldly English,” Modern Fiction Studies (2002); “American Studies without Exceptions,” PMLA (2003); “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA (2005); “Equality, Freedom, and/​or Justice for All:  A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” Metaphilosophy (2009); and “How We Got Here,” PMLA (2013). Michael Bérubé was interviewed by Veeser in State College, PA, on July 25, 2015. His partner Janet Lyon sat in on the interview. HAV: We could just start with your sense of the trajectory of theory. Is 1966 the right starting point? MB:  I wonder about the way the question’s framed. Aside from the structuralism conference in ’66, I don’t think in terms of events, I don’t think in terms of specific historical “moments.” I think in terms of publications, like the 1977 Yale French Studies issue on Lacan. Or the appearance of Shakespearean Negotiations. Or with Sedgwick: Between Men didn’t make as much of a splash as Epistemology of the Closet did, and then a lot of people went back and “Oh, hello, Between Men.” So which book marks the advent of queer theory, you know? The only other “theory event” I  can think of, analogous to the Hopkins conference, was the cultural studies conference at Illinois the first year we were there. And that was a fucking circus. It was also a great conference. But the enthusiasm and antagonism and anxiety it generated was very event-​like. Everyone knew they were at a thing. There were about a thousand people there. But I can’t think of too many academic conferences like that. And, of course, I wasn’t around for the Hopkins conference. And it seemed then that all the interest, all the fervor, all the real engagement with literature and with ideas was on the theory side. Okay, sure, there was a time in the ’80s when people were all so smitten with Baudrillard’s Precession of Simulacra, which has not aged well. The first 10 pages are still pretty good, but there was an element of “[in French accented English] Oh, he says America’s like Disneyland. Brilliant!” You know. The rest of it—​I tried to teach it about 15 years ago. The whole last three quarters of it is just incomprehensible. I won’t be making that mistake again. I also think the whole Althusserian turn was a mistake. It gave really hard-​ line leftists a pseudo-​sophisticated way of holding onto ideas about false consciousness that would have otherwise had no theoretical purchase. And I think this is what also led E. P. Thompson to bail in 1979 and basically get out of the cultural studies business altogether. And then a lot of what happened with cultural studies in the ’80s was the Althusserians fighting the Gramscians. The Gramscians won, and rightly so. Or at least—​it’s a silly way to put it, as if it were a sports rivalry, but the reason I am putting it this way is because I wrote

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this afterword some years ago for a collection called Marxism, Cultural Studies, and Sport and said it’s a replaying of the Althusser–​Gramsci cup matches of the ’80s. It’s right up there with Celtics-​Lakers, you know. So those are the two things I could have done without in retrospect, the whole Baudrillard moment and the whole Althusser contingent. But I was inclined to give everybody a pass 30 years ago because it looked like this was where the fun was, this was where the real intellectual interest lay. HAV: Can you just like give me a genealogy of your attachment to English departments? MB: Uh, sure. Really, until about 14, I was a numbers geek. But my first major in college was political science. I thought I was going to go into policy of some kind. I thought of myself as being a wonk, as being a D.C. person, staffer—​ not an actual person in elective office, I’d never win an election or anything. But I thought, I’ll be one of those people, I’ll be a commentator, I’ll be a staffer or something like that. One of the things that dissuaded me was a political science class in which I learned how easily certain political minorities thwarted the passing of child labor laws and anti-​lynching laws. And then I watched as friends in the environmental movement would win again and again on a local level, you know, with designated wetlands or endangered species, and then the Reagan-​appointed judges in the federal courts would shoot them down. And I just thought I’d go crazy in that kind of  life. HAV: How did your interest in literature develop? MB:  I was always a voracious reader, and more important, a voracious re-​ reader. At the age of six or seven I  re-​read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass again and again. When I  was eight or nine, it was Gerald Eskanazi’s account of the New York Rangers 1969–​70 season, A Year on Ice. When I was 10, it was A Wrinkle in Time. And so on. When I was in graduate school, working in law firms, I heard again and again from the attorneys, especially in graduate school, “Oh, that’s so great, you’re in English. I wanted to do that. But I had to do this.” I said, “Yeah, I know that feeling. We’re very alike”—​I’m sure Stanley Fish has much more to say about this—​“very alike, literary people and attorneys. It’s all about the interpretation of texts. We read more fun things, and you run the world. That’s the division of labor. The stuff you produce actually sets policy. The stuff we produce may affect the intellectual quality of life in a place, but it doesn’t have any real power.” When I  was trying to decide what to do in college, I  thought I  still love language, I still love reading, but, um, my family had gone through such ups and downs—​I mean we were on food stamps at one point in the late ’70s. And I thought, I just can’t live that way. I am going to go into advertising. I’ll hate myself, but as Don Draper says, “How do I sleep at night? On a bed made of money.” And I’ll be fired four times before I’m 30. I did an internship; it wasn’t

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an unpaid internship, it was a standard minimum-​wage thing at an ad agency, summer of ’79. I applied for a couple of summer things at advertising firms, and in 1980 I just missed getting a really great job that probably would have sent me into that world. I know that I was the runner-​up, because the first guy flamed out and they called me a couple of weeks later, and by that time I had something else. So I sort of backed into literature after all. HAV: You’ve mentioned in Public Access that reading S/​Z was a big flip for you in graduate school. MB: Yes, definitely. The other things that remain for me very powerful were not actually on the syllabus. It was Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. And then Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You’re talking to me just after my having written, last summer, the first book of sustained literary criticism I’ve written since my dissertation, since my first book. The Secret Life of Stories. I mean, this is 250 pages of formalism. It’s about intellectual disability in literature. But I had come to the conclusion over the last 10 years that pretty much everything that’s been done in disability studies is pretty much thematic. It’s pretty much about representations of disability, imaginations of disability. There’s been nothing comparable—​this is going to sound grandiose—​to Epistemology of the Closet—​where you have to ask, “Okay, but why do we read differently as a result?” Yeah we can take an understanding of gay, lesbian, queer, or what have you. But what does it mean to queer a text? What does it mean to take those lacunae seriously, as lacunae? HAV: So is this a function of your will to power over a text? Or to get ahead in graduate school, to write things that nobody has ever seen before? Or is it a result of your innate love of books and the way words interact? Or is it a combination? MB: You know, there’s always going to be a will to power. That’s one of the lessons of theory, right? I can pretty much assure you when I was working on the Tolson–​Pynchon material in ’87, ’88, ’89, I had no sense that I was doing something that nobody had ever done before or something that nobody would ever want to do in the first place. I had no idea whether it was going to go over at all. I mean, it was such an oddball project. What happens when you get a guy like Pynchon who wants nothing to do with the apparatus of literary study being canonized pretty much the moment Gravity’s Rainbow comes out, over against a guy like Melvin Tolson, who tried all his life to get his foot in the door in the white academy’s door of all things, and failed. Yeah, I had no idea that anyone was going to care. In the fall of 1988, as I’m going on the market [University of Virginia English Department placement director Paul], Cantor says to me, “It’s a hard call, with your project. Who’s going to be interested in this?” I  said, “Well, Jerry McGann”—​who came in late, he was my co-​director—​“Jerry McGann

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says, ‘Look, the stuff on Tolson is what’s important. You’ve got a neglected African American poet whose major poem’s really interesting. There’s your project. You don’t need the Pynchon.’ ” And I thought, Oh, good, then I’m done. So I  ask Cantor, What do you think? And Cantor rolls his eyes and says, “Jerry McGann hasn’t had to worry about getting a job in 20 years. No. Don’t just do the Tolson. Keep the Tolson–​Pynchon, and keep the whole institutional thing.” I  said, “Well, but Jerry says—​” And Cantor says, “Let me just cut to the chase, all right? You’re not black.” Oh, okay, we just upped the cynicism ante. I said, “All right. Let me see ‘you’re not black’ and raise you: this is a good boom time for black poets you’ve never heard of.” And he said, “Yes, but again, that’s gonna only work until you open the door.” And he was right: that did happen. I got a number of interviews that were clearly over the minute they found out I wasn’t black. Cause Bérubé, you know, if you don’t know it’s a French-​Canadian name, people think it’s Caribbean or something. But, on the other hand, I totally lucked out in terms of timing. Paul Cantor kept track of everything having to do with job placement, and he told us that when we went out, 25 of us went out in ’88 and we got 175 interviews among us, an average of 7. Even the medievalists were doing all right. Four years later I saw him at the New York MLA in ’92. I said, “How’s it going?” He said, “We have 40 people out there this year. They got 36 interviews, total. The bottom dropped out.” And that, of course, was the beginning of the long drought, which was made so much worse by the Bowen and Sosa projections of a faculty shortage in the 1990s. HAV: What about the quiddity or uniqueness, if any, of this period that we’re talking about, 1966 to when? You name the endpoint. MB: 2003, obviously, when Latour pulls the plug, right? Critique has run out of steam. So that project was over that day. HAV: So do you have a sense of that; is there anything really unprecedented about the period that we went through, you know, with the continental theorists; and do you have any stories that would help to reveal the special quality that wasn’t there pre-​1966? MB: I had a conversation with a fellow student named Keith Pomeroy my first year in graduate school, and I said, “So, what are you interested in?” And he said, “Well, I’m working on the French post-​structuralists.” And if you had told me then that they were from the sixteenth century, I would have believed you. And at the time? Foucault is about to die. This is 1984. So to that party, I thought I came relatively late. I felt always that I’m just catching up here. You start from ’66, and the fact that in the ’70s, these major figures all got established in places like Critical Inquiry and what have you, I felt very much second generation.

