CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Aesthetics Contra "Identity"in Contemporary Poetry Studies

A Few Snapshots of the Current State of Poetry Reception

In the January 2008 issue of PMLA—the official publication of theModern Language Association (MLA) sent to more than thirty thousandmembers in one hundred countries—a cluster of essays by eightdistinguished literary critics appeared under the title "The New LyricStudies." The pieces took as their jumping-off point the eminentpoetry critic Marjorie Perloff's MLA presidential address, "It MustChange," given in December 2006 at the annual convention in Philadelphiaand later reprinted in the May 2007 issue of PMLA. In thattalk, Perloff asks, "Why is the 'merely' literary so suspect today?" (originalemphasis), contending that "the governing paradigm for so-calledliterary study is now taken from anthropology and history."

Because lyric has in our time become conflated with the moregeneric category of poetry, the PMLA forum serves to address notonly the state of lyric studies but, more broadly, the state of poetrystudies today. Nine critics may seem a small number—hardly representativeof the larger numbers of academic poetry critics in thecountry—but because of the influential reputations of the criticsinvolved (Perloff and Jonathan Culler in particular); because theMLA, despite the ridicule to which it is sometimes subjected, is thelargest, most powerful and influential professional organization forprofessors and academic critics of literature; and because the PMLAreaches a wider and broader audience than any other literary-criticaljournal, the views of these particular critics are highly visible andinfluential and cannot be easily discounted or dismissed. The MLAis one of what Edward Said calls the "authoritative and authorizingagencies" of culture in the Arnoldian sense (WTC, 8). Individualarticles in PMLA may be overlooked, but statements by high-profilemembers about the state of the field of literary criticism—especiallywhen marked by an adjective such as "New"—are often noticed andby a not insignificant number of readers.

In quite a few respects, the arguments made in "The New LyricStudies" were varied: from Culler's making the case for the specialnessof lyric—with its "memorable language" and its being "characteristicallyextravagant"—to Rei Terada's calling that we "[be] release[d]from lyric ideology" and "let 'lyric' dissolve into literature and 'literature'into culture" (Robert Kaufman, the requisite Marxist contributor,splits the difference by claiming, via Adorno and Benjamin, thatlyric is special precisely because it operates ideologically by the same"version of aura or semblance" that the commodity form does); fromStathis Gourgouris's and Brent Edwards's urging that lyric scholarsengage with truer and more incisive forms of interdisciplinarity; toOren Izenberg's assertion that "it makes good sense to bring literarystudy into closer proximity with the disciplines that give accounts ofhow the mind works," such as "the philosophy of mind, philosophicalpsychology, and metaphysics that deal with the nature of mentalphenomena and their relation not so much to the determinations ofculture as to the causal structure of reality." Virginia Jackson andYopie Prins both argue for more and better historicization: Jackson—pushing against the tendency to make poetry and lyric abstract, idealized,and transhistorical—urges that we "trace ... the history oflyricization"; Prins, that we examine "the cultural specificity of poeticgenres" and the history of poetics and prosody.

Yet despite the various methodological, disciplinary, and aestheticinclinations of the respondents, there are moments of agreement,some expected and others less so, sometimes cutting across thefamiliar "literary versus cultural" divide within literary studies. Notsurprisingly among scholars committed to the "literary," Culler, likePerloff, makes the familiar validating move of tracing the history oflyric back to the Greeks. Gourgouris, too, bolsters his arguments byappealing to the authority of ancient Greece (not so unexpected giventhat he works on Greek literature), taking Perloff slightly to task fortoo narrowly conceiving of poietike, which she translates as "the disciplineof poetics." But Gourgouris—who makes the point that Perloff"does not inquire if 'poetics' can be conducted nowadays in a freshlanguage"—does agree with her claim that literary studies has takena wrong turn, though for him the reasons are internal to the fieldand not, as Perloff suggests, because interdisciplinarity, in the form ofanthropological and historical paradigms, has been a bad influence.Gourgouris writes in "Poiein—Political Infinitive,"

For a decade or more since 1990, the microidentitarian shift in theoryprecipitated a failure of self-interrogation, especially regarding the paradoxesof the new disciplinary parameters that emerged out of the practiceof interdisciplinarity. As a result, literary studies (and other disciplines)suffered, not so much a defanging, as Perloff implies, but rathercarelessness, perhaps even arrogance—one is a symptom of the other—whichled the discipline to abandon self-interrogation and insteadhop on the high horse of identity politics. In other words, if Perloff'sscenario for the relegation of literary studies to a secondary practice islegitimate, the devaluation is not external but self-induced. (224)

