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The Humanities in Love with Themselves

Bauerlein, Mark.

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 26, Number 2, October 2002, pp.

415-431 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0002

For additional information about this article

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415Mark Bauerlein

Philosophy and Literature, © 2002, 26: 415–431

Critical Discussions

THE HUMANITIES AT HOME WITH THEMSELVES

by Mark Bauerlein

W hen I started graduate school in English in the early Eight-ies, a typical thing happened. Those few students with a back-

ground in philosophy drifted together, shared inuences, and devel-oped a hierarchy of critical works. A few pushed analytic philosophy

and pragmatism, but overall Continental theory took rst place,especially Derrida. “Structure, Sign, and Play” and “White Mythology,”de Man’s “Rhetoric of Temporality,” Shoshana Felman’s “Turning theScrew of Interpretation,” and other weighty essays had the status of cutting-edge wisdom, and the hostility deconstruction drew from tradi-tionalists and Marxists in the department only sharpened our commit-ment. Having no other professional standing, we savored the stigma,the roguishness. It complemented our poverty, and eased our transition

from hot-shot undergraduates to rst-year, prequalifying Ph.D aspir-ants. In the evenings, after instructing freshmen in comma splices, wegathered to trade Nietszchean epigrams and mock professors wholooked befuddled at the mention of a priori and aporia .

Other students found us insufferable, and doubtless we were, but not in a partisan way. We panned each other just as hard as we did theuninformed. This was UCLA, not Yale or Johns Hopkins, and personali-ties mattered less than arguments. If in discussion I backed a point with

The Crafty Reader , by Robert Scholes; 272 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press,2002, $24.95.

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416 Philosophy and Literature

“ As Derrida says . . . , ” someone always answered, “So what?” Wefrowned on arguments from authority. Popularizations such as JonathanCuller ’s On Deconstruction earned our scorn. They were one step up

from Cliff ’s Notes, packed with servile observations like “ Jean Baudrillard wants to take us further, into a world where everything is so textualizedthat there is no space left for the real. ” We preferred to understanddeconstruction through laborious readings of Being and Time andBeyond Good and Evil , not in watery effusions about textuality or themechanical pairing of binary oppositions. The latter we placed amongthe scribes, those well-intentioned professionals canny enough torecognize the broad import of deconstruction, but not acute enough todiscern the real meaning of différance or the radical disclosure of theontic-ontological difference. The genius of philosophy, we thought, lay in plumbing the fundamental habits of cognition, like Hegel breakingdown sense certainty and Heidegger questioning the determination of Being as substance. Exegesis of other texts was a lesser activity, though

we acknowledged exceptions such as Starobinski ’s book on Rousseauand Koj è ve’s lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit .

Lower in our rankings were the quasi-Leftist attacks just emerging,such as Frank Lentricchia ’s Criticism and Social Change , which cast

theorists as mandarin functionaries treating interpretation as an apoliti-cal game. They lled the page with spiteful terms like “the mask of purereason ” and righteous declarations like “it is wrong to claim that youare above politics, ” spurning argument for the rhetoric of the reformer.

We diagnosed them as puny reactions to the Reagan Revolution,carried out on the irrelevant ground of literary theory. Philosophically,Lentricchia was a hack, and we rejected the imputation that theory nulli ed activism and justi ed the status quo. Not that we thought

theory bred activism. We just considered them separate activities, andsaw no determinate connection between hermeneutical stance andparty af liation. However, we accepted the elitist charge. How couldambitious academics avoid elitism? It wasn ’t hard for graduate studentsstruggling on $900 a month to see that populist attitudes didn ’t suit thetenured Ivy Leaguer. Professors were paid by exclusive institutions toteach poetry, to write letters for the best and brightest, to run recondite

journals and jet to prestigious symposia. We wanted to join them, but not with phony expressions of social injustice that targeted theory asthe problem.

Allied with the political attacks on theory, and esteemed even lower, were critiques of the humanities as a bastion of high culture. Polemics

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417Mark Bauerlein

such as Andrew Ross ’s No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture treatedliterature departments as conservative enclaves blind to the culturalrealities of the public sphere. Humanities professors guarded a narrow

white-male canon with spurious notions of taste and truth, they argued, while popular culture did the real work of social progress. In the “ voicesemerging from popular culture and voices articulating political thoughtsand feelings of all sorts, ” as one book puts it, lay the genuine force of critique, and the academic ideology that excluded them on highculture grounds was but another reactionary strategy. Once again, weconceded the premise —that the university was a high-culture sanc-tum —but rejected the moral. To speak of academia as a repressivesociety in relation to mass culture was absurdly disproportionate. Massculture was an elephantine monster, the humanities a shrinking refuge.Every year students entered our composition classes with less booklearning and more MTV/ESPN savvy. To object to literature depart-ments keeping sitcoms and romance ction from the curriculum was togive in to the trend. Ross and others acted as if they were leading alonely ght against the monolithic power of the Establishment, but intruth they were backed by a tidal wave of media and consumerism. Wecame to graduate school to escape the onslaught. The only reason they

pushed mass culture on a hemmed-in university, we decided, was that they preferred watching television to reading books, but wanted toretain the prestige and comfort of academic life.

