Star struck and broken down: How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell]

Over the weekend the humanities Twitterverse, at least the part of it that I frequent, broke out in a flurry of discussion concerning the Avital Ronell case.

Briefly, Ronell is a very distinguished literary scholar at NYU. In 2017 Nimrod Reitman, a former graduate student, filed a Title IX complaint against her. The university dismissed the sexual assault, stalking, and retaliation charges, but found her responsible for sexual harassment and suspended her for the 2018-2019 academic year. At about that time a group of very senior humanists issued a letter of support, arguing, more or less, that a scholar of such distinction couldn’t possibly be guilty of such behavior.

It was that support letter, its claim of privilege for one of its own, as much as the case itself, that prompted the weekend’s Twitterverse chatter. Ronell was a “star” in the humanities firmament. What is it about the star system that permits and sustains such behavior? Power, yes. Still, where’d we go wrong? Was there something about humanities practice that contributed to this state of affairs?

I think there is, and that’s what this post is about. But first I want to present a tweet by Cory Robin about the Ronell case, one in a string of ten tweets. Robin read the 56-page lawsuit (PDF) that Reitman had filed against both Ronell and NYU and asks us to set the sexual matters aside. There’s something more fundamental at stake:

On the Avital Ronell/Nimrod Reitman case. Part 3 (of 10). pic.twitter.com/fboANfj2jF

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) August 19, 2018

It’s as though Ronell recognized no boundary between herself and Reitman. That’s what this post is about, boundaries, how the collapse of boundaries in academic literary criticism created an milieu that favored personal excess and indulgence.

The stars are born

During the weekend’s Twitter activity Ted Underwood pointed to a 1997 article that David Shumway published in PMLA, The Star System in Literary Studies (Vol. 112, No. 1, 1997, 85-100). Shumway argued (p. 95):

Theory not only gave its most influential practitioners a broad professional audience but also cast them as a new sort of author. Theorists asserted an authority more personal than that of literary historians or even critics. As we have seen, the rhetoric of literary history denied personal authority; in principle, even Kittredge was just another contributor to the edifice of knowledge. Criticism was able to enter the academy only by claiming objectivity for itself, so academic critics could not revel in personal idiosyncrasy. They developed their own critical perspectives, to be sure, but all the while they continued to appeal to the text as the highest authority. In the past twenty years theory has undermined the authority of the text and of the author and replaced it with the authority of systems, as in the structuralist and poststructuralist privileging of langue over parole or in the mystifying readings of Marxism or psychoanalysis. Sometimes the theory seems to be to eschew all authority, as in some renderings of deconstruction. And yet these claims are belied by the actual functioning of the name of the theorist. It is that name, rather than anonymous systems or the anarchic play of signifiers, to which most theoretical practice appeals.

That’s an interesting set of claims. Let’s start with objectivity and use Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism as a touchstone text. In his “Polemical Introduction” Frye observes:

If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word "inductive" suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a “pure” or “exact” science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safeguarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions. However, if there are any readers for whom the word “scientific” conveys emotional overtones of unimaginative barbarism, they may substitute “systematic” or “progressive” instead.

It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology.

There you have it, literary study is a kind of science, not “pure” or “exact” but science nonetheless,. The repetition of morphological variants of science in this passage is quite stunning, as though Frye wanted to club subjectivity to death with word magic. With all that science going on literary criticism had little choice but to yield to objectivity.

But a decade later things weren’t so clear. All these objective critics kept disagreeing about their interpretations. Is there a standard against which interpretations can be measured so as to determine their validity? Strenuous efforts were made to make authorial intention such a standard, but those efforts failed to win the day. Instead the author was bracketed out in favor of systems, the unconscious, signs, social structure, power, whatever. And objectivity was gone, dismissed as a mirage of scientistic desire.

Boundaries fall

At the same time it became common to elide the distinction between merely reading a text, in the ordinary sense of “read”, and interpreting a text by providing an explicit written account of what the text means. At times this account was written in a more or less common language of humanistic discourse, but increasingly it was formulated in some discourse of capital “T” Theory – deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth. Literary theory had ceased functioning as a theory about literature, as it had been in Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature (1949), and became a set of devices to interpret texts. At this point the boundaries between interpretation and text, critic and author have become very tenuous.

