[From the Archives]: An Interview with M.H. Abrams

Today’s post is an excerpt of an interview with M.H. Abrams, from Issue 69 (Fall 2007).  The interview took place on 26 August 2007 at M. H. Abrams’ home in Ithaca, NY. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, then editor of the minnesota review, and transcribed by David Cerniglia, then assistant to the review while a PhD student in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. M. H. Abrams is an iconic name in literary studies, appearing on the spines of over eight million copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and as the first entry in the references of two generations of critical books. His career has spanned, as he remarks in an essay on “The Transformation of English Studies: 1935-1995” (in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske [Princeton UP, 1997]), over half the life of the discipline of English, and he has been a major participant in its development.

Williams You’ve seen a lot of change in literary studies. You’ve seen it go from literary history, when you were at Harvard in 1930 or thereabouts, to New Criticism, and then to Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, to deconstruction, and finally to New Historicism. Maybe you could talk about the course of criticism that you’ve seen.

Abrams I was brought up in the days when to get a PhD you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hardcore scientific basis for literary study. But the fact is that good teachers taught literature too. Very clearly the bias of the teaching, even by the most lively teachers, was historical. They dealt with the changes in literary forms, with the history of the novel, and there was very little attention to the analysis of the literary text itself. We owe to the New Critics the ability to do what they called close reading—a close, extensive analysis of the construction of a poem and its metaphoric structure. That was new when I was an undergraduate, and it was distrusted, as new things always are, by the traditionalists.

I remember that I was one of the young bucks at Harvard who, as a graduate student, tried to get a New Critical kind of question into the general examination in English studies for English majors. At the end of your senior year you took a written exam, if you were aiming for honors at any rate, and the questions in those exams had a historical bias for the most part. Even when you were asked to discuss a particular poem they didn’t expect you to open it out in the way the New Critics opened it out by close reading. So two of us graduate students got together and we proposed that one of the questions confront a student with a poem, unidentified either in time or place or authorship, to see what he would manage to say about it.

Williams Like I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism?

Abrams I spent a year at Cambridge on a fellowship studying with Richards—and yes, our proposed question was modeled on Practical Criticism or on the sort of thing that Cleanth Brooks and Warren in Understanding Poetry were doing. The whole notion was pooh- poohed by the older people who were writing the exams, who said students wouldn’t be able to cope with the question. So we organized an experiment, I. A. Richards-style: we got together a dozen English majors, seniors, we dug out a poem, they were confronted with it and were asked to say what they could about it, and the results were very good. And we showed it to Douglas Bush and others who were the old timers in the department. Bush was one of the best of the old line teachers. He wrote a wonderful book about the use of mythology by the English poets. He was persuaded that maybe we ought to try it and, as I recall, the examiners did put in such questions.

You can read the rest of the interview, available through Duke University Press, here.

[From the Archives]: Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics

Robin J. Sowards‘ “Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics” first appeared in issue 68 (Spring 2007) of the minnesota review. Sowards teaches English at Duquesne University. His research interests include British poetry of the Long 19th century, literary theory, German Idealism, linguistics, and Noam Chomsky.