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Image 18.  “You’re not black”

By contrast, when the cultural studies boom happened, I felt much more that we were at ground zero. We were reminiscing about this recently with Amanda [Anderson]. It wasn’t just the cultural studies conference. The next year, 1991, Champaign-​Urbana hosted the second annual gay and lesbian graduate students conference, and the keynote was this person named Judith Butler. And with that especially, that queer moment, you really did have the

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feeling—​I joked about this in a retrospective review of Paul Lauter’s book, Canons and Context—​of almost being the old guy who says, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be a young assistant professor in the humanities was very heaven.” And there—​I’m thinking also of Graeme Turner, who just published this book of the history of cultural studies in which he gently raps my knuckles. I  had written an essay about five years ago about what went wrong with cultural studies, why did it get so diffuse and shapeless and depoliticized, why is Stuart Hall saying he can’t read another cultural studies analysis of The Sopranos. And when it was published in the Chronicle, it just caused such a shitstorm. And it was the only shitstorm I’ve been in for which I  was completely unprepared, because I  thought I  was saying something completely uncontroversial. But Turner quotes me in his book and says, “Yeah, Bérubé’s right, cultural studies got diffuse, but it should be noted that he was one of the most eager proponents back in ’92; he’s the guy who wrote this big Village Voice essay with superheroes on the cover.” And he’s right, of course: I really thought at the time that the whole Gramsci and Hall apparatus was just new vistas, both for literature and for theory. I didn’t get around to teaching a seminar on Stuart Hall until around five years ago, and I realized one of the reasons I was having trouble taking a properly critical perspective on essays like “The Toad in the Garden” was that I believed so much of it. I just thought, “This was my next great influence after Rorty.” So, yeah, I had that sense of “Wow! this has not been done before! This is a new thing!” And maybe some of it was illusory, some of it may have been the effect of youth. But I  do think there was something substantial there. I  think everyone you talk to is going to say in one way or another, “No, this wasn’t just, we didn’t all drink the same Kool-​Aid at once, we weren’t totally delusional.” This was really a period in which the humanities underwent enormous transformations, and those transformations were often led by literary studies. HAV: What were your greatest interventions? MB: Oh, so my own interventions. Look, I don’t think—​You know, there really is no equivalent to Epistemology of the Closet in my career. Public Access? Not even close to being in the same league. Some people have gotten back to me 20 years later and said, “That was the book that made me want to do this, that, and the other.” Which is funny, because at the time, I thought it was going to have more of an impact than it did. I wonder to this day if Verso was a little ashamed of it. They certainly didn’t do anything to promote it. Michael Sprinker [editor of the Verso series] went over it line by line and offered great suggestions at every step, but in the end, the imprint of Verso Books publishing that thing by a social democrat like me, I think they were, like, meh about it. But, but the idea of putting together things that were published in the Voice and other essays as your second book, you

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know, was not all that common in ’93–​’94. Still, Life as We Know It would be my major contribution to anything, I think. The only catch is—​I was writing this just this week, in writing the sequel to Life as We Know It—​there was no such thing as disability studies then, not that I knew of. I didn’t think I was doing disability studies. I  thought I  was doing a cultural studies analysis of Down syndrome. Not just something about Jamie, but what are the cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of Down syndrome and intellectual disability. That’s what I thought. And then Lenny Davis’s Enforcing Normal was 1995, Rosemary Garland’s collection Freakery came out two weeks after Life as We Know It, Mitchell and Snyder’s Corporealities comes out in ’97, Simi Linton’s Claiming Disability comes out in ’98. So now retroactively I’m among the earliest things in disability studies, but I did not know I was speaking disability studies. HAV: Is disability studies more of a formalism or more of a historicism? MB: Some years ago, Michael Snedicker, a young scholar, he’s a queer poetics, nineteenth-​century Americanist kind of guy, came and did a high-​church, deconstructive reading of the first paragraph of Melville’s Pierre. And Jeff Nealon and I are usually the first or second question in these things, and Jeff was out of the gate a little earlier than I was, and he says, “So, I notice your reading is very much about the text, whereas most of nineteenth-​century work is about pirates.” And Snedicker, not missing a beat, says, “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.” [laughs] And as far as I was concerned, he had the job right there. But what was underlying Jeff’s question was, really, no one just reads the text. Tell us about pirates, or about shipping, or the black Atlantic, or something. I had moments of wondering about this last summer when I was writing The Secret Life of Stories ’cause it was so resolutely formalist, but in the end, even the moments that are about narrative weirdness, about the way intellectual disability will distort or warp or—​in the case of Don Quixote—​the fact that his intellectual disability, which is an inability to read fiction, produces [Don Quixote] Book Two. It produces the world he thinks he’s in. If you want a text warping itself around a madman, that’s the Ur-​text. HAV: Where is theory today, and what will be the next big thing? MB: As for what’s going on now, obviously you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting people working on the Anthropocene. But even though the Anthropocene is all around us, I  don’t really think in terms of the next big thing, because the ’80s part of it you mentioned, the shoulder-​padded part of it, the puffy-​hair, leg-​warmer part of it, is that there was a moment where it did feel like we ate and chewed up Baudrillard last year, and then the year before that it was Bakhtin. Now, [ghoulish leering voice] who’s next?

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Image 19.  “You can’t swing a dead cat”

There was that sort of sense partly because the ferment was just that intense. I’m reasonably confident that something similar happened in the United Kingdom in the late ’60s when everything got translated seemingly at once. The whole structuralist tradition sort of comes over I think on a flotilla from the continent one day. “Look! Look! Translations!” and there’s Stuart Hall going, “Look at this shit!” and Raymond Williams going, “Yeah.” And

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Image 20.  “Who’s next?”

you just had to sift through this as quickly as you can. I think something similar was going on in the ’80s. But at the same time, there’s no question that the projects of theory are an ongoing thing. I remember a few years back when Rita Felski gave her critique of “critique” at the School of Criticism and Theory, and of course, that crowd wasn’t going for it—​it was like, hello, we’re the School

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of Criticism and Theory, and we’re not quite ready to give up on critique, thank you. So I think the next big thing is, What do we do with all of this consolidated material that has accumulated over the past 40 years, if we sift through it? And also, the way I  like to put it, there hasn’t been a study of animal cognition in the past 500  years that could be summarized by the title “Animals: Stupider than We Thought.” It has all gone the other way. And so we take that and the whole thing that Cary Wolfe was starting and you take Rosi Braidotti, and it does look like as Janet [Lyon] says something like a perfect storm dissolving not humans but humanism in a vat of bubbling textuality and indeterminacy, while animal studies and disability studies rise to the fore. So humanism is under overwhelming pressure from many directions. What comes after humanism? HAV: Is the Greatest Generation the right name for this group of theorists? MB: I started smiling when you asked, “Is there an analogy to the greatest generation” because I didn’t think you were going to go to the warrior part. I thought you were going to go to the part where the greatest generation comes home from World War II and builds a welfare state. And up until about 1973 it’s a welfare state that has horrible inequities of race and gender, but, goddamn, it is a welfare state. And then it started getting dismantled. So there is no analogy between that generation and ours. Our generation is the one that oversaw the dismantling of the social welfare state. We didn’t do it ourselves. But now the ground is shaking underneath us. The only thing I can imagine as a way out is the thing Jennifer Ruth and I proposed in our book, namely, taking as many of the non-​tenure-​track cohort as possible, especially the ones with PhDs, and creating a track to tenure for them. I don’t know how many institutions are going to do it. I’m going to work on something like that as chair of the faculty affairs committee here on the faculty senate next year. But I just don’t know another way out. HAV: So, just to follow up. Was there something combative about the cohort that you’re a part of or at least are a younger element of ? MB: Oh, sure. Again, back then, the deadwood [professors who don’t write] overlapped with the antitheory people, yes, but there were a lot of antitheory people who were not deadwood. But my line in the Minnesota Review essay was, “We did not demonize them. They were demons. We simply –​ized them.” The old guys who were denying tenure to feminists because they were feminist? It was definitely worth it being combative with them. As for me, I was also happy to take on the New Right. I was reading the fucking New Criterion when nobody else on the academic left was. I read this stuff in the ’80s. I remember Roger Kimball making fun of one conference after another, and I thought, “If these guys catch on, there’s going to be hell

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to pay.” And they caught on. My feeling, though, when the PC thing hit was, “Goddammit, I just got a job. And they’re going to try to de-​legitimate the institution.” This is Chris Newfield’s argument as well. That was largely what that was about: de-​legitimating new work in the humanities. The reason it’s not connected to undergraduate enrollment is that undergraduate enrollment boomed in the ’90s. We actually recovered a lot of the people we lost in the ’70s. We were down in English to 3.5 percent of all majors in 1980; we are up to like 4.7 percent, again, not huge, but again in sheer numbers—​ HAV: I think you did a whole statistical analysis in here. [points to book] MB: It’s in there, right. It didn’t really catch on till two years ago. I wrote a thing for the Chronicle, but around the same time Nate Silver had also crunched the numbers, and said, “What are you talking about, you educated one percent of all Americans 18–​21 in English 40 years ago. It’s one percent now. Seriously, this is a crisis?” But it was a crisis of legitimation. HAV: Well, thank you. You have been fantastic. Is there anything you would like to add? Should I be asking other questions? MB: Yes, this goes back to the School of Criticism and Theory. I forget where it started, Irvine, maybe, with Murray Krieger. Old school! And then it moved around to several places. The English Institute goes back to the ’30s. I may be wrong, but I think it was largely a creation of the New Criticism. The kind of institute I run, the interdisciplinary humanities institute, largely a phenomenon of the 1980s. The consortium of humanities centers and institutes was founded in 1988; it’s only 27  years old, and back then the joke was, “Oh, yeah, the consortium of humanities centers and institutes, you mean English professors from North America.” And now we’re trying to internationalize it with much success. But these are different places where you can see the rise of theory; first there was diacritics, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History. All from the late ’60s, early ’70s. And then you have things like the Cornell School [of Criticism and Theory]. And now you had things like institutes. These are ways of gauging the institutional status of theory, sort of like sedimentary deposits, you know, “Oh, yeah. 1988. There were enough humanities institutes to have a whole consortium of them.” I think that’s an interesting way to go, if you ask people what kinds of institutional structures date to when, and why. And for a while we got to watch the battle between feminist theory and women’s studies. And the old guard in women’s studies was very much opposed to this newfangled stuff. And part of it was this battle over queer. Well. Lisa Duggan was our first queer theorist. In 1991 when she and Jane Juffer organized the Sluts Against Rape contingent of the Take Back the Night March, holy shit almighty, talk about the cat among the pigeons. The storm that that generated. The Take Back the Night March was again very old school. Jane was always very much dressed like Fredericks of Hollywood fashion and “I