At the bottom of our rankings lay the humanists. We saw them asquaint and tweedy, spouting palaver about literature and life, citing the“human condition ” as if they ’d missed the twentieth century. They raised Arnold and Eliot as exemplars, but we fancied them more likethe broken-down professor played by Michael Caine in Educating Rita .

They puffed their ideas with sentences like “The great works of literature are worthy of our attention only if they speak to our concernsas human beings, ” but we wondered where they acquired the authority to stand for the rest of humanity. Derrida excited us with ingeniousconceptions that denied canons of logic and common sense, andNietzsche made nihilism into a compelling personal drama. Academichumanists cast learning as a sentimental retreat, in which theorists werecold rationalists and Leftists were antiaesthetic enthusiasts. Worst of all,they eschewed argumentation, letting the raising of an eyebrow or an

Arnoldian adage serve as debating points.None of these books shook our philosophical resolve, and we

continued to read and dispute. But there was a curious motif common

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to them all, one we remarked with bemusement: the New Critics.Everybody derided them. Pop culture mavens censured their HighModernist tastes. Leftists slighted their agrarian conservatism, their

antipathy to modern industrial society. Many of the theorists we readdisdained their Hegelian talk of concrete universals and their Kantianpraise of the synthetic imagination. Humanists moaned, “By followingBrooks and Warren down the New Critical path of tone and tension, weEnglish teachers succeeded in getting life itself, with all its embarrass-ing features, out of our classrooms. ” The charges came down to onething, that the New Critics lifted poems out of historical, political, andsocial contexts and treated them as independent objects. Theorists,cultural critics, and political commentators wanted to situate texts; theNew Critics un-situated them. I. A. Richards ’s experiments in Practical Criticism were paradigmatic. He handed students poems without title,date, or author, and asked them to respond. In doing so, criticscharged, he removed their contextual meaning, their ideologicalimport. The “New Criticism operated to put poetry into an elite culturalghetto, ” one wrote. It “criticized severely poems that were overtly political, ” a policy that “may be attributed to nostalgia for the OldSouth in a group of men who had strong ties to that particular past. ”

The criticisms didn ’t impress us, not least because they exaggeratedthe New Critical in uence on the humanities in 1985. To the assailants,Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and the others hovered overliterary studies like the ery cherubim guarding Milton ’s Garden. To us,they were a group of willful theorists from the 1930s and ’40s devisingcognitive grounds for a discipline of literary criticism, none of whichhad survived. They postulated a semantic distinction between ordinary language and poetic language, but nobody observed it anymore. They

prized poems that were “auto-telic, ” but the works then in vogue wereopen-ended and indeterminate like Tristram Shandy and The Crying of Lot 49 . Once in a while a principle like the Intentional Fallacy or theHeresy of Paraphrase made its way into an undergraduate class, but asan idea, not a principle to guide critical practice. Some maintained that New Criticism prevailed in Intro to Lit classes, but in truth studentsthere were taught a formalist mishmash, borrowed as much from genrestudies, prosody, rhetoric, and a half-dozen other interpretative realmsas from New Criticism. By the late ’80s, younger graduate studentsdidn ’t even bother to open The Verbal Icon or Murray Krieger ’s summa-tion The New Apologists for Poetry .

The ideas had passed, the in uence had waned, so why og them?

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Maybe professors needed to in ate the power of the past in order tofoment their rebelliousness. We thought that they envied the New Critics’ success. Eighties critics proclaimed a crisis and complacency in

the humanities and set out to rede ne literary studies. The New Criticsfaced a crisis, too —loose historicism, impressionism, no disciplinary standards in the classroom —and formulated rules for reading andnorms for judging literarature. The difference was that New Critics

wished to realize their theories in academic institutions. Eighties critics wished to dismantle those institutions, but, suspicious of hierarchy andIvory Tower privilege, they didn ’t know what kind of institution shouldreplace them. The changes they proposed —opening the canon, mak-ing scholarship activistic, legitimating popular culture —countered thedistinctions on which the humanities were based. The New Critics wereall-too-comfortable with them.