All literary critics already do some kind of linguistics. When we make even the most off-hand assertions about the meaning of a literary text, we commit ourselves de facto to assumptions about the nature of language and about specific aspects of linguistic structure. It’s no surprise that intricate observations about the linguistic nuances of literary works depend on a theory of language. If we start talking about count nouns, subordinate clauses, or the indicative mood, we are drawing on a technical terminology that only has content by virtue of a specific theory of language (a theory, for example, in which some groups of words count as “clauses” and other groups of words don’t). But one need not be a formalist for one’s claims to depend on linguistics. Even a mere paraphrase would be unintelligible without unstated linguistic premises, and if its claims were to be justified explicitly these premises would necessarily step into the light. For example, say we are considering the first line of Shakespeare’s first sonnet, “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” We might plausibly gloss this line as saying “We want the most beautiful things to reproduce.” But in asserting this as a paraphrase, we must assume that there is some systematic relationship between the sentence we started with and the sentence we offered as a gloss on it. We would want to say, for example, that “we” remains essentially unchanged between the original and the paraphrase, but to do so we must assume some notion of grammatical subject that explains in what sense “we” remains the same when it is obviously in a different spot. Even the most innocently general summary of what a text says—even the publisher’s blurb on the back of a novel—would, if it had to get down to brass tacks and really make all of its claims and assumptions explicit, turn out to depend on premises of this kind. Linguistics is our inevitable hidden premise, just like one cannot infer “I am” from “I think” without assuming that “Everything that thinks, exists” (which is why Descartes goes to such trouble to deny that the cogito is an inference [68]). The only way one could avoid any implicit dependence on claims about language would be not to talk about the text at all, and a work of literary criticism that did not talk about the text at all could hardly meet even the most minimal standards for evidence.

You can read the rest of “Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics” through Duke University Press, available here. You do not need a subscription in order to access this article.

[From the Archives]: “Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity”

Roberto Esposito‘s “Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity” first appeared in issue 75 (2010) of the minnesota review, in a special section on Franco-Italian Political Theory. Esposito teaches Theoretic Philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples and Florence. His recent works, translated into various foreign languages, include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (U of Minnesota P, 2008), Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford UP, 2009), Comunità, Immunità, Biopolitica (Mimesis Edizioni, 2008), Terza Persona: Politica Della Vita E Filosofia Dell’ impersonale (Einaudi, 2007), and Termini della Politica.

Condensing into a single formula a more complex argument already presented elsewhere, in The Sense of the World Jean-Luc Nancy clearly distances himself from all philosophy of the flesh by opposing to it the urgency of a new thought of the body. “In this sense, the ‘passion’ of the ‘flesh,’ is finished—and this is why the word body ought to succeed on the word flesh, which was always overabundant, nourished by sense, and egological” (149). This is not to say that this “anti-carnist” stance has isolated him in today’s philosophical landscape. In France alone, for example, Nancy’s position is not far from that articulated by Lyotard, Deleuze, and Derrida, albeit in different registers. I would say that, despite the obvious heterogeneity of their philosophical presuppositions and intentions, these authors share a certain mistrust of the modality in which phenomenology— from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and up to Didier Franck on the one hand and Michel Henry on the other—has dealt with the question of flesh. While for Lyotard the phenomenological perspective, despite or even because of the declared reversibility between sensing and sensed, comes down to a “philosophy of intelligent flesh” closed to the eruption of the event (22), Deleuze perceives phenomenological carnism not only as a deviant path in relation to that which he defines as “logic of sensation,” but also as “both a pious and a sensual notion, a mixture of sensuality and religion” (178).

But in the very book he dedicated to Nancy, Derrida gives the anti-carnist position its most solid philosophical support. This support strikes neither at phenomenology as such (which on the contrary Derrida recognizes as playing a decisive role in the genealogy of touch) nor at the Christian religion, but rather at the point or line of their tangency. In its most intimate essence, the notion of flesh is the directional vector through which Christianity penetrates modern philosophy and is contemporaneously the linguistic symptom through which phenomenology reveals an unavowed Christian ascendance.

You can read the full version of “Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity” here.

[From the Archives]: “Thinking Outside the Quad”

Paul Youngquist‘s Provocation piece first appeared in the minnesota review in 2008 (Issue 70).Youngquist teaches English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he writes on science fiction, British Romanticism, and other illusions. He is the author of Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (U of Minnesota P, 2003) and Madness and Blake’s Myth (Penn State UP, 1989). In “Thinking Outside the Quad,” Youngquist muses on global education.

The notion came to me while I was on the phone with customer service for Citibank. I was walking across the empty quad trying to keep my cell squinched between jowl and shoulder, fiddling with the lock on my old leather valise—my father’s, really, but he’s long gone. “Andy” was having trouble locating a recent payment (“Amitava” more likely).