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demand that you take me seriously.” To do the Sluts Against Rape thing I think they were dressed very provocatively, I wasn’t there myself, and their point was “It doesn’t matter what the fuck I’m wearing, No means No.” And Paula Treichler couldn’t stand McKinnon-​Dworkin either. Paula once asked—​ and Dworkin had quite a following in Champaign-​Urbana—​and Paula said, “you know, laws like the ones you and Catherine McKinnon advocate have been passed in Canada, and the first thing, the first thing that goes is the gay bookstores. That’s pornography.” And Dworkin just says, “That’s the price we have to pay.” That’s when the queer moment happens. JL [Janet Lyon]: And since it’s so completely grounded in Foucault, right out of French Theory, and their original formulations were Foucauldian. And they continue Foucauldian. MB: We were kind of there at that second gay and lesbian graduate student conference; I actually was in the room for this one. Essex Hemphill, may he rest, is giving a presentation. Tongues Untied had just come out. Hemphill, queer and black poet, was talking about being queer and black, and a woman in the crowd was saying, “I’m sorry. Gender is the primary oppression. We’ve really established that.” What the fuck! Straight white guy, [whistling] I am sitting out this one. Janet and Amanda Anderson and Paula had to fight some battles even against women’s studies, because they were theoretical, because queer theory was Foucauldian and all. HAV:  What you’ve been describing really, you could trace it from battle to battle, from postcolonialism to versions of feminism fighting to the death, to the rise of queer theory. Well, I think we’re done for the moment. This is the 25th of  July. MB: 2015 of the Common Era.

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Chapter 18 JEFFREY NEALON  Born: 1963. Education: Marquette University, BA, 1981–​85; Loyola University, Chicago, MA and PhD, 1986–​91. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and philosophy at Penn State University. His books over the last decade constitute a kind of trilogy on biopower and its discontents in the neoliberal present: Foucault Beyond Foucault (2008), Post-​Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-​in-​Time Capitalism (2012), and Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016).

Publications Double Reading:  Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993, 1996), Alterity Politics:  Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), The Theory Toolbox:  Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Rethinking the Frankfurt School, co-​ed. (2002), Arts & Social Sciences (with Susan Searls Giroux, 2003), Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (2007), Post-​Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-​in-​Time Capitalism (2012), Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016), I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and American Popular Music (2018), Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism (2021), and https://​www.bing.com/​videos/​search?q=jeffrey+nealon&view=detail&mid =5171E9B5FAC55AFBEA915171E9B5FAC55AFBEA91&FORM=VIREj (a three-​part video of talk on post-​postmodernism). His important articles include “A Random Walk Down Las Vegas Boulevard:  Empire of the Intensities,” Parallax (2002); “Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Etihics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White,” Twentieth-​ Century Literature (2005); “Take Me Out to the Slot Machines: Reflections on Gambling and American Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2006); “The Swerve around P:  Literary Theory after Interpretation,” Postmodern Culture (2007); “The Economics of Academic Freedom; or, Plato’s P&T Committee,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2009); “RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth

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Goldsmith’s The Weather,” Critical Inquiry (2013); “Still life, with Tequila,” Oxford Literary Review (2014); “Stuart Hall and the ‘Detour through Theory’ Revisited,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2016); “Living and Dying with Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Biopower,” Between Foucault and Derrida (2016); “The Frankfurt School and Its Successors,” Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory (2017); “Jokes and the Performative in Austin and Derrida; or, The Truth Is a Joke?” Cultural Critique (2017); “Postmodernism,” Bloomsbury Companion to Literary and Cultural Theory (2019); “Anti-​Theory 2.0,” What’s Wrong with Anti-​ theory? (2019); “Steamy,” symplokē (2020). Jeffrey Nealon was interviewed by Veeser on July 25, 2015, at Penn State University. HAV: What is your general take on the shape of the theory moment? JN:  The theory generation would never have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for the New Criticism that came before it. Theory was an intensification of the New Critical apparatus, which is to say we had all tacitly agreed that texts are there to be interpreted and that literary criticism and theory is about producing interpretations of texts. After the war, when you’ve got all these GIs coming back, they didn’t know Greek or Latin, or they didn’t know the tradition. But with New Criticism, you could sit them down in front of a poem, ask them to empty their minds of presuppositions, and, boom: what’s going on with this red wheelbarrow and this chicken? Right? So it was tailor-​made for post–​World War II pedagogy. And during the theory years, even New Historicism, feminism, or psychoanalytic criticism, all the way up until about 1990, there was, I  think, a broad agreement (among people who disagreed about everything else) that interpretation was the only game in town. Now which paradigm you were using, well, there was substantial disagreement about that. HAV:  Just to follow up, Rita Felski used the term “Trojan Horse” of close reading to explain how theory was introduced into the academy over all resistance and was successfully implanted in the academy. But the Trojan Horse idea suggests that there is much more to theory that is finally not only beyond close reading but actually destructive of its ethos and setting. Trojan Horse is another of those military metaphors. JN: Well, yeah, I guess my entry into the professoriate circa 1992—​I came through philosophy rather than through literature—​meant that by the time I  came to deconstruction in the late ’80s, it didn’t look like a fresh new method. It had begun to spin its wheels pretty considerably. Not because it was wrong about anything in particular, but because it was right! Once you decide that binary oppositions canceling themselves out can be found in virtually any of the quote unquote great texts, and that all texts are

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Image 21. “What’s up with that chicken?”

“undecidable,” it just becomes a matter of demonstrating that endlessly. Milton might as well be Holderlin who might as well be Chaucer who might as well be Toni Morrison. So once that’s become the point of something like deconstruction, it seems to me that that evacuates the whole question of interpretation.

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As a philosophy, deconstruction was never about producing interpretations of texts. At least the Derrida I  learned about (and briefly from) in philosophy departments had all these far-​ranging commitments to thinking about painting, ethics, politics, the nuclear arms race, apartheid. Derrida was interested in it all, most of which had nothing to do with demonstrating the undecidability of meaning within literary texts. Of course, Derrida was very interested in literature, but it didn’t seem to me that you could reduce deconstruction to a method for interpreting texts, which looked to me like what had happened by the mid-​to late ’80s. Is that de Man’s fault, or Jonathan Culler’s fault, or Hillis Miller’s fault? No. But this is in fact what I  think ended up happening. So for me it was an attempt to reinvigorate theory from the very beginning. It had already had its first generation of the close reading, Trojan Horse method, and it seemed to me as if that was petering out; there was all this other stuff that theory could do, and it was an interesting moment to expand theory beyond the question of literary meaning and its discontents. HAV: To what degree was the rise of deconstruction a re-​hash or revisiting of the continental theorists, who were imported into the United States at least by the time of the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference? JN: American deconstruction owed a great deal to Jakobsen on metaphor and metonymy: the idea that metaphor was simply a disguised version of metonymy, that it was always replacement rather than any kind of transcendental move, that the signified was simply another chain of signifiers. Maybe you can wrest that from Derrida, but could have gotten that out of Jakobsen in the mid-​’50s, and that’s of course where de Man was coming from, Geneva School phenomenology. So, is it simply a re-​hash? I wouldn’t go that far. It struck me as being novel and interesting at the time. But again these concepts or methods have only so much—​one doesn’t want to use the term shelf-​life but—​ HAV: Your sense of the overall shape of the thinking and work done during this period, would you hazard a model for that? Is it a progressive model, evolutionary? Or would it be a declinist model? JN: What all Big Theory has in common is a historicist version of the binary opposition game, with European postwar thought sandwiched between American capitalism, on the one hand, and Soviet totalitarianism, on the other hand, trying to find a third way, an emergent space, an excess, that is not dialectically sublatable between these two poles. People who are as very different from each other as Habermas, Derrida, Foucault, or Deleuze would all share this kind of sense that being European is being stuck between these two gigantic things, neither of which you necessarily want to endorse. It’s not, I  think, a surprise that Theory begins to peter out or no longer become as unified around 1990. Because then the Cold War is over, and it’s no longer the same kind of Cold War situation of paranoia, dedicated to the axiomatic