Because we had no ambivalence about the institution we were tryingto enter, we regarded the New Critics as just another school of literary interpretation. Whatever ideological content lay in it we ignored,treating maneuvers such as Richards ’s decontextualization of poems asa classroom experiment, not a political plank. It was and would remainpart of the history of criticism, 1930 to 1965, while the Eighties critics,

acting on institutional resentment, would pass into oblivion onceinstitutional conditions changed. They relied more on attitude thanargument, and each camp had its humor: the popularizer ’s earnestness,the Leftist ’s indignation, the pop culture critic ’s irreverence, and thehumanist ’s sentiment. We thought attitude couldn ’t last, not only because we insisted that valid reasoning be the arbiter of the discipline.

We also saw it result in silly behavior.For instance: some time in 1987, a meeting of the English Graduate

Union was called in order to discuss the apartheid situation in South Africa. The topic surprised us. The EGU was a collective to which all150 English students automatically belonged. Its functions were to senda representative to meetings of the faculty committee on the Ph.Dprogram, to inform students of changes in curriculum, and to commu-nicate student concerns to the Chair. A few got heavily involved, but most of us barely noticed its existence. Nobody thought of it as apolitical organization. But, apparently, the new leaders of the groupthat year envisioned a more activist role, and apartheid was the issue of the day.

About fty people showed up. As the meeting progressed, a group of second-year students proposed that the EGU place an editorial in the

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Daily Bruin demanding that the University of California withdraw allinvestments from companies that reaped pro ts in South Africa. A few spoke about multinational corporations, diamond mines, and Mandela

in prison. One blasted the Reagan Administration for ignoring theproblems, another cited antiapartheid stands taken on other campuses.It was time to call the UC Regents to account, they pressed, and apublished broadside just might shame them into altering their portfolio.

One of my friends spoke up. “How will the statement be signed? ” Theothers hesitated, having learned to mistrust his simple openings. Toooften in seminars he had trapped them with disingenuous questionsthat led to embarrassing discoveries of fallacies in their presentations.Many of them struggled to remain civil.

The head of the EGU answered, “It will say ‘English GraduateUnion. ’”

“But what if some of us don ’t agree with the editorial? ” my friendasked.

“That ’s what we’re here to discuss, ” she replied.“Okay . . . ?” There was a pause.One of the more moderate supporters wondered what he didn ’t like

about the statement. “I didn ’t say I didn ’t like it, ” he noted. “I’m just

asking whether the EGU should send out political statements and enlist all the students in a cause whether they like it or not. ”

“But who would oppose this? ” a young bearded fellow interjected,impatient with the turn.

Another of my friends warned, “There may be some problems. First of all, we don ’t know but that having companies withdraw from placeslike South Africa might make conditions worse. Second, we ’re insomething of an ambiguous position. ”

“Huh? ”“ Well, you’re demanding that the Regents pull money out of compa-nies invested in South Africa, which sounds ne, but how do you answeroutsiders who say, ‘ You work for the university, so you ’re implicated,too ’?”

“They ’re right! ” one blurted. “That ’s why we’ ve got to do this! ”Several mumbled their agreement.

“Oh, then, ” I concluded, “if the Regents do nothing, we ’re all goingto quit. ” More silence.

The bearded man rose and stepped to the center of the room.“Everything ’s connected, ” he said slowly, glancing around with asomber regard. “It ’s easy for us to ignore what ’s going on half-way

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around the world, but everything we do has consequences for everyoneelse.” He looked at us. “That ’s reality. ”

“No,” my rst friend corrected with a smile, “that ’s paranoia. ”

“Let ’s calm down, ” the head of the EGU said.“No,” another insisted. “These companies are making money off of racism, and we ’re gonna try and stop it! ”

“Then you better stop drinking that Coke in your hand, ” my friendobserved, “and nobody use that xerox machine upstairs anymore. ”