It was one of those piquant days at the beginning of the semester, the afternoon air tinged with coming cold. The quad felt bright and still. I had finished a summer of intense work on my manuscript, Neoliberalism and the Global Lyric, and I was feeling good about my prospects for promotion. It’s not easy being a tenured radical. I have deans to appease and undergraduates to offend. Most of all, however, I have books to write, and that’s not so simple as senior colleagues make it sound. I am close to finishing my second, making me ripe for promotion to Full Professor—in spite of Horowitz and his humorless ilk. I deserve it, having slaved away my virile years as an Associate. But I’m not quite there yet. I have to complete that sticky chapter on Poetic License and Creative Commons. Then the index.

“Sir! You there, sir? Very good, sir. No. I can find no record of a payment to Amazon of two hundred five dollars and ninety-five cents. You say it was for the collected works of Carl Max?”

“That’s Karl Marx, Andy, volumes one through six, and I distinctly remember making that payment. The old-fashioned way. By check.”

“Very good, sir. Please await the outcome of my patient inquiry while I put you on hold…”

I dropped my father’s valise and looked up, pasting the phone against my face. The quad was suddenly swarming with undergraduates. They surged out of classroom buildings, krill in colored T-shirts: muscles flexing, breasts bouncing, smiles flashing like newly-minted money.

They were back. 
I had to teach.
 When would I find time to write another word?
 “Sir, I am very sorry to report that despite my best efforts I cannot locate any record of a payment on the works of Carnal Mocks.”

“Andy, I will consult my records. Good day—if indeed it is day in Bangalore.”

I’d begun my day in gladness. Despondency and madness were right around the corner.

My book. My promotion. 
These damn students.
 Then it hit me.
 Why not ship these students overseas?
 Why not relocate higher education offshore?

You can read the full version of “Thinking Outside the Quad” here.

[From the Archives] No Mongrels Need Apply

Paula Harrington’s “No Mongrels Need Apply” first appeared in issue 74/75 of the minnesota review in 2010.

In the 1880s, two events occurred in New York that would prove pivotal in the social history and iconography not only of the city but of American culture as a whole. One was as public and deliberately emblematic a moment as the country has witnessed: the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty by President Grover Cleveland before a crowd of thousands in 1886. The other was a private gathering of wealthy sportsmen at Madison Square Garden two years earlier: the first meeting of the American Kennel Club (AKC History). While the former eclipses the latter in its iconic representation of immigration and changing class structures, the introduction of dog breeds—and more broadly the pursuit of canine breeding, showing, and sports known as “dog fancy”—also holds up a prescient and revealing mirror to class in America. We can learn much about American notions of class both from the history of our dogs and from the patterns of our immigration, and an especially revelatory picture emerges when we view the two in juxtaposition. For the embrace of purebred dogs coincided with the scorning of immigrants, and the desire for these dogs among upper and middle classes grew as anxiety increased over a loss of power and status in an altered society symbolized by Lady Liberty.

The craze for purebred dogs and dog shows began in the British Empire. While dogs that look like greyhounds and mastiffs date back to ancient Egypt (Thurston 29-30), breeds as we now know them did not come into vogue until nineteenth-century England. Before that, dogs were known for the tasks they performed, not the bloodlines they represented: “beast dog,” “coach dog,” and “vermin dog,” for example (Thurston 100-101). Queen Victoria, who kept some eighty dogs, is often credited with turning breeding into a popular “sport.” In turn, it took hold with her subjects (Thurston 103-105). The first organized dog show occurred in Newcastle, England in 1859 (National Dog Show), and by the end of the century a purebred dog had become a status symbol among Britain’s growing leisure class.

