I haven't been much good for anything today, fending off a semi-migraine—but I'm catching up on some blog reading I've missed, and want to point to this post ("Radical Literary Theorists") of Henry Farrell's on Crooked Timber. It's about The Valve, the new lit-crit group blog with CT affiliations, about criticism of its surprisingly right-wing organizational provenance, and about what it might mean to want academic literary study to make a place for itself in the wider public discourse.

I have one or two things to add to the discussion, and will, when (and as) I can collect my thoughts. (And I've paid scant attention to The Valve so far, and I really need to look in to get a sense of what they think their practice is.) For now, I'm just going to gesture: this, from Henry, resonates—he quotes Scott McLemee (writing on Saul Bellow) about the state of "anxious low-grade misery" that seems endemic in the literary academy, and adds:

An "anxious kind of low-grade misery," which is connected directly to the conditions of production in the academy. If you don’t produce work which fits a certain set of professional criteria, you aren’t going to get tenure. However, these criteria have perverse consequences. You spend your life studying work which you aren’t supposed to enjoy on its own terms; too high a degree of enthusiasm is anathema, unless it’s couched in political or critical terms that disconnect the value of the text from the text itself ... You aspire to a certain vision of literary studies as politics – but are aware (have to be aware) that your profession is almost entirely disconnected from politics as it is practiced in everyday life. You simply don’t have much to say that’s politically useful. It’s a particularly unpleasant version of Weber’s “iron cage.”

I don't think it's riding the theory horse too hard to note that Henry's appeal to the value of "the text itself," or the proposition that enjoyment "on its own terms" (what terms are those?) might be a meaningful ground of professional literary study, won't bear much scrutiny. Nevertheless, as I said, this resonates, particularly in its awareness of a kind of self-thwarting political idiocy in the literary academy. (I can't think of "literary study as politics" without a little vision in my head of my last Marxist Literary Group cash bar—if your head doesn't explode at the thought of a Marxist cash bar—at the MLA, all the chic, pomo types in knots practicing their cooloer-than-thou ...)

Do yourself a favor, if this is the sort of thing that interests you, and read all the way through the comments thread. Great stuff—exactly the reason blogs have comments, to promote this kind of argument. Damn if there isn't a flow to it: watch as Cultural Revolution (whose critical post on The Valve's relation to the anti-MLA Association of Literary Scholars and Critics got the whole ball rolling) starts spraying hits around in the middle innings, giving every appearance that the visitors have the game in hand. But then Timothy Burke comes back with a couple of well-timed knocks, and the Big Mo swings back to the home side! I won't even attempt to summarize the play, but it's fun to watch.

posted by michael  11:11:18 PM  
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