This moment is surprising in that Gourgouris, who strongly advocatesfor, in effect, a "truer" form of interdisciplinarity—one that"requires, by definition, the double work of mastering the canonicaland the modes of interrogating it" (225)—and who emphaticallystates that "[p]oetry cannot be understood except in relation to life"(227), places the blame for the fall of literary studies so firmly andunquestioningly on "the high horse of identity politics"—presumablynot "relat[ed] to life"—the end result of "carelessness" and theabandoning of "self-interrogation." Indeed, "identity" has alreadybeen referenced as a dirty word earlier in the quote when Gourgourisspeaks of the "microidentitarian shift in theory" and its having "precipitateda failure of self-interrogation." Let me delay my discussionof this critique of "identity politics" for now and turn to anothermoment of agreement in PMLA.

On page two 2 of his essay "Poems Out of Our Heads," Oren Izenberg—beforeasserting that literary studies be brought in closer proximitywith more scientific "disciplines that give accounts of how themind works"—makes common cause with Perloff, quoting her:

I share much of Perloff's resistance to viewing poetry as "symptomsof cultural desires, drives, anxieties, or prejudices" and to the sometimeshaphazard forms of interdisciplinarity that this view fosters.(217)

This move is also somewhat surprising, for aesthetic and methodologicalrather than disciplinary reasons: not only has Izenberg beenharshly critical in print of the Language poets, of whom Perloff hasbeen a pioneering and fierce champion, but his privileging of analyticphilosophy's methods do not align with Perloff's more Continentalproclivities and her more literary historical approaches to poetry.

Thus, whatever other aesthetic, methodological, and disciplinarydifferences may separate them, Gourgouris, Izenberg, and Perloffdo converge when thinking about one of the reasons—if notthe major reason—for the fallen state of literary studies: forms ofsloppy (careless, haphazard) thinking, slightly differentiated butfundamentally linked, that privilege, variously, the sociological overthe literary (Perloff); identity politics over rigorous self-interrogation(Gourgouris); the cultural over the literary or philosophical orsomething called "reality" and its "causal structure" (Izenberg). Inother words, scholarly overconcern with the cultural, including thepolitical—dismissed as unspecified "anxieties" and "prejudices"—has seduced serious literary scholars away from the proper studyof the literary, specifically poetry. Perloff posits this binary quitestarkly in her presidential address:

Still, I wonder how many of us, no matter how culturally and politicallyoriented our own particular research may be, would be satisfiedwith the elimination of literary study from the curriculum. (656)

Despite her use of the first-person plural pronoun, Perloff suggeststhat such "culturally and politically oriented" research is preciselythe research that "use[s] literary texts" instrumentally, as "windowsthrough which we see the world beyond the text, symptoms of culturaldrives, anxieties, or prejudices" (654). She ends her address byforcefully exhorting,

It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field inthe first place and to recognize that, instead of lusting after thoseother disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don'treally practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical,and critical training in our own discipline. (662)

More rigorous training in the discipline of literary studies—thoughoddly, a discipline rooted in an "instinct" that brought "us" into thefield in the first place (who is included in this "us" and "we"?)—isposited as the antidote to the deleterious cultural and political turn,seen as a "lusting after" the "exotic."

For Perloff, this either-or choice obtains not only with literary methodsand disciplines but also with individual authors and texts themselves.In her spring 2006 "President's Column" written for the MLANewsletter, she writes more explicitly and directly of what choices are atstake:

Under the rubrics of African American, other minorities, and postcolonial,a lot of important and exciting novels and poems are surelystudied. But what about what is not studied? Suppose a student(undergraduate or graduate) wants to study James Joyce or GertrudeStein? Virginia Woolf or T.E. Lawrence or George Orwell? WilliamFaulkner or Frank O'Hara? the literature of World Wars I andII? the Great Depression? the impact of technology on poetry andfiction? modernism vis-á-vis fascism? existentialism? the history ofmodern satire or pastoral? Or, to put it in the most everyday terms,what of the student who has a passionate interest in her or his literaryworld—a world that encompasses the digital as well as printculture but does not necessarily differentiate between the writings ofone subculture or one theoretical orientation and another? Where dosuch prospective students turn?

What is one to make of this suggestion that Joyce and Woolf andFaulkner or any of the other canonical authors listed are not beingstudied because curricula are crammed full with the works of, say,Chinua Achebe and Gwendolyn Brooks? (Since Perloff does notmention the names of minority or postcolonial writers—only that"a lot" of their work is "surely" being studied—one can only guesswhich writers she is referring to.) What is most noteworthy inthis passage is not that Perloff opposes the "important and excitingnovels and poems" of "African American, other minorities, andpostcolonial" writers against the great works of Joyce et al. (Joycehimself a postcolonial writer) but that, rather, she explicitly sets upan opposition, "in the most everyday terms," between the "literary"and the writings of these racialized and postcolonial subjects whoare members of "subculture[s]."