I don ’t recall how the meeting ended, except that we left it half-annoyed and half-amused. I wanted to dismiss the whole scene as afarce, or to diagnose it as students facing a tight job market and shiftingtheir anxieties to a situation with clear victims and oppressors. There

was something pitiable about a dozen humanities students in Los Angeles pretending to be partisans against apartheid, and somethingsinister in using a tiny student organization to do it. The initiative hadno scholarly content, but people represented it as academic duty. This

was Eighties criticism ltered down into the graduate ranks, a practice with a imsy disciplinarity but a strong professional identity. Youngerstudents didn ’t wish to explore the debate between Derrida and Searle,or the Romantics ’ reading of Hamlet . They wanted topical matters with

a righteous edge.Go to it! we urged. Your activism, your egalitarian sympathies, your

political hopes —they won ’t work in an institution that thrives onprivilege and hierarchy. The Eighties attitude will soon exhaust itself and its ideas will be insuf cient to stand on their own. That was ourprediction. Of course, our judgment probably had as much to do withstudent rivalry and our own insecurity as it did with principle. If this isthe direction of the profession, we may have calculated, if political

affect trumped intellectual devotions, then we could look forward tolong years of adjunct teaching and minimal wages. Our hierarchy of critical works will have been discredited, and we will appear just another gang of students who read too much philosophy and too littlehistory, who presumed that their little forensic games amounted toscholarly thinking.

That was fteen years ago. Our faith that bad attitudes and bad ideascouldn ’t last proved but half-correct. The attitudes indeed disappeared,or became so blunted as to be ineffectual, once the Culture Wars

worked their way through academia circa 1987 –95. In a bitter case of cosmic irony, the professors got exactly what they wanted —exposureoutside the Ivory Tower —and it was a disaster. They campaigned to

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eliminate Western Civ requirements, trumpeted their canon busting,aunted their (theoretical) Marxism, and oated scandalous lecturetitles, all of which enhanced their prestige within academe. But once

the public found out, the outcry was startling. Neoconservative rebukesreached the mainstream press —for instance, Hilton Kramer and RogerKimball’s annual reports on the MLA Convention —and professorsdidn ’t know how to respond. Having spent their lives communicating

with people of similar outlooks within the selective setting of classroomsand symposia, they couldn ’t understand how anyone but the most benighted reactionary could ridicule their race, class, and genderthematics. As journalists and public gures across the political spec-trum echoed the criticisms, professors grew strident. They wrote op-edscomparing themselves to great writers of the past who had undergonepublic censure. They devised speech codes that legal scholars judgedun-Constitutional. They formed panels to complain about their illtreatment.

The press didn ’t buy it, nor did the reading public. They perceivedtoo many ambiguities in the professors ’ position to take their claims at face value. First of all, it seemed that professors were shirking theirprofessional charge. Parents paid $25K a year to have their sons and

daughters learn about King Lear , not crossdressing. State legislatorsdisapproved of budgets that supported teachers who schooled studentsin the evils of U.S. capitalism. Intellectuals who relied on the humani-ties to impart traditional learning to undergraduates accused theinstructors of betraying a public trust.

Second, professors claimed to be discerning ideological analysts, yet they displayed a childish na ï vet é in public dispute. They played theé pater les bourgeois game, then acted dismayed and angry when the

burghers shot back. They assumed that their academic status grantedthem a congenial, trusting audience beyond the campus, but since they themselves questioned the nature of academic status and privilege, they should have expected hostile reactions.

Finally, there was the sharp discrepancy between the ideas academicsprofessed and the demeanor they bore. They spoke for equality anddiversity, and yet they behaved with arrogance and condescension.

When they politicized the humanities and enlisted education in thecause of social justice, they involved themselves in wider social policiesin which other parties have a rightful say. But academics treated thoseothers as lesser persons. They interpreted all opposition as political andideological, while in fact most people agreed that some measure of

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multiculturalism in higher education was bene cial, that gender rolesshould be liberalized, and that popular culture had its merits. What defeated academics in the public arena wasn ’t the ideas, but rather the

virtuousness, the indignation with which they pushed their points. They framed debates in us-vs.-them terms, and used an exclusionary lan-guage riddled with jargon and morally tendentious. Neoconservatives,editors at the Wall Street Journal , researchers at the American EnterpriseInstitute, and Republican politicians weren ’t the only ones painted asrepugnant. They maligned anyone who doubted af rmative action,backed Reagan ’s “evil empire ” speech, was Pro-Life, or praised Great Books programs. Their high-handed judgments convinced nobody, andearned the labels “Leftist McCarthyism ” and “Dictatorship of Virtue. ”Commentators captured those attitudes at their worst, and the readingpublic made best-sellers out of polemics such as Dinesh D ’Souza’sIlliberal Education .

