Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
In his book Beyond the Culture Wars, Gerald Graff proposes as a solution to the present battles raging in literary studies that professors "teach the conflict"--that is, incorporate debates over the canon, critical theory, and multiculturalism into the English curriculum itself. Many reviewers, myself included (see my review in MP, Fall 1993) have been intrigued by Graff's proposal, but have wondered how his idea could be practically implemented. Now an answer has been provided by Falling into Theory, a collection of essays edited by David Richter (including a foreword by Graff himself). Intended specifically to serve as a classroom text, this book explores aspects of the debate from varying viewpoints.
A critique of a book of this sort must consider two main questions. First, does Falling into Theory offer a comprehensive introduction to current conflicts in English studies? Second, would an instructor be well advised to adopt the text for use in an undergraduate literature course?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. As an overview of the literary culture wars, Falling into Theory, though not flawless, is quite good. The book's title, which Richter explains in his introduction, encapsulates nicely the topsy-turvy condition of literary studies today. At present, for a variety of reasons, all the basic premises previously guiding literary study--premises whose validity professors used to simply take for granted--have been called into question. As a result, the profession has "fallen into theory"--that is, while in the past theoretical discussions were largely unnecessary, professors today must once again debate these basic issues, in the hope of someday fashioning a new consensus.
The book's three main sections sum up well the nature of these issues. Part One, "Why We Read: The University, the Humanities, and the Province of Literature," includes essays that consider why literature is worth studying in the first place. The readings in Part Two, "What We Read: Aesthetic and Political Issues in the Canon Wars," debate whether or not literary curricula should be based on the traditional canon of Western literature. Finally, Part Three, "How We Read: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning," groups articles analyzing the nature of the process of interpreting literature.
In organizing his material, Richter has wisely paired essays which present opposite points of view on the same topic. So, for example, in the book's two concluding selections, first conservative columnist George Will decries what he sees as the left-wing politicization of literary studies, which Will maintains aims at nothing less than "delegitimizing Western civilization by discrediting the books and ideas that gave birth to it" (287). In response, New Historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt argues that current political readings of canonical works are often based in sound historical understanding, and that Will's demand that professors merely ballyhoo the Western literary tradition turns literary education into "a decorous liturgical celebration of the new world order" (290).
Another strength of Falling into Theory is Richter's own series of introductory essays, which are consistently lucid, balanced, and thorough (though at times too thorough--at the book's start, for example, the reader must wade through a foreword, a preface, and two introductions before finally reaching the first selection).
However, despite Richter's own objectivity, and despite his inclusion of essays offering contrasting viewpoints, the book still exhibits a certain left-wing bias. By my account, of the twenty-nine essays included, only nine uphold an "anti-P.C." stance, while the rest advocate some variant of either a feminist, Marxist, Afrocentric, deconstructive, or New Historicist position. Admittedly, not every contributor can be neatly ideologically pigeonholed. Moreover, several challengers of "P.C." orthodoxy--Helen Vendler, Louis Menand, John Searle--do so brilliantly. Still, I wish Richter had replaced some of his weaker "P.C." selections with a few of the plethora of fine essays challenging current trends by such distinguished traditionalist critics as M.H. Abrams, Frederick Crews, Robert Alter, Harold Fromm, Irving Howe, Frank Kermode, and John Ellis.
A second problem with Falling into Theory is its unevenness. Take the many selections of feminist criticism. Several are indisputably worthwhile, such as Jane Tompkins' "Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation," which contrasts Hawthorne's present literary stature with those of nineteenth-century female authors who were more popular at the time, in order to support Tompkins' thesis, derived from reader-response theory, that "a literary classic is a product of all those circumstances of which it has been traditionally supposed to be independent" (119). In contrast to Tompkins' excellent essay, however, stands Bell Hooks' screed, "Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy," which eschews intellectual argument in favor of such extremist jargon-mongering as this: "Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive" (76).
As for the question of whether Falling into Theory is worth adopting as a classroom text, I think, first, that the book would have been better suited for the average college student had Richter abided faithfully by a simple but key editorial principle: pick only essays written in comprehensible English. Although, in his preface, the editor claims to have "indulged my prejudice in favor of critics who write jargon-free prose that can be relished by novices as well as experts," he has, in fact, selected essays that inflict sentences such as the following on innocent undergrads:
"Interrogating the connection between language and power is crucial for understanding how teachers of English might view literacy as a form of textual authority that legitimates a particular form of discursive practice";
"One way we can best satisfy our personal stakes in reading is by elaborating transpersonal principles of value that link desires in the present to forms of imaginative discourse preserved from the past";
"To be sexed or gendered in this system is to come under the radically overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse of acts or bonds and at the same time of a minoritizing discourse of kinds of persons" (viii-ix, 65, 131 & 186).
However, the larger issue concerning the book's pedagogical applicability is whether it's a good idea for a literature professor to assign any text focused entirely on critical theory. Setting aside the question of accessibility to students, should an instructor devote a large portion of the semester to a study of theoretical essays--which means, of necessity, discarding a number of primary texts? For the grim reality of the contemporary American university is that, since our nation's intensely career-oriented students are generally looking to take the bare minimum of liberal arts courses, most of them rarely enroll for more than a handful of literature classes. Given these woeful circumstances, a student assigned Falling into Theory might lose his only chance to study, say, The Iliad or The Canterbury Tales or To The Lighthouse.
My point isn't to second George Will's notion that the theoretical debates currently raging in English departments across America are irrelevant to true literary studies--a position which, like Stephen Greenblatt, I emphatically reject. Rather, the issue, as I see it, is whether a literature professor should devote precious class time to the study of theoretical works, or whether it's better to assign only primary texts, and then to interject into classroom lectures or discussions relevant allusions to feminist or Marxist or deconstructive ideas.
There's another possibility, which academic publishers might wish to consider. In place of such texts as Falling into Theory, why not publish a literature anthology which, in its literary selections and editorial content, was specifically designed to enable instructors to "teach the conflicts?" For example, Jane Tompkins' view that female authors are underrepresented in the canon might inspire an American literature anthology to place works by Hawthorne and Melville alongside such writers as Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe, with an introduction that undogmatically voices these feminist concerns. While standard anthologies like those issued by Norton or MacMillan have responded to current academic trends by including, for example, more minority writers, no text, to my knowledge, has yet been organized entirely around Graff's proposal. Such an anthology would allow professors to plunge students into current literary conflicts, without forcing them to spend fleeting class time on purely theoretical works.