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“hermeneutics of suspicion” (there’s something sinister buried in this or any other opposition). You remember, I am sure, the talismanic word “totalization”; if you called someone a totalizer back in the day, it was worse than any insult you could possibly muster at them. Whereas now, a scant 25 years later, there is a whole series of realisms which are back on the theory scene—​speculative realism, object-​oriented ontology, vibrant matter, actor–​network theory. This seems to me somewhat tied to the fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, which remains uneven to be sure, but in many of the wealthy countries, it’s nothing but scapes and flows and various kinds of movements. And that seems to me why Deleuze becomes a sort of thinker du jour, because you go from a kind of binary opposition world (in search of a third way through) that someone like Derrida could really tell us a lot about, to a global world of nothing but immanent flows and movements, which is why Deleuze becomes a key thinker in the ’90s. HAV: You’ve been described as the true heir of Fredric Jameson. Your explanation of 1990 as pivotal suggests a kind of international allegory. JN: First, I think Phil Wegner and Caren Irr are much better “true heirs” to Fred than I am. I take mostly from Jameson the idea that there exists a cultural dominant that needs to be named, so you can diagnose what’s happening or what’s likely to put you in a position to outflank that thing, or at least put up some friction to it, rather than recycling the same old clichés from 20 years ago, which would have been injurious to a Fordist disciplinary capitalism. So, for example, being sexually transgressive, taking drugs or practicing yoga, or the aesthetics of the body, these practices may have put up substantial resistance to Fordist capitalist imperatives of the ’50s. But today’s biopolitical or neoliberal capitalism runs on them; it doesn’t run from them. HAV:  Can we shift ground to your personal history. Let’s dial it way back. How did you become interested in this field? JN: Unlike almost everybody I know in academia, I was never a big reader as a child. Neither of my parents went to college; my mother read a lot, but mostly Harlequin romances. My father watched TV. So I grew up mostly with television, movies, the radio, pop culture. It’s when I  got to college that I started reading literature, especially Modernist literature, especially highly arcane, difficult Modernist literature. I guess just the sheer difficulty of it appealed to me. Maybe because I hadn’t grown up doing it; today I’m still not really a lover of page-​turners in literature as many of my friends are. They’re people who loved literature, read all the time, and then got to graduate school and realized they had to learn this thing called theory to get ahead in the game called academia. They had to give up something they loved (the joy of reading literature) for something they didn’t (the cold

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abstractions of theory). It was easier for me because my first cathexes were theoretical. Like, What’s going on here? What’s happening in The Waste Land, how does this work, how does this fit together? So it’s the aporias or the difficulties that drew me in to begin with. HAV: Did you start graduate school in philosophy? JN: I started grad school in English, at the University of Connecticut. One of my mentors had gone there, and I realized very quickly that this was not what I was really interested in. HAV: Why? JN: I had thought that grad school in English would everywhere be synonymous with theory—​my best undergraduate English teachers were recent Yale products, and I thought that studying literature was essentially studying phenomenology. Boy was I  wrong! That’s not, in fact, what it was, in most places. So then I had to sort of figure, “Okay, then do I go to a literary theory program? Or do I  just do the straight-​up continental philosophy, and then work it through literature in some way?” And if you’re looking for continental philosophy, there is none at the Ivy League schools, because it’s all analytic. It’s the Catholic schools that have the continental philosophy, so I ended up at Loyola. There was already great theory in the English Department (I worked closely with Paul Jay) and I  could also do continental philosophy—​working with Heideggerians (John Sallis and Tom Sheehan were also there), as well as a whole bunch of other people like Paul Davies (who works on Levinas and Blanchot). And David Krell was an El ride away at DePaul. So the decision I  made, which in retrospect was pretty stupid [laughs], was to do a pretty straight-​up continental philosophy co-​degree, and then sort of work it through literature, rather than only do literary theory, which already struck me as kind of suspicious. It seemed to me that all this theory stuff was based on Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and that many of the people that I talked to—​and this is just what happens—​ learned everything they know about Heidegger from Derrida, which is not anything Derrida would have ever suggested you should do. So it seemed to me you had to know the primary texts. You had to work your way up to the present rather than projecting backward from it, and I was already a philosophy major from a Jesuit school, so I  had some of that continental background to begin with. HAV: So what about the particular moments of revelation? JN: Derrida would come to Loyola, and I did a mini-​course with him in Italy. I was a second-​year master’s student. It was on Glas, which had just been translated. He did a week-​long seminar on it. And it was—​as anyone who’s taken courses from Derrida will tell you—​smooth. It was just, boom, boom, boom, this is how it works. It was incredible.

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HAV: Was he teaching in French? JN: No, it was in English. Mostly to a group of North American faculty and undergraduates and a smattering of other people from around Europe. But English was the lingua franca for the thing. HAV: And Derrida was comfortable there. JN:  Yes. It was sort of the philosophy loop—​Nancy was there for a week, Agamben (before anyone knew who he was), Rodolphe Gasche organized it, and he’d just published his great book on Derrida, The Tain of the Mirror. And as far as those sort of Heideggerian Derrideans are concerned, people like John Sallis or David Krell, they know who Jonathan Culler is or who Hillis [Miller] is, but they’re not really doing the same thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with literary theory, but it’s just not the same game—​its interests, the things that drive it, it’s just a different kind of discourse. I  got a lot of pushback against that when I  first started simply saying it, right? In retrospect I think I was correct about that, so I don’t have a bad conscience about it, though it didn’t make me any Ivy League friends at the time. I don’t think anyone still thinks that we should still be hunting out binary oppositions or demonstrating the undecidability of texts some 30 years later. HAV: What about the discipline of English? How did you get to that? JN: So I was primarily interested in culture, cultural studies, or something like it. And you just couldn’t do it in philosophy—​and besides, the job situation in continental philosophy was terrible. HAV:  Within the philosophy department, though, how did your interest in culture develop and flourish? JN: I was an Auslander; I was from somewhere else. And so to this day I get along well with people in continental philosophy. And I can say stuff like, “Hey, I saw this movie last night which reminds me of something in Heidegger.” They found it mildly amusing at the time. [laughs] HAV:  You were interested less in reading and interpretation than in “How does this work?” You’ve done a Toolbox of Theory. Is theory a kind of very smoothly operating meat grinder into which you can feed a text, and out will come something more interesting? Or to what degree is the theory tool box connected to a will to power over a text? Or to what degree is it just one’s intrinsic interest in the operation of textuality or the geeky attraction to taking apart really complex machinery? I mean, those are four possible things, and I’m sure I’ve missed many others. JN: Well, I think everybody wants to keep at bay the meat grinder. Remember, this was the critique of theory from the New Criticism:  that you weren’t responding to the text, but you were simply running it through this template, looking for binary oppositions, or looking for race relations, or gender deformations or something like that, and for the New Critics, that wasn’t

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Image 22. “Meat grinder”

actually being true to the text. The problem for me becomes when you hang onto the tools and don’t see that you have constantly to update or rework them. I mean, for example, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was a sense that, if you could point out the hidden subversions underneath what looked like commodified practices and products, you were doing interesting work. And that strikes me as being true circa 1985. Take a book like Hebdige’s

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Sub-​cultures; great book, but you can’t just pick it up and move it 40 years further into the future, because now there’s nothing but subcultures. Mainstream culture is a series of subcultures. “Welcome to Amazon.com, Jeffrey. We have some suggestions for you.” Which isn’t to say that Hebdige is wrong. It’s just a matter of the historical moment and the refashioning of the critical tools. HAV: What about your own interventions? JN: For me, the ongoing diagnosis of the present is the thing. Which is another way of saying I really wanted to avoid philosophy because philosophy does tend as a discipline to encourage you to be an expert on X thinker, a backward-​ looking commentator on the meaning of that person’s thought. You should be a Hegelian or a Kantian—​some of my best friends are Foucauldians. Which is perfectly righteous. It’s just that I am more interested in the diagnosis of the present. I’m primarily interested in how, as Foucault put it, today is different from yesterday. HAV: Was a diagnosis of the present always at least a sub-​job of the English Department or a part of its portfolio? JN:  I would think that’s new-​ish. Isn’t it? Certainly, the importation of cultural studies into English has been uneven. Somebody like Larry Grossberg will say cultural studies was largely unknown or at least seriously under-​ theorized or thematized in English departments before 1990, before that conference at Illinois, which would be maybe equivalent to the Hopkins conference in a different, odd way. And I think there are still people in English departments who think of them as being primarily historical repositories of literary greatness. But I  think on that model, and maybe this is a segue to what happened to English or what’s happening to English; we become like the “critically acclaimed” stuff that nobody watches on Netflix. But I guess even the “historical repository” model has everything to do with the present. So, for example, Milton is always a bellwether for me. In 1993, Herman Rappaport writes Milton and the Postmodern, and then we see arise these books on Milton and New Historicism, Milton and Affect, and Milton and Terrorism. HAV: Really? JN: Well, yeah. Guy Fawkes! There was stuff going on there. [laughs] Milton went from being a very pious, religious figure to being a bearded anarchist, to being a postmodernist or an aesthetic dandy. For a while, in the New Historicist era, Aeropagitica became all of Milton. I’m not a Miltonist by any stretch of the imagination but interested in looking at the scholarship as a leading indicator of changes. It’s maybe the same thing with Shakespeare, right? Here’s a question that people are trying to figure out, something like terrorism, and what does Shakespeare have to say about terrorism? Hamlet was an Oedipal drama in the psychoanalytic era, and then it became a political drama in the New Historicist era, and then it became about binary oppositions, and then it

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became about gender. All those things. I don’t think one can pooh-​pooh those questions as mere fashion. HAV: And what’s the pay-​off of presentism and its reassessments of Milton or of Hamlet or of Shakespeare? JN: There’s some danger of historical amnesia. That no one else has ever dealt with these sorts of problems before, that you see with undergraduates. HAV: Whom would you have wanted to plagiarize? JN: Derrida, without a doubt. If you think of the “Differance” essay, “I will speak, therefore, of a letter.” It’s all right there. I will speak—​in the future—​I will speak of a letter, speak of writing. Speech/​writing. And don’t forget “therefore,” the interruption right in the middle of the sentence, the aporia between speech and writing, the hesitating virtual futurity of this “I will speak.” It’s all right there. It just takes you the next 25 pages to unpack it. [laughs] There’s an essential enigma there that needs to be foregrounded. Lacan as well. The obfuscation is there for a reason. The unconscious doesn’t just rush up to meet you [laughs] like a toilet-​paper commercial. There’s an experimental, transversal method to get there, and the enigmatic quality is part of the encounter. HAV: You wrote, Why do we have to apologize for not having a nice, unified, organic structure? JN: I have to say it kind of pissed me off when Derrida died, The New York Times, I don’t know if you remember the headline, it was “Abstruse Theorist Dies at 74.” But when a molecular biologist dies, do they say, “Abstruse Epidemiologist Dies at 74.” Or do they say, “We Mourn Folksy Guy Who Explained How Mitochondria Work”? No, they don’t say that. And the desire for a neat organic structure seems part of this idea that if you taught students to appreciate things again, if you simply got rid of the theory and the politics and the gender and so on, then the majors would come back to you because they want to learn how to appreciate … poetry, in its organic wholeness? This is magical thinking. And this idea that if you did territorialize back on the appreciation of great British and American literature, you’d have more majors? Donald Trump doesn’t call a meeting and say, “Get in here and appreciate this thing for me!” No. It’s “get in here and deconstruct this thing for me.” Disruption is one of the business plans du jour. Also, when people say that theory killed the coherence of the English curriculum, it drives me nuts:  theory was the only coherence the English curriculum had after the canon wars. Everybody had to know something about Judith Butler, whether you liked it whether you hated it. You had some sense of how performativity worked, whether you thought it was just putting on a different set of clothes today or whether you thought it was more having to do

