Among the Intellectualoids / MLA Malaise
Myers, D. G.
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS MLA MALAISE by D. G. Myers Toward the end of a particularly grueling session of papers at the recent convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco,...
...But the highpoint of the conventionoccurred when Jane Tompkins of Duke, scheduled to participate in a panel discussion on the revival of mass-culture criticism along with Todd Gitlin and Richard Ohmann, rose instead to deliver a stinging rebuke to such well-known Marxist critics...
...There were as many sessions on "Chicana" writers as on Shakespeare...
...The titles of MLA sessions are an easy mark for ridicule, but one will give a whiff of the present intellectual milieu of the MLA: "What Is a (Wo)Man Critic and What Does (S)He Want...
...Martha Evans of Mary Baldwin College said that, as women's numbers rise in the university, men are beginning to call for "balance" in the name of the same principle asserted to fuel the rise of women—Affirmative Action...
...Afterwards the convention was a-buzz...
...They "condescend to the masses they would disabuse," and bear themselves with an insufferable "air of moral superiority...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS MLA MALAISE by D. G. Myers Toward the end of a particularly grueling session of papers at the recent convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, Stephen Greenblatt spoke yearningly of what every English professor wishes for--1`the moral authority of homelessness...
...Gilbert and Gubar named these critics, respectively, the "mirror" and the "vamp" (their caricature of the title of M. H. Abrams's great study of critical theory in the Romantic age was meant as homage, but its effect was to suggest the literary bounding, the straining after unearned distinction, characteristic of much feminist criticism...
...Deconstructionists moaned that students continue to enroll in graduate school believing superstitiously that "texts" are actually "writings...
...There have always been, they said, two types of feminist critic...
...My problem with Marxism has as much to do with being made to feel socially outof-it as anything else," Tompkins said...
...Feminism has gone from being a special and rather narrow interest to having become one of the large clumsy categories by which literary study is organized in the university...
...What's more, men who express sympathy for feminism turn out to be just as dangerous as men who fiercely oppose it...
...The less intelligent complained that, despite the best efforts of the academic left to re-educate them, common readers still display a retrograde interest in narrative and the lives of individual men and women—witness the current vogue of that form of criticism which has resisted the advances of nouvelle theorie, the literary biography...
...These two types of critic have remained at odds too long...
...On one hand there is the critic who insists on her "expressive autonomy," her freedom from fidelity to the historically determined text, and who despises "the phallo-logocentrism of the very idea of history...
...But if the new two-in-one feminist approach proposed by Gilbert and Gubar only demonstrated the hollowness of the previous feminist approaches, if feminist criticism was demonstrated to be in deep trouble as an intellectual method, feminists themselves at MLA appeared to be internally divided, rancorous, and fretful...
...The more intelligent among the Marxists admitted that, after years of trying to dodge the issue, distinctions of value in criticism must at last be faced (though how this is to be done, if discrimination and judgment are to be denounced as instruments of repression, went unsaid...
...Just as it should be entering a period of concentration, of drawing back and consolidating its gains, the professoriat seems instead to be entering a period of fatigue, D. G. Myers is a graduate student in criticism and modern literature at Northwestern University...
...Greenblatt is a star of the profession, head monkey of the latest fashion in literary studies (the New Historicism), full professor at Berkeley in his forties...
...But they do have the one thing Stephen Greenblatt does not: the moral authority ceded to the weak in a social-welfare state...
...But this little episode may also revealthe extent of the demoralization on the academic left...
...Feminists in the academy fear they are reaching not so much a critical mass as a saturation point...
...But don't expect a large turnout...
...Gitlin and Ohmann didn't know what to say in response...
...Annette Kolodny of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute warned that male professors who seek to synthesize feminism with other methods or subjects are covertly seeking the "containment" of feminism...
...Marxists, who once confidently expected Departments of English to wither away and be replaced by "cultural studies," are depressed to see how few courses in film and TV criticism are being offered in American graduate schools and how few articles on mass culture are being published in the scholarly journals...
...Aimee Myers assisted in reporting for this article...
...We need to rethink our rhetoric .. . to defend and protect our position...
...By all rights they should be celebrating...
...they have very nearly succeeded in transforming the MLA from a scholarly to a political organization...
...They don't have a lifetime job or a home in the Berkeley Hills...
...Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated how this might be done in an incoherent reading of Coleridge's Kubla Khan...
...Much as this might be welcome to feminism's opponents, there is better news still...
