Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
them more available to other critics.
I came to this project with two strong commitments representing what had until recently been quite divergent traditions. I was first of all committed to the necessity of wide reading in the literary past and to the recovery of many forgotten writers whose work I found of great power and interest. At the same time I was also committed to a poststructuralist doubt about the possibility of actually and literally recovering anything. Neither history itself nor the individual text, I believed, had any meaning apart from the effort to reinterpret them within contemporary historical, social, and intellectual contexts. In the current critical scene it was beginning to be possible to experience these two commitments partly—but only partly—as enjoyably and productively competing, rather than as merely impossibly contradictory. But that has not always been the case.
Until recently, many people engaged in recovering forgotten authors might easily see themselves as doing real, productive, material work that made high theory seem hopelessly self-indulgent or useless. And theorists, in turn, might see themselves as engaged in settling far more universal and intellectually ambitious problems than literary historians were willing to consider. The project of opening up the canon often seemed intellectually and methodologically unreflective and largely untheorized. And indeed for the profession as a whole, to take a simple but rather indicative example, it seemed impossible to imagine someone interested in theory working in a rare book room or a literary archive. While this kind of self-aggrandizing mutual disdain is not flattering to either position, it does not follow that these two traditions could easily be placed in dialogue with one another, let alone combined in any given project. For there were real adjustments to be made and real losses to sustain in viewing either tradition from the vantage point of the other.
Moreover, ingrained defenses and compensations let each tradition seem self-sufficient to its practitioners. From the perspective of a 1960s feminism or a classical Marxism, the project of opening up the canon might seem already sufficiently theorized. The larger narrative into which individual projects might fit was already written in the metanarratives of class or gender oppression. Those narratives would become more persuasive by being proven in local circumstances, and they would as well continue to produce more detailed new accounts of local historical conditions, but neither their capacity to contain further knowledge nor the validity of the narratives themselves were in doubt. Continued elaborate theorizing was to some degree considered either irrelevant or counterproductive. Conversely, high theory had its own convincing social and material investments. It was engaged in rereading either literary or critical texts (and thus disseminating its discourses) and in efforts to terrorize traditional academic disciplines. Its real-world investments thus appeared to be as important as any projects a polemical and self-assured feminism or Marxism could define.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, then, efforts to expand the canon could continue without much interaction with the more abstract: enterprise of pure theory. This situation persisted despite the fact that sophisticated doubt about the objectivity of both textual and historical knowledge was apparent in some quarters as of the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s—as poststructuralism began to replace structuralism; as linguistically experimental French feminism began to be disseminated in the United States; as some British and American feminists began to argue for more complex analyses of the social construction of gender; and as the new Marxism abandoned an unquestioning belief in the master narratives of its predecessors—the certainty that earlier texts could be recovered with their meaning intact became more difficult to sustain. People of course continued to write as if these developments had not taken place, but only by either repressing their responses to the current state of theory or by actively attacking the new theory. There ensued, for example, the regrettable phenomenon of feminists or Marxists committed to historical certainty attacking other feminists or Marxists who were reflecting on the overdetermination of all knowledge.
The spread of a poststructuralist doubt throughout much of contemporary theory should not, however, be taken as successfully superseding everything that preceded it. Theory develops and changes through its own debates and in response to a whole range of historical forces. But conscious or unconscious allusion to a myth of progress in theory is best avoided, not so much because of the truth or falsity of such a myth but because of its effects: its tendency to block self-reflection and critique, to cover over patterns of difference and repression, and to encourage disinterest in the social consequences of theorizing. Other narratives may also simplify but can also do progressive work. Some of the more polemical feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s, including narratives of victimization that effectively (if unintentionally) de-emphasized the need to read women’s writing differentially and in detail, provided exactly what was politically necessary at that moment in time; moreover, these critical works often remain vital today. They are part of the necessary cultural underpinning to feminist work of the 1980s and 1990s. The only serious problem arises when people try to write now as though the last twenty years of intellectual history had not taken place. It is not possible simply to be a 1960s feminist, Marxist, or, for that matter, a 1960s literary historian, without writing a partly reactive prose highlighted with signal resistances, silences, evasions, and anxieties. The certainties of an earlier moment cannot simply be imitated today. Again, it is not that theory has progressed in any straightforward way but rather that it has developed out of its continuing internal dialogue and its negotiation with changing historical conditions. It has not ceased to be blind, but its blindness is differently constituted and serves different strategic ends.
These in any case were some of the issues that seemed relevant to me as I began a study of the modern poetry canon several years ago. The result, paradoxically, is a book that insists on the mediated and constructed (rather than preexisting) nature of all historical knowledge, while setting about on an extensive project of recovering forgotten poems and magazines. Indeed, I was concerned to recover as well a number of material features of the literature of the first half of the century: book jackets and pamphlet covers, illustrated poems from books and magazines, and covers to song sheets and magazines. I frequently urge people to think about what social uses poetry has served in earlier periods, uses that are often different from those it serves in our own. And finally I include seventy pages of footnotes, some devoted to continuing theoretical reflection but many devoted to recovering forgotten information about the lives and careers of the poets I discuss. The index lists about eighty entries devoted to “bio-bibliographical notes.” In short, for a book that argues that texts have no intrinsic meaning, that all history is reconstructed to meet contemporary needs, and that interpretive certainty is unachievable, there seem to be quite a few facts assembled for the reader. That no doubt explains why one reader described the book as “at once postmodern and decidedly old-fashioned.”
Not every reader will recognize this situation as partly paradoxical. Some will recognize no contradiction. Others will see the copresence of historical recovery with poststructuralist doubt as thoroughly disabling, a kind of continual betrayal of one impulse by the other.1 It will not ameliorate but rather exacerbate the problem to acknowledge (as I insist on doing) my own sense that I had to struggle to keep these somewhat competing aims responsive to one another. For the issue remains to decide what status the “facts” I assemble are finally to have. That is not an issue I address directly in the book, though my answer is implicit in my arguments about the interested construction of history and interpretation of texts. I argue at one point that there is no possibility of access to an uninterpreted level of textuality. We cannot jettison our cultural and disciplinary assumptions and psychological needs to perceive some level of sheer uninterpreted textual materiality. If we could do so, the text “in itself,” to echo Derrida, would be nothing more than black marks on a white page. An uninterpreted text would have no meaning at all. The same thing, as Hayden White’s work suggests, is true of the facts historians sometimes see themselves as assembling.2
Facts, of course, are often embedded in interested narratives, but even the decision to assemble a mere list of seemingly neutral facts about an author—birth and death dates, lists of publications—embodies numerous assumptions about how to organize information about the past, what is worth remembering, and what cultural uses people are likely to find for these facts once they are disseminated again. So such facts are in many ways already interpreted when we first see them. The selection and presentation of facts typically embodies implicit narratives about their cultural