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with Austin and Derrida. But people read it. Now does everyone today have something to say about Badiou or Ranciere? No. The methods (or really the methodological disagreements) held us together, not our common familiarity with the literary canon. HAV:  You’ve made some wry remarks about the search for the next big problem as being a kind of throwback, dating oneself. That’s still a project for some people. JN:  Somebody asked me in 1986 what I  thought the next big thing was. I  said, “Blanchot.” [laughs] So I  still await the Blanchot revolution. Turns out I was wrong. I see there’s the desire for a new dominant paradigm. I get that. But I came up at a particular time (during the deconstruction vs. new historicism squabble, for example) when that quest for dominance struck me as the problem rather than a solution. The thing that allowed theory to have a coherence in the past was not everyone having the same theory, but the tacit agreement that (1) the project was interpretation and (2) the objects were largely literary objects of fairly high-​culture value. And those are both probably no longer unproblematically the case—​I’m not sure we’re any longer in agreement that we’re all here to seek out new interpretive paradigms to apply to texts. But we’re in the innovation game whether we like it or not, right? Unless we want the whole thing to be de-​professionalized, which is to say we all want to be adjunctified; you have to be able to publish stuff, and to publish stuff with some kind of innovative component to it. So these things work hand in glove. You can’t just repeat what other people have said about Richardson or Shelley or Wollstonecraft; you have to do something new. But at present I really can’t imagine what a “new interpretation” of Robinson Crusoe would look like. So we’re on to the myriad other things you can do with texts, other than talking about their “meaning.” HAV: What about the adjunctification? What’s been the impact on what we study and what we teach? JN:  First, I  agree with [Marc] Bousquet:  the naturalist fiction of “the job market” is the first thing that has to go or has to be deconstructed or rethought. Talk of the academic job market bolsters this idea that there is a natural supply-​and-​demand curve, and all of a sudden the demand curve for tenure-​ line positions in the humanities has dried up: the idea that deans and provosts didn’t create this scarcity, but the laws of economics did. And concerning faculty and adjunct numbers, I would have thought there was a number under which you could not go and still remain highly ranked in the U.S. News and World Report in terms of tenure-​track faculty doing the teaching. And I would have thought that number would have been over 50% tenure-​line faculty to get a high rating, especially given the skyrocketing cost of college. But it’s not. And the number of courses taught by tenure-​line faculty continues in

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what looks like free fall! Right? 30 percent, 25 percent. Is there a floor to that number? Can you have 90 percent of your courses in the humanities taught by adjunct faculty at these very expensive institutions and still say you’re running a first-​rate research university? That I guess remains to be seen. Clearly, there hasn’t been enough agitation from faculty members about this. Most of my colleagues nationwide are engaging in a lot of collective hand-​wringing, but they continue to sort of see this as a sort of a dry-​up or that there’s some natural process at work here, when it’s simply that there hasn’t been enough agitation to keep tenure-​line jobs as tenure-​line jobs. HAV: Are MOOCs and televised courses aiming at working your way down to a few superstars? JN: That dream has been around for a long time, since the first distanced ed. College, however, is a biopolitical product, at this point, as much as it is anything else, for the students, right? It’s not about credentialing or mastering some body of knowledge; it’s about networking and careers on the other side of college. Which is to say, they don’t flee from the humanities to psychology because of the content, much less the theory. They don’t become economics majors because they’re really down with rational choice theory, and they’ve had it with Badiou. They don’t know anything about it. The students simply believe these are more salable majors, career-​wise, which (in the case of psychology especially) is disastrously untrue. HAV: Are there any questions you’d want me to ask to your fellow theorists as I continue doing these interviews? JN: Going forward, the question that would interest me as you’re talking to people is, “What does a graduate or undergraduate syllabus look like these days?” Theory was taught for a long time as a menu. You start with Saussure, then you read some Russian Formalism, then you may read some New Criticism, then you read structuralism, post-​structuralism, feminism, deconstruction, New Historicism. That was before there were affect or animals or anything like that. But it was an increasingly arcane menu. You’d ask other grad students when you took a seminar, “What are you going to do for your project?” And they’d say, “I’m either going to deconstruct Hamlet or do a feminist analysis of The Waste Land.” It allowed people to think about theory as a mechanism, the meat grinder as you say. I would wonder, Do people still teach it that way? I do it according to concepts: authorship, ideology, subjectivity, class, gender, globalization. HAV: So the way the English Institute works, “This year all the papers are going to be related to reading.” Or it’s usually a concept. JN:  Well, if you’re going to organize it around reading, you can start with Shlovsky and talk about defamiliarization, but you can get to Moretti and talk about mapping in the same week, without this development

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narrative: “defamiliarization, that sounds good,” and then the next class it’s like, “Ohhh, snap, it’s been overcome by Iser and filling in gaps.” [laughs] Doesn’t sound so good the next week. I see some syllabi every now and again, and they seem like they still have that historical progression model which seems to me nuts. It seems that it ought to be more, “What have we learned about … authorship.” So you can do “Death of the Author,” you can do Benn Michaels on intentionality, “the Intentional Fallacy,” you can do “What Is an Author?” So you can talk about authorship as a debate which has particular kinds of tendrils at different moments, and you can wrap the history of structuralism or feminism or postcolonialism around it as well. When I talk to John McGowan or Jeff Williams or Vincent Leitch, they say theory isn’t in trouble at all, that the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is selling like hotcakes. They’re already working on the next edition. And they have to do a couple of updates; they’ve got to get the affect and the animals in there. I  was at the sales pitch McGowan made to Cary [Wolfe] for the animal studies material. And at least John says there are certain people that fall out. So the Kenneth Burke has fallen out. Which is somewhat surprising to me, but—​ HAV: Steven Mailloux is going to be terribly disappointed to hear that. JN: Well, certainly Burke remains a major figure for rhetoricians, so I wouldn’t be too worried about him. But then what’s going to happen to Poulet, Iser, what happens to phenomenology that’s not Heidegger or something like it? Are these folks footnotes to something? I also see a lot of people trying to kind of reinvent those wheels, filling in gaps as reading, for example, and knowing something about phenomenology would have been helpful there. HAV:  Are there things that I  have neglected to ask you that you wish I’d asked you? JN:  Not necessarily. I  think my story may be interesting only insofar as it’s anomalous. I didn’t really come through the English Department, elite-​grad-​ school wringer. And for years I’ve played both sides of that fence. So, in a philosophy context, I say, “Oh, I’m a literary guy, what do I know?” And then to the literature people, “Oh, I’m a philosophy guy.” In any case, I’m not really a joiner and never wanted to be an -​ist or an -​ean (a New Historicist or a Derridean). But that may be what makes my perspective on theory more orthogonal than other people’s to some degree. HAV: What does orthogonal mean? JN: A sharp right angle, perpendicular to the dominant line. I think I remain committed; somebody else said this to me, I  don’t remember who, might have been [Jeff] Williams, said something like, “Well, you know, you’re really committed to those Big Theory guys.” I reply, “Well. All right.” It’s not like you’ve simply exhausted what Foucault has to say about “today” precisely

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because today keeps changing. I  think these people are giants for a reason. And there’s a lot more that you can do with them. There are some readings of them that are not going to be helpful going forward. But I certainly remain committed, maybe more than most people, to that Big Theory era, in a weird way, at least to the big names of  it. HAV: OK. This has been Hap Veeser talking to Jeffrey Nealon in his office at Penn State, it’s July 25, 19—​ JN: 2015! [laughs] It may seem like it’s 1996. HAV: Thank you, Professor Nealon.