For Perloff, the problem is not the death of literary print cultureat the hands of the digital, as some critics lament—she is forwardthinkingin championing new technologies and rightly sees no contradictionbetween the literary/poetic and the digital, or even betweenthe literary and the cultural (there is no problem in studying a topicas sociological as "the Great Depression")—but that the works of"African American, other minorities, and postcolonial" writers leaveno room in the curricula for those works that satisfy "the studentwho has a passionate interest in her or his literary world." Perloffexplicitly frames the choice as one between "passionate" and "literary"writing by famous named authors, all white, and an undifferentiatedmass of unliterary writing by nameless minority authors.Perhaps because she is writing in the more informal context of anorganizational newsletter, Perloff feels freer to be more explicit aboutwhat exactly threatens the "literary" than in her MLA presidentialaddress "It Must Change," where she uses more generic terms such as"culturally and politically oriented" research—though we can fairlyaccurately guess what the indefinite pronoun "It" in the title refers to.

My critique here is directed not at Perloff's views as an individualscholar but at an ideological position that she articulates in herMLA presidential address and the newsletter—one widely held inthe academy but not usually so straightforwardly stated. Indeed, Iadmire the forthrightness with which Perloff expresses what many literaryscholars think and feel but do not say except, perhaps, betweenthe enclosed walls of hiring meetings: the frightening specter that,because of "politically correct" cultural-studies-ish pressures in theacademy, presumably the detrimental legacy of both 1960 s activismand the culture wars of the 1980s, worthy, major, and beloved worksof literature—whose merits are "purely literary"—are being squeezedout of the curriculum by inferior works penned by minority writers,whose representation in the curriculum is solely the result of affirmativeaction or racial quotas or because their writings have passed anideological litmus test, not literary merit. This sentiment is usuallyexpressed in a manner much more coded though, nonetheless, clearlyunderstood.

What makes it particularly disappointing that Perloff is the oneusing the powerful forum of the MLA presidency to express theseconventional (and literary-establishment) views on minority writingand race is that for decades, she has fought hard to open theacademy to unconventional modes and forms of poetry, which wereoften not considered poetry or even literature, at a time when therewas no institutional reward for doing so. She was one of the first,and certainly the most prominent and vocal academic literary critic,to champion the Language poets and is almost single-handedlyresponsible for their now having become officially canonized andholding appointments at various prestigious English departmentsacross the nation, such as the University of California, Berkeley,and the University of Pennsylvania. Anyone who works on avantgardepoetic writing in this country owes a debt to her—includingmyself.

In the particular 2008 issue of the PMLA in question, it is left toBrent Edwards—the only critic in the group of eight respondents whowrites on ethnic literature (and is himself African American)—thetask of explicitly making the argument for the social in his response,"The Specter of Interdisciplinarity," to Perloff's "It Must Change"address and her posited binary of the "cultural" and the "political"versus the "literary":

Perloff uses "merely" [in her rhetorical question "Why is the 'merely'literary so suspect today?"] to suggest that the literary, even if threatenedor "suspect," can nevertheless be considered in isolation, as thecore of a disciplinary practice. (189)

In whatever form, literary criticism must not relinquish its uniquepoint of articulation with the social. (191)

To reinforce this latter point, Edwards turns to the work of the blackMartinican poet Monchoachi—"a pseudonym ... the name of aninfamous Maroon who led a violent insurrection against Frenchslavery in Martinique" (191)—active in the creolité movement in theFrancophone Caribbean:

It is suggestive to read Monchoachi's speech [made in 2003 onaccepting the Prix Max Jacob] in juxtaposition to Perloff's, at oncefor his "social interpretation" of the role of poetry, his different callfor a "return," and his implicit departure from some of her framinggestures, perhaps above all her turn to Greek sources as foundationsfor the discipline of poetics. (191)

On the previous page, Edwards spoke of "the unique experimentalcharacter of postcolonial poetics," adding that "[s]till, only a handfulof scholars have begun to theorize the relation between postcolonialityand poetics in a broader sense." That Edwards turns to a Francophonepostcolonial poet, rather than an African American one, andspeaks of the "comparative literature of the African diaspora," ratherthan US ethnic literature, is understandable, given the minefield thatawaits anyone, especially a minority scholar, who dares to invoke theterm "identity" (much less "race or "identity politics") in a US context.This treacherous terrain is a synecdoche of the fraught natureof any discussion about race in the larger national context—even, orespecially, in this "post-race" era.