What had begun in England took on a life of its own on our shores. If in England owning a purebred dog showed social standing in a rigidly classed culture, in America it signaled family origins in a supposedly classless one. At the height of nineteenth-century immigration, when Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and other so- called “races” kept arriving, a purebred dog was not a mongrel, much as someone born in the United States—read a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—was not an immigrant.

Paula Harrington teaches writing and literature at Colby College, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of the Farnham Writers’ Center. She is currently at work on a book about dogs in American culture, America: A Dogology.  To read the rest of the article, visit our online archives. You do not need a subscription to read the full article.

[From the Archives] What is an Intellectual Woman?: An Interview with Toril Moi

Today’s post is an excerpt of an interview with Toril Moi, from Issue 67 (Fall 2006).  The interview took place on 1 September 2006 in Toril Moi’s office at Duke University. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, then editor of the minnesota review, and transcribed by Heather Steffen, then the assistant to the journal while a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. In this excerpt, Moi discusses differences between American and French feminism.

Williams: Sexual/Textual Politics burst onto the scene in the mid-80s and changed the representation of feminism in the US. You became a kind of European informant of French feminism, and to some you were perceived as attacking Anglo-American feminism for its essentialism and waving a banner for French feminism. How do you see the reception of that book when you look back?

Moi: The argument in the book wasn’t actually “Anglo-American feminism is bad, French feminism is good”; the argument was that the great thing about the Americans was their strong and explicit political allegiances, and that the actual politics of the French were often incredibly vague. I also thought that the Anglo-American development, which had been exciting to me because it was thinking about women and writing in completely new ways, was almost theoretically unconscious in the late 1970s, just as the theory wave was happening. I thought the French feminists that I read had a much more solid theoretical formation, but that they were lacking in politics. I also found them on the whole ahistorical, and idealist. The idea that I was setting up a binary where one was positive and the other was negative was based on fairly superficial reading. I think that there are other problems with the book, but in each chapter I tried to give as fair an account of what the theorists in question were saying as I could, and then I tried to show where the problems were. I was also astounded when I heard that people thought I was a great fan of Irigaray and Cixous, which I have never been. […]

Williams: What would you change if you were to go back to it?

Moi: I think it’s a book that’s of its moment. It’s not possible to change it now. It came out in 1985, I wrote it from 1982 to 1984. I was active in various feminist discussion groups in Oxford, mostly with students and other unemployed intellectuals, and we had intense discussions. Some of my feminist friends in Oxford at that time were against theory because they thought that what we needed was a political practice based on respect for women’s experiences. The book was written, among other things, to say that you can’t just go from experiences to politics, because unless you have some kind of awareness of theory you’re not going to know what your politics are. That’s what I’m showing in the first half, particularly about the Americans, but also about the French, whom I call contradictory and ahistorical, and impervious to the particular case. When Irigaray says, for example, that women should mimic patriarchal discourse because patriarchal discourse covers everything, so all one can do is to mimic it ironically, I asked whether there aren’t places where mimicry, or irony, will go undiscovered, where everyone will take it for straight? And aren’t there cases where you get much further by straightforwardly opposing things?

One important point for me was that if you don’t know what your theory is, you won’t know what your political effects are either. That’s why I read Showalter’s account of Virginia Woolf, for example, to show that she was imposing a feminist version of Lukácsian theory onto Virginia Woolf, and that the effect is an authoritarian straitjacket for women writers, incompatible with what I thought feminist utopia should be about, namely freedom. The idea of laying down requirements for what women must do just because they are women has always been anathema to me.

For more of Jeffrey J. Williams’ interview with Toril Moi, visit our archive for Issue 67 here. You do not need a subscription to read this or any article from that issue.

[From the Archives] Class Matters: An Interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.

Today’s post is an excerpt of an interview with Adolph Reed, Jr., from Issue 65/66 (Spring 2006).  The interview took place on 26 August 2005 in Adolph Reed’s office at the University of Pennsylvania. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, the editor of the minnesota review at the time, and transcribed by Nilak Datta, then a doctoral student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. In this excerpt, Reed discusses the complicated intersections between race and class.