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AFTERWORD  Heather Love

Ask a group of theorists if theory is alive or dead, and you may get a lesson in what Michel Foucault called “the speaker’s benefit”—​the tendency to assume the best for and of oneself. Foucault was thinking of the tendency of late twentieth-​century readers to assume that they were more liberated and less repressed than their Victorian counterparts. It is clear that a similar temptation exists in retrospectively narrating the theory era, that moment beginning in the late ’60s when the university was a place of promise, progressive social change was afoot, and the generation most closely associated with the rise of theory was young. It is a heady mix, ripe for self-​aggrandizement. There is little in the way of grandiosity here, though, nor idealizing nostalgia. There is a distinct glow when critics talk about the way that theory was a force for intellectual and personal transformation. However, it would take a lot of persuading for most people to see this as a revolution, and not simply because its effects were mostly confined to the academy. There is also significant hesitation on the part of some of these critics, closely identified with the rise of theory, to say what it is. There is the danger that by describing it, one lessens its impact, draining it of its potential to affect the present. It seems late in the game for such scruples, and by touting the elusive capaciousness of theory, one simply condemns it to obscurity. Even if one keeps faith in the liveness of theory, a historical approach seems more in keeping with its path through academic institutions, and its ambiguous place—​at once a rallying cry, and a footnote—​in a university under siege. In this view, one may also agree with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-​ Graff in their claim that theory was never successfully translated into a mass education project. Instead, it kept its sights turned on a niche audience, a subset even of humanities scholars. But what that audience may have lacked in numbers it made up for in intensity. Far-​flung as it was, there was a movement, a fact attested to by the scholars gathered here. They bear witness to the powerful influence of theory and criticism on their political, social, and

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professional lives. Some of the heat seems a result of youth or the gravitational pull of charismatic teachers and colleagues. But some of it is a result of the ideas themselves. Theory, with its ability to skew frameworks and undermine stable forms of knowledge, changed lives too. Change isn’t always for the best, and these scholars grapple seriously with the ambivalent legacy of theory. This generation profited intellectually but also materially from a strong hit of anti-​foundationalism. The rise of theory coincided with the rise of the star system in the US academy and with the destruction of the welfare state. Because of the structure of academic careers, this has led to profound and lasting inequality. Many of the critics featured in the book built their careers during the boom and are still enjoying those privileges. Meanwhile, the infrastructure which supported public university education has been gutted, leading to the exclusion of many lower-​income students as well as widespread adjunctification and precarity. Opinions vary about how or where to assign blame for this situation. Michael Bérubé acknowledges a shared responsibility, stating simply that his generation “oversaw the dismantling of the welfare state.” Walter Benn Michaels sees a more direct link, tying his good fortune in the profession to casualization and suggesting that income reductions at the top would allow younger scholars a chance at job security and a living wage. It is a sound proposal, and it is bracing to hear Michaels speaking openly about the advantages he has had. In the current moment, however, his proposal may sound not only idealistic but impractical, given that the excesses at the top no longer seem adequate to cover the scale of the need at the bottom. For some, these changes in the economic underpinnings of higher education are not personal but structural. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, these processes are the fault of capitalism, not individual theorists, or theory itself. But there is a lingering question about whether, in the close attention to language or the history of philosophy, theorists took their eye off the ball. Capitalism may be to blame, but a sense persists of not having done enough to confront its ravages. Michaels comments on his generation’s odd combination of success and failure during these decades: “We made out like bandits.” In light of fears about the death of the university, discussions of the liveness of theory strike an odd note, perhaps made odder by the fact that the shipwreck is narrated by its survivors. One’s sense of the crisis is no doubt determined by one’s relation to it. What if the collection were made up of interviews with junior scholars, adjuncts, and graduate students. It may be that the group represented here is not best equipped to address the question of the liveness of theory. But it does have the strong advantage of retrospect, which in this case produces significant irony. The dream of democratization and anti-​authoritarianism that sparked the theory movement has led to

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an unexpected set of outcomes:  aging professors teaching critical theory to wealthy undergraduates, while their graduate students look for work elsewhere. Theory’s relation to politics has reached a crisis in the moment of the university’s decline. But, as these critics make clear, this relation has been vexed from the start. The question of whether theory is political, or whether it does any good, is bound up with the status of representation, and the significance of language and culture alongside geopolitics and economic realities. It is also inflected by its travels across the Atlantic in the twentieth century and, as I have suggested, by broader anxieties about the nature of academic careers. About this last point, Stanley Fish takes a hard line, arguing that theorists should stay out of contests of virtue, indicating the entire realm of political life. He suggests that literary criticism is best understood as a profession, “just a job” like any other. Through such an approach Fish has become an icon of conservatism, which is how other critics in the volume refer to him. But the volume as a whole casts a harsh light on inflated claims to political effectivity. Fish, by utterly disavowing such claims, avoids this form of bad faith. But in a context in which theory looks like rather a bad bet as a profession, many are seeking to find meaning as well as value in its substance. It is possible to narrate the history of theory as a political project. Because the book concerns the rise of theory in the United States, this story of its political importance tends to reflect an American understanding of politics, with a heavy emphasis on gender, race, and sexuality. It is true that the assimilation of European post-​structuralism into the American academy during the 1980s and 1990s brought it into close, if contentious, contact with identity-​based fields. The point of origin in this story is not the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that resulted in the publication of The Structuralist Controversy (1970). Instead, it is the 1990 conference at the University of Illinois, Crossroads of Cultural Studies, that is key. The legacy of this moment is complex, since the anti-​foundationalism of theory gave rise to significant skepticism about identity, and yet it registered mostly in fields with links to social justice movements. For Jane Gallop, this was just an improvement, as she felt psychoanalysis and deconstruction were “just like” lesbian feminism, but smarter. It was also very productive in the field of queer theory, which pursued a critique of homophobic thought while temporizing on the question of identity. But it remains unclear, even several decades later, what was accomplished more generally in the replacement of the concept of identity with the concept of difference. While this incorporation of struggles for inclusion and inequality in the United States constituted a clear advance for some critics, for others it meant a reduction in theory’s range and impact. Critics that are more attuned to

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theory’s European contexts offer resistance to the narrative of the transit across the Atlantic as one of straightforward politicization. As Jeffrey Nealon points out, continental theory was a much broader philosophical project, more closely tied to Marxism and to the twin pressures exerted by the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. For other critics, the rise of a framework of identity meant the decline of attention to class. For Ken Warren, there was a promise in post-​structuralism of thinking race and gender in a broader geopolitical context. For him, however, this was a project that failed. He writes, “There was a way in which a left political analysis rooted in political economy felt as if it were potentially compatible with the kind of analysis that we associated with post-​structuralist theory. What we’ve seen has been the loss of political economy as the standard feature. The sort of leftist claims associated with theory end up being more or less posturing rather than deep-​rooted analysis of where we are now.” Walter Benn Michaels blames rising class inequality in higher education on this shift toward identity, thus imagining an either/​or situation in which we can have either racial diversity or economic equality. It is a way of setting the problem that many would refuse. Many critics struggle with the fact that their work as literary and cultural critics gives them a heightened awareness and understanding of the world’s injustices, but does not equip them to address those injustices directly. Homi Bhabha points to the ideal of a more integrated practice. Considering the situation of millions of displaced people across the world, he writes that “to be effective an intervention has to be imminent: it has to be impending, hanging over your head or your text as if it is about to happen. An intervention must emerge, in the field of interpretation and social action, as if it brings the past to a kind of fruition even as it meets the necessity and the unknowability of the future.” The virtual quality of this account (“as it if is about to happen”) can be explained by the fact that critics intervene much more regularly in the “field of interpretation” than in the field of social action. For many critics interviewed here, it is important to acknowledge this lack of agency and to make clear that doing theory is not the same as doing politics. Next to heated debates about inequality and shifting definitions of politics, the stakes of debates about the import of post-​structuralism into specifically literary critical contexts can seem rather tepid. But it is clear from these scholars’ comments how much significance attaches to their encounter with this philosophical approach and with the figure of Jacques Derrida. Here too there are controversies, though since they don’t track along the twentieth-​ century fortunes of Marxism and the New Social Movements, they seem less consequential. Was deconstruction taken up in American academia because it continued the New Critical tradition of close reading? Did the example

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of Derrida lead to a general improvement of thought and writing among American scholars? Is it really possible to designate a form of thought so premised on dispersal as a movement? These are not exactly burning questions in the present. Furthermore, they may have a slightly forensic air—​they are the kind of questions that are asked at the inquest, rather than in the heat of the moment. But the project counts on the fact that the theory era was important to enough people that it deserves an inquest and that it has not yet had one. Having gone to college in the late ’80s, my early encounter with deconstruction and allied forms of thought changed my life. For me, it was fascinating to hear the stories of how this intellectual world came into being, who the players were, and what mattered to them. As an inquest, it is very lively, attesting to the intellectual hunger that led people to refuse whole swaths of teaching, change fields, and plunge into the unknown. The energy of that moment is palpable here, even as it recedes into the distance. As the white-​hot influence of theory’s avatars cools, theory still retains its ability to animate new generations of readers—​but as a canonical body of knowledge, as a set of historical texts. This may not be what anyone had in mind, but it is the fate of successful movements to take up their place on library shelves. As inspiring as the iconoclasm of the founding generation of theory is to scholars now, curation—​and keeping the library open—​may be our most pressing task in the present.

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INDEX Abel, Elizabeth 8, 112 Abrams, M. H. 53 Academic Freedom (Fish) 24 “Affective Fallacy, The” (Beardsley) 136 African American studies 173–​74, 178 Allegories of Reading (de Man) 53 Alpers, Paul 33 Ambassadors, The 31 American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (Leitch) 51–​52, 55, 57 American theory 80–​83 Animal Rights Movement 186 animal studies 185–​86 “Animal That Therefore I Am, More to Follow, The” (Derrida) 113, 191 Anscombe, Elizabeth 68 anti-​foundationalism  23, 43 antiprofessionalism 17–​19 “Anti-​Professionalism” (Fish)  17–​19 Anxiety of Influence (Bloom) 9–​10 Applied Grammatology (Ulmer) 56 arguments 42–​43 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried) 68 Austin, J. L. 22 avant garde movements 164–​65 Bahktin, Mikhail 53 Barthes, Roland 1 Bate, Walter Jackson 17 Bateson, Gregory 184 Bauer, Dale 141 Beardsley, Monroe 136 Benjamin, Walter 102–​3 Bennett, William J. 53 Berlant, Lauren 113 Bérubé, Michael 45–​46, 62, 207–​19 big events 208–​9, 214–​15

birth 207 career 207 on disability studies 214–​17 education 207 English departments, attachment to 209 on Greatest Generation 217 interventions 213–​14 interview 208–​19 Life as We Know It 46, 214 literature develop, interest in 209–​10 Public Access 210, 213 publications 207–​8 and School of Criticism and Theory 218–​19 Secret Life of Stories, The 210, 214 views on theory 208–​19 Best, Stephen 55 Beyond the Culture Wars (Graff) 43 Bhabha, Homi 43, 95–​107 birth 95 career 95 education 95 interventions 101–​2 interview 96–​107 mother 97–​101 on postcolonial moment 96–​97 publications 95–​96 Bhabha, Naju 97–​101 biocybernetic reproduction 112–​13 Birkenstein-​Graff, Cathy  37–​48 birth 37 career 37 education 37 interview 39–​48 publications 37–​38 They Say/​I Say 39–​43 Black Aesthetic, The (Gayle) 52