Isolated and harried, humanities professors couldn ’t sustain theirhaughtiness, except in secure tenured enclaves. They aimed to beintellectuels engag é s , but couldn ’t nd an extramural readership. Without a sustaining public, the attitude imploded, spent itself in repetitiousconferences and class meetings. Once the estrangement set in, there

were no more public stakes in academic battles, only academic ones.Professors concocted ever more exotic forms such as postcolonialism,but those soon evolved into an institutional option, a job description,and ’90s students worried more about catching the latest theoretical

wave than changing the world. Transgressive gestures no longer im-pressed colleagues, much less laymen. Three years ago I attended an

Americanist conference in Riverside, one of whose papers was entitled“The Function of the Penis at the Present Time. ” Ten years earlier it

might have titillated or appalled; this time it evoked barely a murmur.This is radical posturing in the academy today —a professional routine,an attitude without bite.

As for the ideas, however, they have lived on despite the loss of affective support. All the up-and-coming political notions and popular-izations that sank on our scale of merit, even the fuzzy nostalgias,survive—not as innovative breakthroughs, though, but as ordinary sense. Nobody actually argues against the distinction of high and low culture, or for the political character of texts, or the textual nature of reality. Nobody presents theoretical propositions such as Foucault ’salliance of truth with subjection as insights to be elucidated. They arebits of humanities principia , certain and secure. Academics wield them

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as casual verities, the patent grounds of cultural critique, and whensomeone gainsays them, academics merely cite them as salient remind-ers, as if the poor eccentric had forgotten his copybook. Last fall,

novelist Jonathan Franzen ( The Corrections ) caused a stir when hederided Oprah ’s Book Club after being chosen for inclusion. “I feel likeI’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition, ” he said, and though Oprahhas chosen some worthy books, she ’s picked “enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe. ” Here is Janice Radway, a professor at Duke, commenting in the Chronicle of Higher Education :

What ’s interesting is Franzen ’s citing of high-art literature. He seems tobe familiar with the way these categories come out of cultural studies, but

using the term in an old-fashioned way. Before poststructuralism, no one would have used that term. They [sic] would have just said, This isliterature. Over the last 25 years, those categories of high and low havebroken down. People who might have defended a literary artist, someone

with what are called standards, are not defending him. (30 November2001)

Pity Franzen. Twenty- ve years out of date, irting with cultural studiesbut misconstruing the message, abandoned by former defenders. And

envy Radway. She knows the difference between old-fashioned andtimely, and registers surehandedly the advent of poststructuralism. That all of her points are, to say the least, debatable doesn ’t shake hercon dence a bit. She believes that poststructuralism undermined high-art conceptions, but the corpus of Derrida, de Man, Lacan, and Saidshows them as high-culture devotees. She suggests that cultural studiesappropriated the term “high-art literary tradition, ” making its use viableonly in a critical mode. She thinks that because academic theorists

interrogated the division of high and low in the ’70s, the rest of theculture did, too.One could investigate these assertions, and even conclude that

Radway has a case. But she speaks as if they were beyond discussion.Twenty- ve years ago the high-low split collapsed, and that ’s that.Poststructuralism changed the world, and there ’s no going back.Franzen ’s ungrateful remark (which he retracted) is blank ignorance,so that instead of arguing against him, Radway need only mutter thesnide “seems to be familiar with ” and the sneering “ with what are calledstandards. ” This is the current forensic. One but recalls the truisms of theory and the morals of critique to dispense with opponents. Theprovocative declarations of the past have settled into academic lore,

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separating the knowing from the naive. They don ’t work as tools of argument. They ’re like entrance fees: subscribe to them and you may

join the humanities conversation.

Of course, every discipline including the sciences has its consensusknowledge, ideas everyone embraces and norms everyone follows. Without a base agreement, inquirers speak at cross-purposes and peerreview lacks universal criteria. Only after forging common ideals andgoals can practitioners begin to disagree meaningfully. The differencebetween the humanities and the sciences on this score is that scientistsadhere to certain epistemological standards (scienti c method), but from there they test hypotheses, pose theories, and dispute results,ferociously winnowing out incorrect and weak ideas. Humanists alsoenter the eld in accord with select standards — various kinds of rectitude and institutional politics —but from there they labor with asurprising pluralistic tolerance, allowing a swarm of different andcontradictory theories and methods to coexist. New historicism, traumatheory, subaltern studies, Althusserian Marxism, cultural studies,neopragmatism, ecocriticism . . . they prosper side by side, untroubledby their incompatibility. A single issue of New Literary History might include specimens of several, while humanities departments boast

professors who specialize in each, and who have learned to mute theircommitments in department meetings. They still condemn pre- ’70shabits —formalism, history of ideas —but toward each other they exer-cise a temperate respect, an “I do what I do and they do what they do ”custom. Those who persist in disputing who ’s right and who ’s wrongnd themselves shunted into alternative groups like the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics or stigmatized as cranks. The hierarchy weprized as graduate students has been attened, the Nietzschean sense

of rank subdued, and the humanities have become a supermarket of critical goods.This explains why all the phrases quoted earlier as samples of