Williams: Your academic field is political science, although the people who read minnesota review are probably more familiar with your stuff in The Nation or The Progressive. They’re probably in literary and cultural studies, and people in literary and cultural studies are versed in a certain discourse of cultural politics, but they’re usually unfamiliar with political science. I think it’s a problem in cultural studies, that there’s a dearth of political theory.

Reed: Yeah, it almost seems like the more that people declaim piously and in favor of multidisciplinarity, the less inclined they are to read or engage outside their own narrow sub-specialty. There are not many disciplines, right? I’ve been struck at how infrequently the work ofhistorians or political scientists, or economists, or even sociologists, gets cited in the domain of cultural politics. I suppose you could say that the same is true on the other side of the ledger; most of what goes on in political science is pretty stupid anyway. It could be possible to be a competent theorist without immersing oneself in multiple disciplinary debates, but I think all too often people are drawn to what they imagine theory to be because they think it comes with no heavy lifting.

I’ll go into a bookstore and look at a book by the title of, say, The Political Economy of Gender in Late Victorian England. I pick it up and find out it’s an examination of six poems. That gives you the sense of a lot of cultural studies discourse: political economy is a phrase whose main function is to imply a kind of heft and demands to be taken seriously, but it has nothing to do with anything that anybody from Marx to Krugman would call a political economy.

[From the Archives] Redescriptions of Female Masochism

Rita Felski’s “Redescriptions of Female Masochism” first appeared in issue 63-64 (Spring/Summer 2005) of the minnesota review.

Of the terms bequeathed to us by the fathers of sexology, masochism is one of the most perplexing. Masochism has been depicted as craven submission or as wilful revolt, as a form of radical self-shattering or the epitome of ironic self-consciousness. In one account, the masochistic script is an extreme instance of psychic rigidity and compulsive sexual need; from another perspective, it is the epitome of playfulness and theatricality. Some writers view masochism as an aberration; others see it as a quasi-universal condition that lies at the core of human sexuality.

One major dispute hinges on the role of gender. Masochism has been deemed both a uniquely male perversion and an innate female tendency (a disagreement that often turns on whether it is deemed a psychological or a specifically sexual condition). Hence a survey of the writing on female masochism turns up wildly diverging propositions: masochism is a natural urge in women; epitomizes women’s oppression under patriarchy; is an empowering form of sexual experimentation; does not exist. Current approaches to masochism draw on disparate vocabularies-political, medical, therapeutic, philosophical, and aesthetic-whose underlying tenets are often strikingly at odds.

[From the Archives] This I Believed

Michael Bérubé’s “This I Believed” first appeared in Issue 71-72 (Spring/Summer 2009) of the minnesota review.

Sixteen years ago, in the summer and fall of 1993 when I was writing Public Access, I described myself as “a lefty middle-innings pitcher, keenly aware of living in a time when New Deal liberalism marks the leftward border of the thinkable in the United States, and committed to a pragmatic politics of the most fairly regulated markets this society can produce or imagine.” The end of that passage marked me as Not Left Enough in some quarters, but it’s the beginning of the passage that I’d like to explain. The middle-innings pitcher is the guy who shows up when things have gone badly awry. He’s not the closer, who shuts things down in the ninth, and he’s not the setup man, who takes care of the seventh and eighth so that the fireballing closer can face the absolute minimum number of batters and live to throw heat the next day. He’s the schlump who appears when the starter has coughed up one hairball after another, or when the starter has coughed up hairballs and his hapless replacement has followed suit. The job of the middle reliever is to stop the bleeding and give the team a chance to rally. If they can.

[From the Archives] The Obligations of Academic Freedom

Timothy Burke’s “The Obligations of Academic Freedom” first appeared in Issue 67 of the minnesota review.