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242 THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM Black and White Strangers (Warren) 176–​77 Blake, William 111–​12 Blanchot revolution 231 Bloom, Harold 9, 43, 117, 190 “Book and Its Public, A” (Auerbach) 179 Booth, Wayne 17, 53 Bourdieu, Pierre 53 Bousquet, Marc 54 Brennan, Timothy 161 Brown, Wendy 185 Burke, Kenneth 114 Bush, Douglas 19 Butler, Judith 20–​21, 24, 45, 53, 59 Cain, Bill 141 Cane (Toomer) 176 Canons and Context (Lauter) 213 Carroll, Lewis 28 Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychoanalytiques 6 Chandler, James 113 Cheney, Lynne 53 Chute, Hillary 121 Claiming Disability (Linton) 214 Clueless in Academe (Graff) 45–​46 Cohen, Ralph 16 colonialism 112 competitiveness 28 Contingencies of Value (Smith) 185 Corporealities (Mitchell and Snyder) 214 Corral, Will H. 54 Counterfeiters, The (Kenner) 71 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 128 Critical Environments (Wolfe) 188 Critical Inquiry 8, 52–​53 Crow, Jim 175, 177 Crumb, Robert 121 Culler, Jonathan 3, 45, 53, 126, 135 Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (Leitch) 57 cultural studies 8–​9, 160, 213, 237 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway) 53 Davidson, Arnold 113 Davis, Lennard 46 Davis, Lenny 214 Day of the Triffids, The (Lukács) 29 deconstruction 1, 23, 47, 80–​81, 87

Deconstructive Criticism (Leitch) 55 de Man, Paul 53, 87, 112 Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 27, 31–​32, 53, 68, 112–​13, 186, 191–​92, 230–​31, 234 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bahktin) 53 Diaz, Natalie 96 Dimock, Wai Chee 4, 7–​8, 147–​57 big events 148–​49 birth 147 career 147 on deconstruction 152 education 147 Empire for Liberty 149, 151 “Humanists as Builders” 153 interview 148–​57 networks 154 on New Historicism 152 PMLA review process and 149 presentism 154–​55 publications 147–​48 Residues of Justice 151 responsibility 156 Through Other Continents 155 Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival 150–​51, 154 writing style 149–​50 Distinction (Bourdieu) 53 Doing What Comes Naturally (Fish) 17–​18 Donato, Eugenio 51–​52 Don Quixote 7 Drama of Ideas, The (Puchner) 199, 201 Dubliners (Joyce) 176 Eagleton, Terry 179 École de la Cause Freudienne 6 École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) 6 Ecological Poetics or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Wolfe) 189 Elmer, Jonathan 186 Empire for Liberty (Dimock) 149, 151 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 54 emulation 28 Enforcing Normal (Davis) 214 English in America (Ohmann) 53 Enigma of Arrival, The (Naipaul) 100 Epistemology of the Closet 208, 210, 213 erotic energy in academy 23 Erpenbeck, Jenny 100

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INDEX 243 Eugenides, Jeffrey 9 Experimental Forests 189 Fanon, Frantz 96 Fantastic, The (Todorov) 14 Felski, Rita 24, 159–​69 on autobiography of new interiority 164 big events 160 birth 159 breakthroughs 161 career 159 contributions/​interventions  162 education 159 on French theory 163–​64 interview 159–​69 and Marxism 160–​61 on professionalism 161, 167–​68 publications 159 theory effect on people’s writing 163 turning point 160–​61 views on theory 160–​69 feminism 5, 185 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 45 Fish, Stanley 1, 9, 13–​24, 28, 44, 46, 56, 113–​14, 135, 184–​85, 200 Academic Freedom 24 “Anti-​Professionalism”  17–​19 birth 13 breakthroughs/​insights  19–​20 career 13 Doing What Comes Naturally 17–​18 education 13 erotic energy in academy 23 Graff, Jerry and 17 interview 14–​24 Is There a Text in This Class? 16–​17, 19–​20 “Literature in the Reader” 16 “No Bias, No Merit: The Case Against Blind Submission” 18 Paradise Lost 16 personal history with theory 14–​17 plagiarize style 22 “Profession, Despise Thyself ” 19 professionalism 17–​19 publications 13–​14 School of Criticism and Theory 13–​14

Self-​Consuming Artifacts 16 Surprised by Sin 16 theoretical interventions 22–​23 theory impact on prose 20–​22 Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (von Uexküll) 187 “Force of Law, The” (Derrida) 22 Foucault, Michel 14, 59, 68, 81, 90, 97, 163–​65, 185, 191–​92, 211, 219–​21 Freakery (Garland) 214 Frederickson, George 176–​77 French Hegel 26–​27 Fried, Michael 33–​34, 68 Frye, Northrop 71 Gallop, Jane 1, 7, 45, 85–​93, 237 birth 85 breakthrough moments 90–​91 career 85 eccentricity as writer 91–​92 education 85 interventions 92 interview 86–​93 with literary theory 88–​89 publications 85–​86 Reading Lacan 91 style 93 views on theory 86–​93 Garland, Rosemary 214 Gasche, Rodolphe 227 Gates, Henry Louis 8 Gayle, Addison Jr. 52 gender 120 gender politics 5 Gender Trouble (Butler) 53, 59, 127 Germano, William 55, 123–​31 birth 123 career 123 education 123 Getting It Published 130 interventions 128–​29 interview 125–​31 prose style 129 publications 123–​25 publishing strategy 126 views on theory 125–​31 Getting It Published (Germano) 130 Gilbert, Sandra 53

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244 THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM Glyph group 32–​35 Go, Went, Gone (Erpenbeck) 100 Goldberg, Jonathan 33 Golden Bowl, The (Wells) 29 Gold Standard, The (Michaels) 73 Graff, Gerald 37–​48 Beyond the Culture Wars 43 birth 37 career 37 Clueless in Academe 45–​46 education 37 interview 39–​48 publications 37 They Say/​I Say 39–​43, 47 Graff, Jerry 17 Granovetter, Mark 150 Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti) 54 Greatest Generation, The 31, 47–​48 Grillet, Robbe 14 Grossberg, Larry 229 Gubar, Susan 53 Hall, Stuart 8–​9 Hamlet 5 Haraway, Donna 53, 190 Harcourt, Bernard 119 Hardt, Michael 54 Harmon, Graham 166 Harvey, David 54 Hayles, Kate 188–​89 Heath Anthology of American Literature (Lauter) 54 Hemphill, Essex 219 Hirsch, Don 17 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 29 Holland, Norman 56 Homecoming, The (Pinter) 9 Home (Morrison) 100 hooks, bell 54 Horowitz, David 54, 62 Horwitz, Morton 155 House for Mr. Biswas (Naipaul) 100 How the University Works (Bousquet) 54 Hyppolite, Jean 26–​27 Iconology (Mitchell) 117 identitarianism 69 Image Science (Mitchell) 117 “Intentional Fallacy, The” (Beardsley) 136

Intention (Anscombe) 68 Interpretive Conventions (Mailloux) 137 intersectionality 128 Irigaray, Luce 89 Irr, Caren 225 Is There a Text in This Class? (Fish) 16–​17, 19–​20, 200 iterability 44 Jagoda, Patrick 121 James, C. L. R. 151 James, Henry 176 James, William 30 Jameson, Fredric 43, 53, 54, 184 Jane Principle 31 Johnson, Barbara 73 Journal of English and Germanic Philology 14 Joyce, James 98, 176 Kenner, Hugh 31 Klein, Richard 33 Knapp, Stephen 112 Knapp, Steve 73 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The (Lukács) 29 Konvoluts (Benjamin) 103 Kopp, Ernst 187 Krieger, Murray 56 Kristeva, Julia 126 Kuhn, Thomas 60 Language of Thieves, The (Puchner) 197 Larsen, Nella 7 Last Dinosaur Book, The (Mitchell) 113 Latour, Bruno 4 Lauter, Paul 54 Learning to Labor (Willis) 128 Leitch, Tom 126 Leitch, Vincent 1, 6, 49–​64 American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s 51–​52, 55, 57 birth 49 career 49 Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism 57 Deconstructive Criticism 55 education 49 interventions 57 interview 49–​64 legacies of theory 60–​61

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INDEX Literary Criticism in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance 60 Living with Theory 62 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 6–​7, 54, 63 Postmodernism—​Local Effects, Global Flows 61 publications 49 Theory Matters 60 Theory’s effect on 55–​56 views on theory 49–​64 Lewis, C. S. 22 Life as We Know It (Bérubé) 46, 214 Literary Criticism in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance (Leitch) 60 literature 1 “Literature in the Reader” (Fish) 16 Living with Theory (Leitch) 62 Lukács, Georg 3, 29 lyrical thinking 102 Macksey, Richard Allen 25–​35, 51–​52 birth 25 career 25 education 25, 28 humorous writing 27–​28 interview 26–​35 paranomasia and 27 publications 25 schooling 28 Structuralist Controversy, The 30–​31, 35, 68–​69, 71, 172, 237 views on theory 26–​35 Mad Magazine 116 Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 53 Mailloux, Steven 1, 133–​43 after 1982 138 big events 135–​36 birth 133 career 133 on confrontation between Said and de Man 137–​38 criticism 136–​39 education 133 Interpretive Conventions 137 interview 134–​43 prose style 142 publications 133–​34