Eighties subgenres in fact come from one book, Robert Scholes ’s The Crafty Reader , recently published by Yale University Press. The book is amodel illustration of the egalitarian stew that is contemporary criticism.Each of what we graduate students considered inferior forms of argument makes its appearance, from the diluted theory to thehumanist gush to the populist joys to the anti-New Criticism. Theostensible goal of The Crafty Reader is to promote “crafty reading, ” anartisan-like skill in handling texts. Each chapter takes a different object of reading —poetry, the world ( “Textual Realities ”), personal chronicles,

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private-eye novels, science fantasy, a Pauline epistle, a Norman Rockwellpainting —and displays a trained eye and critical ken at work.

But Scholes is careful not to set crafty reading against predominant

trends in the humanities. Rather he assimilates them into a pedagogicalimperative few academics would defy. A liberal outlook, a little closereading, some semiotics, a shot of historical context, a touch of Frenchtheory, bits of mass culture and even a few Great Books come together

with a call for improving the reading habits of literature majors. Theseform the equipment of craftiness. The scheme is inclusionary, andsometimes jarring. On one page he hails Rockwell as a postmodernist operating in the hyperreal, but elsewhere asks teachers to present poems “in a way that encourages readers to connect the poems to theirlives” (p. 36). He objects to New Critical “school-talk, ” the “articialconcerns of symbol, tone, and irony ” (p. 24), but later praises a passagefrom a Raymond Chandler detective story for its “tone of self-mockery, ”“built-in irony, ” and “deft metonymy ” (p. 166). He joins high theory

with composition instruction, ranges from the New Testament to Harry Potter, pairs Jean Baudrillard with Samuel Johnson, and in twenty pagesleaps from Allen Tate to Sacco and Vanzetti to Swann in love to culturalstudies to Kantian disinterestedness to Brooks and Warren ’s Understand-

ing Poetry to America Online bulletin boards. Twenty- ve years ago, suchelements squared off —here they confederate.

The ingredients are derivative, but the attitude is new, post-Culture Wars. Gone is the radical bluster, the provocateur ethos. Instead, Scholesintroduces his topics with a pedantic avuncularity. His conclusionreproduces Rockwell ’s painting of Abe Lincoln, then begins: “My epigraph is truly graphic, an image rather than a set of words. Let usread it ” (p. 241). In the chapter on science fantasy he announces,

“Having established myself as a nontheoretician, I shall now proceed totheorize, boiling a few roses and serving them up as a dish for the crafty reader ” (p. 184). Fifteen pages later, he repeats, “This introductionprovides a plentiful supply of blossoms for those who like to boil roses.Let us put the kettle on and see what we can brew up ” (p. 199). InScholes’s rendition, the portentous ideas of radical criticism becomethe property of all. The world of the hyperreal isn ’t an exotic posthumanland; it is the “ world . . . in which we and our students live ” (p. 90).Poststructuralists talk about reading as if every act were an esoteric,high-stakes interpretation, but Scholes sees it as craft, and “Craft iscommon; it can be learned. . . . This book is about that craft. It is anattempt to explain and embody ways of reading that anyone can learn ”

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(pp. xiii –xiv). Here is the seasoned professor, earnest and expert,administering Seventies theory and Eighties critique as a benignknowledge ready for use.

To balance the parts of crafty reading, Scholes maintains a judiciousrestraint of each. He breaches the high culture/low culture divide, but “ Without rejecting the notion that some texts are indeed better thanothers (for some purposes) ” (p. xv). He plays with critical tools liketone, but “ would urge caution in employing such totalizing terms ” (p.46). He nds a virtue in the errors of theorists: “it is their job, their duty,to be wrong so as to set the rest of us thinking about what might beright ” (p. 184). He values Great Books, but deprivileges them: “ we usethis literary training not by expounding the Truth that is to be found inthe Great Books but by teaching the craft of reading that we havelearned by reading those books and other cultural texts ” (p. 215). Heinsists on close reading, but remarks, “I see the craft of reading ashaving de nite political implications ” (p. 217). Scholes ’s moderationsreconcile different approaches, make the critical choices less stark.Political criticism is less partisan, theory less abstract, humanism lessnaive, Great Books less elitist.