Yes, any numbskull can see that Stanley Fish is not John Milton and Surprised by Sin is not Paradise Lost. There’s nothing profound in that mundane observation. But on a deeper, more profound level – and that’s what literary criticism is about, right? depth and profundity – those things don’t matter. When you think about it, really think about it, those distinctions disappear, no? Literature is in the reader and the critic becomes the author.

And so we have a passages like this one by Geoffrey Hartman:

A great interpreter like Erich Auerbach, a great critic-scholar like E. R. Curtius, a prodigal son like Kenneth Burke, or men of letters like Paul Valéry and Edmund Wilson, who practiced the minor mode of prophecy we call criticism, are not annulled by the fact that they may be explicitly writing about the writing of others. It may be a weakness in them to prefer, at times, the indirectness of commentary to the creation of their own news, but it may also be a conviction that their identity is bound up with the writings of others—that the mind is laid waste by the false Unas of literature even as it is renewed by faith in the classic or neglected text. (p. 267)

Reading, then, includes reading criticism. (p. 268)

The question persists, however, whether there is a specific function that differentiates literary criticism from literature .... Literary understanding, then, has two components: literary tradition proper, or an expansible canon of texts; and criticism, which helps to form this canon and guide its interpretation—which prepares us, at least, for the complexities of literary expression. (p. 270)

Those are from the title essay in his 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading. Shumway wasn’t kidding when he asserted that these theorists “cast them as a new sort of author”. Hartman all but says as much.

Theorist, person and persona

Hartman also tells us, in “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” (p. 3):

Confession. I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art. The interpreter, molded on me, is an overgoer with pen-envy strong enough to compel him into the foolishness of print. His self-disgust is merely that of the artist, intensified. “Joe, throw my book away.” Sometimes his discontent with the “secondary” act of writing—with living in the reflective or imitative sphere—makes him privilege some primary act at the expense of art or commentary on art. He turns into Mystic or Vitalist. But, more often, he compromises by establishing a special relationship to what transcends him. Having discounted other critics, and reduced art to its greatest exemplars, he feels naked enough to say: “Myself and Art.” Like Emerson, who said that ultimately there was “I and the Abyss.”

Um, err, Joe, if that’s how you want it – because I don’t – Prof. Harman, I’m not interested. TMI – Too Much (freakin’) Information!

For all I know many literary critics harbor such feelings, but we, readers of books, lovers of literature, scholars and investigators, we don’t need to know that. Why did Hartman inscribe those personal feelings in his professional role as literary critic? What is it about that professional role that seemed to all but demand such confession and to authorize the conversion of (aspects) one's private person into a professional persona? 

Note: I have no particular animus against Hartman. I never worked with him, didn’t know him, nor have I called on his work in my own examination of specific works. I present his words here as exemplifying the attitudes of an influential group of critics. I note further that Hartman wasn’t trained in these ideas and attitudes. His training was Old School. But what happens when one assimilates these attitudes as a graduate student? What happens when these aren’t the ideas you arrive at in an act of intellectual rebellion but are instead the foundation of your mature intellectual life?

Back to Shumway (p. 96):

Because of the widely held notion that one can speak only from one’s own gendered, racial, class, sexual, or professional position, increasing numbers of literary scholars are engaged in describing their positions. Personal matters, once regarded as extraneous to disciplinary discourse, have become central to it.

Is that it? Had personal confession become the mark of authenticity that guaranteed the value of a theorist’s work?

I note that it was about that time that anxious confessions of “mea culpa” began attaching themselves to critical work, sometimes in a footnote, sometimes in the text itself: I realize that as a white male working in a university funded by robber barons that I have no business commenting on the writing of a disabled African-American woman, but, hey, baby needs a new pair of shoes. The confessions weren’t that obviously silly, but their underlying epistemic substance was the same: zero.

What next?

If that’s what brought literary criticism to this pass, how does the discipline recover? How do critics restore the boundaries (between reading and analytic investigation, between author and critic) that had been dissolved in the names of progress and authenticity? Can they be restored at all?

It’s not a matter of good will, hard work, and pure intentions. Those are personal qualities, valuable, but personal. What’s required is in the realm of professional craft and conceptualization.

We can’t go back to Northrop Frye’s world. That’s gone, forever. We must create a new intellectual world.

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I've now published a follow-up piece:  Star struck and broken down 2: Lit crit stars, real or an illusion?