245

“Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies” 140 Rhetorical Power 140–​41 Thoreau project 136 views on theory 134–​43 Marcus, Sharon 55 Marriage Plot, The (Eugenides) 9 Marxism 160–​61, 184 Marxism, Cultural Studies, and Sport 209 McGann, Jerry 210–​11 McGrane, Laura 154 Mehlman, Jeffrey 33–​34 Meltzer, Francoise 113, 118 metacommentary 42 Michaels, Walter Benn 17, 20, 30, 33–​34, 45, 67–​77 birth 67 career 67 education 67 Gold Standard, The 73 interventions 72–​73 interview 68–​77 legacy of theory 74–​75 publications 67–​68 as theorist 69–​70 Trouble with Diversity, The 74 views on theory 68–​77 “Walden’s False Bottoms” 72 Miller, J. Hillis 9, 53, 87 Milton and the Postmodern (Rappaport) 229 Mitchell, Juliet 89 Mitchell, W. J. T. 1, 8, 109–​21 birth 109 career 109 education 109 Iconology 117 Image Science 117 interview 111–​21 Last Dinosaur Book, The 113 on personal encounters 118 ‘Pictorial Turn, The’ 117 on political moment 117 “Post-​colonial Literature, Post-​Imperial Theory” 112–​13 publications 109–​11 Seeing through Race 112, 120 turning points of  116 views on theory 111–​21 Moby-​Dick 4, 150–​51

246

246 THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM Mommy Myth, The 71 Moretti, Franco 54, 166–​67, 184 Morrison, Toni 100 Morton, Tim 166 Mountain Pine Beetle project 190 Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, The (Shell and Sollors) 54 Naipaul, V. S. 100–​101 nazi-​cissim  97 Nealon, Jeffrey 1, 7, 221–​34 on adjunctification 231–​32 on American deconstruction 224 birth 221 career 221 Derrida and 230–​31 education 221 interventions 229 interview 221–​34 moments of revelation 226 personal history 225–​26 publications 221–​22 Toolbox of Theory 227 on Trojan Horse method 222–​24 views on theory 222–​34 Negri, Antonio 54 Neoliberalism (Harvey) 54 New Criticism 50, 59–​60, 87–​89, 164, 204, 218, 222, 227, 232 Newfield, Chris 218 New Historicism 57, 59–​63, 73–​75, 87–​88, 130, 152, 180, 222, 231–​32 New Literary History (Cohen) 16, 52 Nguyen, Viet Thanh 100 Nixon, Rob 55 “No Bias, No Merit: The Case Against Blind Submission” (Fish) 18 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch) 6–​7, 54, 63 Oates, Joyce Carol 71, 72 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 53 Ohmann, Richard 53 Omeros (Walcott) 100 Orientalism (Said) 8, 53 orthogonal 233–​34 Outlaw Culture (hooks) 54

Outline for a Philosophy of Technology (Kopp) 187 oxymoron 150, 152 Paradise Lost (Fish) 16 paranomasia 27 Parasite, The (Serres) 7, 187, 190–​91 Parker, Hershel 135, 149–​50 Passing (Larsen) 7 Patai, Daphne 54 Peirce, Charles Sanders 29–​30, 81 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 210 ‘Pictorial Turn, The’ (Mitchell) 117 Pinter, Harold 9 Piper, Andrew 166 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes) 90 Poirier, Richard 150 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson) 43, 53 Politics of Interpretation, The (Gates) 8 “Post-​colonial Literature, Post-​Imperial Theory” (Mitchell) 112–​13 Postcolonial Love Poems (Diaz) 96 postcolonial migrant 96–​97 postcolonial mimicry 43–​45 posthumanism 188–​89 postmodernism 23, 112 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 54 Postmodernism—​Local Effects, Global Flows (Leitch) 61 post-​structuralism 44, 47, 80, 87, 90–​91 pragmaticism 30 “Profession, Despise Thyself ” (Fish) 19 professionalism 161, 167–​68 Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, The (Horowitz) 54, 62 prose, theory impact on 20–​22 Puchner, Martin 195–​206 on American vs. French theory 204 big moments/​turning points 196–​97 birth 195 breakthroughs 197, 199 career 195 de Man and Jauss, debate between 199–​200 Derrida’s impact on 198 drama and manifestoes works 199 Drama of Ideas, The 199, 201

247

INDEX 247 education 195 interventions 201–​2 interview 196–​206 Language of Thieves, The 197 on paradigm in literary theory 198 on plagiarizing 203 publications 195–​96 views on theory 196–​206 Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization, The 202 queer theory 7, 60–​61, 63, 113, 123, 127–​ 28, 143, 163, 208, 210, 218–​19, 237 “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Gates) 8, 112 racism 7–​8, 22, 67–​68, 73–​74, 95, 112, 120, 172, 176–​77 Rankine, Claudia 96 Rappaport, Herman 229 Reading Lacan (Gallop) 91 realism 177, 225 Reassembling the Social 162 Refugees (Nguyen) 100 Residues of Justice (Dimock) 151 revisionary ratios 43 Rhetorical Power (Mailloux) 140–​41 Rorty, Richard 117 Sacks, Sheldon 114 Said, Edward 8, 17, 53 Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 100 Scholes, Robert 45, 56 School of Criticism and Theory 13–​14 Secret Life of Stories, The (Bérubé) 210 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 8, 126 Seeing through Madness 119 Seeing through Race (Mitchell) 112, 120 self-​consuming artifacts  16 Self-​Consuming Artifacts (Fish) 16 Selzer, Jack 141 Serpell, James 185 Serres, Michel 7, 187 sexuality 7 Shell, Marc 54, 185 Signs Taken for Wonders (Moretti) 184 Silence of the Lambs, The 186

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon) 55 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 185 Snedicker, Michael 214 Sollors, Werner 54 Sopranos, The (Hall) 9 Sorel, Julien 74 Spectres of Marx (Derrida) 113 speech-​act theory  16–​17 Spivak, Gayatri 1, 5, 59, 79–​83 birth 79 career 79 education 79 interview 80–​83 publications 79–​80 views on theory 80–​83 Stade, George 29 Stella, Frank 4–​5, 151 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 184 Sterne, Laurence 32 Stevens, Wallace 190 Structuralist Controversy, The (Macksey) 30–​31, 35, 68–​69, 71, 172, 237 Structuralist Poetics (Culler) 53 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences” (Derrida) 45 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) 210 Sub-​cultures (Hebdige) 228–​29 “Surface Reading” (Best and Marcus) 55 Surprised by Sin (Fish) 16 S/​Z (Barthes) 14, 179 Tain of the Mirror, The (Gasche) 227 Talking Like Whales 200 Taussig, Michael 119 Tenured Radicals 8 Theory 1–​3 for adjunctification 23 American 80–​83 as barometer 5 book series 63 crossovers 63 exports 63–​64 in feminism 5 gender politics 5 goals 7 impact on prose 20–​22

248

248 THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM Theory (cont.) job market 62–​63 on language 8 language/​perception, reformation of  7 liberatory 8–​9 map 6 in ordinary people’s lives 80 overview 3–​10 pedagogy 62 programs 63 to psychotherapy 6 recycling 4, 7–​8 reparations 7–​8 sexuality 7 transformations 3–​5 unseen truths and 7 weak 5, 9–​10 writing, teaching of  7 Theory and History of Literature (THL) 186 Theory Matters (Leitch) 60 Theory’s Empire (Corral and Patai) 54 They Say/​I Say (Graff) 39–​43, 47 Thoreau project 136 Through Other Continents (Dimock) 155 Tompkins, Jane 45, 181, 185 Toolbox of Theory (Nealon) 227 Toomer, Jean 176 To Reclaim a Legacy (Bennett) 53 Transformation of American Law, The (Horwitz) 155 Trouble with Diversity, The (Michaels) 74 Turner, Graeme 213 Turner, Tommy 32 Tyrannical Machine (Cheney) 53 Ulmer, Gregory 56 Ulysses 31 Underwood, Ted 166 universalism 69 Validity in Interpretation (Hirsch) 17 von Hallberg, Robert 113 von Uexküll, Jakob 187 “Walden’s False Bottoms” (Michaels) 72 Warren, Ken 238

Warren, Kenneth W. 6, 171–​81 on African American studies 173–​74, 178 birth 171 Black and White Strangers 176–​77 career 171 conferences and journals, function of  172 education 171 on erotics of teaching 180–​81 history and literature, relationship between 175–​76 interventions 176–​77 interview 172–​81 literary theory era, experience of  172 on literature 174–​76 publications 171–​72 views on theory 172–​81 What Was African American Literature? 120, 177 writing/​thinking, rhetoric and tropologies in 179–​80 Waste Land, The 7 Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (Dimock) 150–​51, 154 weak theory 5, 9–​10 Wegner, Phil 225 Weiss, Peter 74 What Is Philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari) 188 What Is Posthumanism (Wolfe) 189 What Was African American Literature? (Warren) 6, 120, 177 Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser 200 Williams, Jeffrey 4, 44–​45 Winterowd, W. Ross 135 Winters, Ivor 17 Wolfe, Cary 7, 183–​93 Animal Rights 192 on animal studies 185–​86 big events in history of theory 184 birth 183 Bloom, Harold and 190 career 183 Critical Environments 188

249

INDEX on critic as parasite 187 Ecological Poetics or Wallace Stevens’s Birds 189 education 183 on HAP’s project 192–​93 interview 184–​93 Manifestly Haraway Project 190 Mountain Pine Beetle project 190 on posthumanism 188–​89

249

publications 183–​84 views on theory 184–​93 What Is Posthumanism 189 Writing and Sexual Difference (Abel) 8, 112 Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization, The (Puchner) 202 Zizek, Slavoj 59