No theory or academic sect comes up for censure. Scholes saves his

animus for two sets of noncrafty readers far from the humanities crowd,the New Critics and “fundamentalist readers ” such as the SouthernBaptists and Pope John Paul II. The New Critics, he says, “ were seriously

wrong about the subject they knew best. And I want to make a few suggestions about how to recover from the mess they made ” (p. 3).They “emphasized the technical qualities of form over the humanqualities of expression ” (p. 75), sapping literary studies of relevance.Fundamentalist readers are zealous for certainty, “turning a deaf ear to

the complexity of the texts themselves, their histories, and their present situations ” (p. 219). Instead of “reading gaps and contradictions in thetext precisely as gaps and contradictions, ” they end up “silently llingthose gaps with ideological cement ” (p. 223). Crafty readers know better and are less certain —less patrician than the New Critics and lessdogmatic than the Christian Right —the humanities having taught them to suspect the objectivity of the interpreter and the literalmeanings of the text.

One senses here an ambition to synthesize and solidify the practicesof the last thirty years, in many of which Scholes played a role. In the’60s he was a Joycean literary critic, in the ’70s a structuralist, in the ’80sa semiotician with a political edge, in the ’90s a gender critic and then

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a veteran re ecting upon “the rise and fall of English. ” Now, he intendsto expel the enemy once and for all —formalists and fundamentalists —and reconcile diverse humanities strands into a reasonable and engag-

ing multivocal method. It is a worthy goal, for fundamentalism iscontrary to the goals of liberal education, and the internal squabbles of professors have damaged higher education and provided fodder forneoconservatives and reporters hungry for bad academic behavior. But the humanities synthesis, Scholes ’s or any other, cannot work, for tworeasons.

One, the methods and principles Scholes unites into crafty readingdo not, in fact, support one another —they subvert one another. Whenthey rst appeared from the late- ’60s onward, they did so antagonisti-cally. Deconstructionists dismantled the Romantic aesthetics of the New Critics, neopragmatists announced an “ Against Theory ” program, femi-nists attacked Harold Bloom ’s masculinist model of in uence, politicalcritics accused de Man of aestheticizing all things, and so on. Early practitioners knew what Scholes ignores, that the premises of respectiveschools are incompatible. They begin with different de nitions of beauty, truth, and literature. Scholes wants a next-generation alliance of postmodern notions of reality and a pedagogy of “real life. ” He thinks

“Most poems of real interest are about the scenes of life, scenes of language, that we encounter and inhabit in our daily lives ” (p. 36), sohe asks teachers to explore “how any particular text connects to life asit is lived” (p. 44), to select poets “ whose poems clearly emerge fromand connect to the ordinary events of human life ” (pp. 37 –38). But this

vision of mundane experience and ordinary life hardly ts thepostmodern temper, a mood of ironic skepticism that regards life asfraught with self-consciousness, simulacra, mass delusions, kitsch, and

irreverence. To a postmodernist, “life as it is lived” is just as much anaesthetic formulation as the poem, and the connection between themas arbitrary as the person doing the connecting. Scholes tries to pushlife in a postmodern direction by insisting that “ We live in a textualreality ” (p. 76), “The human condition is a textual condition ” (p. 77),and “ We never escape textuality ” (p. 78), but the language of ordinary life bears too many bourgeois echoes to be postmodernized. Scholes ’sassertions, by their repetitiousness, admit as much.

One could say the same about other discrepancies, such as his popculture enthusiasm for Harry Potter books vs. the cultural-studiesdistrust of mass phenomena. The only way for Scholes to collect incompatible criticisms into a single reading strategy is to soften them

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until they lose their implications. Consider his version of Baudrillard.Scholes introduces him in a discussion of textual reality, and acknowl-edges that he “is one of those French thinkers whose ideas seem at rst

to be utterly outlandish ” (p. 81). But in the next sentence he claims,“little by little, we come back to his ideas, and they seem a bit lessstrange, until we must face the awful possibility that he may be right ” (p.82). A paragraph later, readers witness Scholes undergo just that process. He cites Baudrillard on Disneyland, the “perfect model of allthe entangled orders of simulation ” (Simulations ). The passage notesthe “play of illusions and phantasms, ” the “miniaturized and religious revelling, ” and the “inherent warmth and affection of the crowd. ”

Few would quibble with that. But Baudrillard ’s nal sentence is ashock: “The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot —a

veritable concentration camp —is total. ” To cast the parking lot as aconcentration camp is either a perverse joke or an insane judgment.Remarkably, Scholes ’s comment overlooks it entirely: “ We shouldnotice that Baudrillard is not simply another Frenchman trashing

America. He likes some of what he sees ” (p. 83). Draining Baudrillard ’sremark of all political and historical baggage, he interprets theDisneyland piece as simply an exegesis of the hyperreal.