...At a cocktail party, Marxists prefer to slouch around in their work shirts and Levis and talk darkly of hegemony and contradictions rather than to introduce themselves to Tompkins or offer to get her a drink...
...By our very success are we undoing ourselves...
...Radicals warned that cultural criticism, meant to be "liberatory, feminist, egaliTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 33 tarian, socialist, and anti-racist," was being co-opted by the right...
...I'm bored with trying to be politically correct," an attendee at this year's convention blurted at the end of a session—and if the sullen murmur of approval in the room was any indication, she may have spoken for a growing number of literary scholars who are bored with the politicization of their discipline...
...self-doubt, and nagging discontent...
...Catherine R. Stimpson of Rutgers complained that too many grants were going to women "in the middle," and Ruth Salvaggio of Virginia Tech declared bitterly that itis unethical to permit "conservative women" to review the work of feminists...
...It says much about the condition of literary scholarship in America today that a public attack on Marxism at a national convention of literary scholars should take the form of a complaint about bad manners, and that such an attack should be deemed unanswerable...
...In their version of the poem, Coleridge announces that "the utopian City of Ladies" has arrived, and the next task is to bring the repressed to the surface of consciousness and set it free...
...on the other there is the critic who "believes that literature inscribes social conditions" (usually evil ones) and who "imagines utopian futures...
...Jane Tompkins is throwing bombs," a friend said...
...The result, she said ominously, would be the depoliticization of feminism...
...EI or all that, however, there are rumblings of discontent...
...The very words we had used to attack white male hegemony are now being used to defend those interests," Evans said...
...More than one objected to the fact that not all women in the profession are radical feminists...
...Titles like "Let Us Speak" or "Speaking for Us" were characteristic, testifying to feminism's conception of literature as a branch of political oratory...
...As the MLA convention illustrated, these days a good many left-leaning professors of literature are demoralized...
...Their breath was fairly taken away...
...For the professors continue to lack moral authority, even though they're feeling weak...
...At the very moment of its triumph, the academic left—at least in literary studies —has run out of gas...
...They have captured the profession...
...MLA is sometimes called "Malaise," and the name never seemed more apt than in San Francisco this year...
...A renewed interest in the moral authority of great writers...
...More than one convention paper raised the subject of "(en)gendering...
...What does feminist criticism have left to do when the last poem has been unmasked to reveal a male poet's secret desire for "immersion in the feminine...
...What's next...
...Next year (or maybe the year after) in Nairobi...
...But there is no celebrating...
...Take the case of feminism (as if you had any say in the matter), the most prominent of the new theoretical movements in literary studies...
...You wouldn't think they would be...
...Though based on misreadings," Gilbert said, such an interpretation "might be more to the point...
...Or perhaps only the lack of imagination...
...they have radicalized literary studies...
...She described the Marxists as smug and knowing...
...Lehmann's figures were borne out by the program of the 1987 convention—fully 10 percent of the sessions were exclusively devoted to feminist topics (not counting the nineteen sessions on female writers or the endless number of papers given over to "feminist readings" of male writers...
...I am sympathetic to Marxist critics," Tompkins said, "but I'm also angry with them—I've carried resentment toward them around for a long time without knowing it...
...Worse yet, conservatives are beginning to develop cultural criticism of their own in journals like the American Scholar, the New Criterion, Commentary, and The American Spectator...
...What passes for radical reform of academe these days is exemplified by the call, made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...Esteeming writers solely on the basis of their "gender" or "ethnicity" is known in literary studies as "opening up the canon...
...Yet still he envies the frayed, unshaven, coughing men who live upon the streets...
...In his envious recognition of what it is he lacks, Greenblatt could easily have been speaking for a large segment of the academic profession of literary studies...
...Foreseeing a depletion of the literary works and problems that will yield to the feminist approach—what might be called feminism's impending energy crisis—Sandra M. Gilbert of Princeton and Susan Gubar of Indiana proposed a solution...
...they and their separate functions must be merged into one...
...Indeed, so prominent a part of the academic literary scene has feminism become that during one afternoon time slot at the convention no fewer than nine sessions on feminist topics from lesbian writing to "feminist dialogics" were droning on concurrently...
...F eminists were not the only ones at MLA who felt their gains of the past two decades slipping away...
...of Cornell, for MLA to be held in Africa...
...Outgoing MLA President Winfred Lehmann reported that the women's studies section of the Association has increased in membership to rank second in size only to the section on literary criticism...
...After all, they are fortunate enough, as Cecelia Tichi of Vanderbilt said at one point, to live in "the post-Vietnam era of a declining imperial power...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