Many academics, including myself, rise to defend “academic freedom” in response to claims that professoriate is too “liberal.” The concept of “academic freedom,” however, seems to mean many things to many people, and there is often a lack of appreciation about why it is necessary and what it ought to entail.

[From the Archives] Meat Consumption and Food Traceability

Dennis Soron’s “Meat Consumption and Food Traceability” first appeared in our combined Issue 73-74. Since the publication of the essay in 2010, interest in the origins of food has only increased: controversies over pink slime in our hamburgers and cochineal dye in popular beverages have dominated news cycles in recent weeks.  In this essay, Soron argues that now is the time to start tracing where the meat we eat comes from.

(From the Archives) Critical Self-Fashioning: An Interview with Stephen J. Greenblatt

Today’s “From the Archives” post, an excerpt of an interview with Stephen J. Greenblatt, comes from Issue 71/72 (Summer 2009).  This interview took place on 8 December 2008 in Stephen Greenblatt’s office in Widener Library at Harvard University. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, the editor of the minnesota review at the time, and transcribed by Gavin Jensen, then an MA student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. In this excerpt, Greenblatt contextualizes the new historicism school of literary theory. 

What the Trolls Teach Us

Tedra Osell’s ”What the Trolls Teach Us” first appeared in our Fall/Winter 2007 issue (#69). In the essay, Osell compares the current emphasis on blog interactions with the “enabling fiction” of the Habermasian public sphere. 

“The enabling fiction of the public sphere is an illusion, but one with real ideological power. As such, we tend to credit revolutionary changes in mass communication with bringing it about, or at least bringing it closer. In the eighteenth century, it was newspapers and magazines; in the nineteenth, telephones and recording devices; in the twentieth, broadcasting. Now, of course, we’re excited about the internet.

(From the Archives) “Whose University? Our University!”: The Case for GA Unions

Today’s “From the Archives” post excerpts Carl Levine’s 2006 “‘Whose University? Our University!’: The Case for GA Unions.” Levine argues eloquently in favor of unionization, an argument that is concretely based in the acrimonious relations that developed between New York University and its graduate assistants after the university elected not to renew the GA union in 2005. Unionization continues to be debated, not only at NYU but also at other universities across the country (most recently at the University of Minnesota). Clearly, Levine’s argument remains a timely one.

From “‘Whose University? Our University!’: The Case for GA Unions”

Carl Levine

The idealized version of the university—as a community of scholars enjoying a free space for intellectual discourse, insulated from the pressures of the outside world—if it ever existed, exists no more. Higher education in this country is a colossal industry, increasingly ruled by the imperatives of the marketplace. Academic freedom is threatened, not by graduate student assistants (GAs) demanding input into decisions that affect their working lives, but by administrators seeking unilateral control of decision-making.

Interview with Sherry Linkon and John Russo

Sherry Linkon and John Russo founded and continue to run the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, the first multidisciplinary center in America devoted to the study of working-class culture. Linkon and Russo also collaborated on Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (2002) and New Working-Class Studies (2005), a collection of essays on approaches to the study of working-class life and culture.

This interview took place at the Center on 22 November 2004. It was conducted by Victor Cohen, who at the time was an editorial assistant for the minnesota review and a Ph.D. student in literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. The interview was originally published in Issue 73/74 (Spring/Summer 2005) of the journal.

Cohen: How did the Center for Working Class Studies get started? Was there a conscious plan from the start, or did some set of events set things in motion?

Russo: We started out simply to get a higher profile for what we were doing. In 1995 we had been teaching courses over at the union hall, courses for people on the swing shifts, so we would offer a basic composition course that you could take in either the morning or the afternoon, and not just our courses but we did a math course, a labor history course, a philosophy course. It immediately brought fifty new students into the university. Now, that’s a lot of money. I want to be real clear on this to a university that had declining enrollment, you bring in fifty new students, that’s really important. The last time we checked, of those original fifty, I think twenty-five or thirty actually made it through a complete program of study.