On the next page, we see Baudrillard broadening the description,announcing that Disneyland is the “real ” America. The amusement park hides the “fact that real childishness is everywhere. ” Scholesextends Baudrillard ’s vision to Monica Lewinsky and The Truman Show ,episodes that highlight the scripted nature of postmodern life. Eager tond “the warp and woof of the cultural text ” (p. 81), to argue that “ welive not in a chaotic world of random events but in a world of gures orcultural codes ” (p. 80), Scholes misses the hatred underlying Baudril-

lard ’s exuberance. Just before The Crafty Reader was published, Bau-drillard ’s animus became quite explicit. It appeared in his notoriousarticle in Le Monde in the wake of 9/11, which denounced

this insufferable superpower that gave rise both to the violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all. That the entire world

without exception had dreamed of this event . . . this fact is unacceptableto the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact

that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to eraseit. (Reprinted in Harper ’ s , February 2002)

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One can ’t help noting the arrogance of a Left Bank intellectualimputing a terrorist imagination to us all, invoking an indisputable fact after having made a career denying fact-ness, and condemning a nation

that has paid him handsomely in royalties and lecture fees.Of course, Scholes composed The Crafty Reader long before theterrorist attacks, but the step from concentration camps at Disneylandto U.S. world terrorism is a short one. A crafty reader would apprehendBaudrillard ’s loathing at rst sight. But then, if Scholes were toexpound the political implications of Baudrillard, he couldn ’t accom-modate him to the life-talk, the populism, and other strains in the book.The humanities synthesis couldn ’t happen. Scholes extols J. K. Rowling ’sHarry Potter books —the “books work because she has crafted her world

with extreme care, and with an admirable amount of wit and joy ” (p.211) —but Baudrillard might interpret them as adolescent Englishpublic-school delirium. Limiting Baudrillard to hyperrealism foreclosesthat critique, and makes him a reliable advocate of crafty reading.

The other problem with the synthesis bears upon the antagonismScholes preserves, that between humanities professors and, together,the New Critics and the fundamentalists. It is hard to believe that aftera thousand diatribes, academics are still knocking the New Critics.

Scholes faults I. A. Richards for his decontextualizing experiments, but in the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , Richards doesn ’t evenget an entry. A quick glance at any conference program or seasonalbook list reveals how remote New Critics are from current practice. So

why, yet again, fault them for including only ve women poets in theanthology Understanding Poetry , or for overlooking “those who felt ignored or oppressed by the dominant culture ” (p. 34)? Continuing theattacks suggests that latter-day movements need the New Critics in

order to have something to say, forgetting that de ning oneself against a long-gone straw man doesn ’t strengthen the case.The fundamentalists pose a different problem: they are too easy a

target. The readership of The Crafty Reader already abhors the kind of literalism they practice, the “ Word of God ” interpretations of Biblicaltexts. Scholes observes, “ We who live in English departments are by andlarge a docile group, who would rather avoid con icts with the outside

world than engage in them ” (p. 218). He then declares, “ we shall haveto risk doing so, ” and proceeds to chide the Southern Baptist Conven-tion and Pope John Paul II for their reading of Ephesians and1 Corinthians. But in truth, Scholes risks nothing. The chances are slimthat a member of the Baptist or Catholic organizations will open The

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Crafty Reader , and if they do they will classify it as one more postmodernist,relativist tract coming out of the humanities and forget it.

In both cases, Scholes errs in choosing enemies outside the commu-

nity of inquirers, and doing so in a community document, a university-press publication read only by other professors. He externalizes con ict.The bad guys are all in the past or in the church, not in humanitiesdepartments. If he wanted to discourage uncrafty reading, Scholesmight just as easily have gazed inward and chosen ideological critics,

whose moral vision is as rigid as the Southern Baptists ’; deconstructivecritics, whose acts are as predictable and derivative as any churchchoir ’s; or race, class, and gender critics, who prefer group advocacy,promoting this congregation and that. But Scholes won ’t chastise hisown. Existing practices are to be left intact. Lacking self-criticism, The Crafty Reader is a statement of and for the humanities in their current forms. It brings the schools together into a bland enterprise that offends no one within and will be ignored by everyone without.

Emory University

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