Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
social effects are, the discipline came under a distinctly different and more threatening kind of intellectual pressure.
But literary studies for decades had used twin strategies for containing threats to its core politics of interpretation. The first was to harness theory primarily to immanent textual analysis. The second was to turn any body of theory with broad and unsettling disciplinary implications into a subspecialization cut off from any general dialogue with the discipline. A series of potentially revolutionary theories had been tamed in this way, and the analysis of disciplinarity itself would prove no different. Soon it became a field, an isolated area of research, a specialization with, paradoxically, no pressing claims on the discipline’s general attention. Gerald Graff warns against the intellectual containment built into mutually exclusive subspecializations. For all practical purposes his own warning, however, has itself been contained, classified within the subspecialization of disciplinary history.
Similar fates had befallen most of the radical skepticisms with potential to throw the discipline into serious self-scrutiny. The first modern body of theory to be contained in this way was psychoanalysis, which in the 1950s traded disciplinary accommodation for any potential to challenge the false and unreflective rationality that still pervaded professionalized interpretation. In effect, psychoanalytic critics agreed to act like experts in a specialized method with no psychodynamic claims about how literary interpreters practiced their craft. They gave up at once their theory’s inherent potential for self-analysis and for general disciplinary analysis and critique. Many also found ways to accommodate notions of unconscious motivation with sacralized models of the literary text.
Beginning in the previous decade and mounting with furor in the 1950s, the other existing body of theory with similarly disruptive structural potential—Marxism—was scandalized and largely cast out of the American university. But it would eventually establish among its warring traditions its own ways to revere literariness and thus accommodate much of its interpretive practice to disciplinary norms. Its larger politics, however, would remain a threat, so Marxism would be ruthlessly marginalized until the 1970s. As for its capacity for self-reflection and self-critique, Marxism would have to abandon its fantasmatic claims to scientificity before serious self-scrutiny could become widespread.
In the 1970s, however, another body of theory arrived with greater purchase on the American academy. I refer of course to contemporary feminism, which spread from the public sphere to academia in the mid- to late 1970s and became massively influential in the 1980s. Out of necessity, feminism kept literary studies and the institutions of academia at a distance in its first years. Its early focus on exposing the patriarchal bias in canonical writers prevented it from sacralizing literary texts. Meanwhile, discrimination against women meant that feminists had to fight to find academic employment; that maintained disciplinary critique as a high priority. But by the mid-1980s those patterns had begun to change. Feminists had begun the long and immensely fruitful rediscovery and reinterpretation of forgotten texts by women; that has been tremendously beneficial to the discipline and the culture, but an unexpected side effect has been to install in feminism its own version of literary reverence. Simultaneously, the number of women gaining academic employment began to reach a critical mass in many departments. Though not wholly co-opted, feminism by the early 1990s was securely institutionalized in many places, from departments to publishers’ lists. It was no longer a place to look for foundational critiques of academic institutions that would extend beyond gender to the whole range of their constitutive discourses and practices.
Meanwhile, through all these changes, traditional scholars had a place to retreat to, a conceptual and methodological ground they could call their own in the face of theory’s multiple onslaughts. That place was history, literary history to be specific, and it was more or less what everyone else claimed to be doing while theories multiplied and gained adherents. By the late 1980s, however, this last redoubt began to crumble. History, long little more than an unreflective site on which to stage period-based literary idealization, began to be theorized. Unproblematic and generous in its rewards for decades, history began to be a site for theoretical reflection. Those who resisted the theory revolution now had no presentable territory to call their own, so they retreated into exceptionalist platitudes about the transcendence of art.
The increasing theorizing of history was an overdetermined change. The reverberations of the expanded canon—pressed by feminists, Afro-Americanists, and scholars on the Left—had a cumulative effect on our confidence in a belief that cultural memory could be disinterested and comprehensive. Textuality, a nervous site of uncontainable meanings, began to encompass all sorts of purportedly nonliterary historical documents. Fresh enterprises like the New Historicism, initially centered in Renaissance studies, came to have wider influence. And the field of theory of history, contained by its own larger discipline in much the same way as literary studies contained its threatening subspecializations, slowly attracted readers in other departments. Meanwhile, fields like anthropology and sociology were undergoing their own crises of confidence. For all these reasons literary historiography could no longer protect itself from the ravages of theory.
By the late 1980s, therefore, a new development in English studies had coalesced enough to have a name—the return to history. Volatile and changeable for two decades, the discipline—or at least a portion of it—was making yet another foray into a new identity and set of commitments. This time, however, the change was heralded by many as a return to an earlier preoccupation. And so the name stuck, at least for a time. I remember some of my older colleagues remarking with satisfaction (and wary camaraderie) my own return to history. No doubt similar conversations and moments of unexpected recognition across a generational divide took place elsewhere in the country.
By the mid-1990s, however, history’s handshake could not so easily be extended across the abandoned battlefields of the profession. In its new incarnation, the older generation began to realize, history as they knew it was pretty much spoiled. For years, history, not patriotism, had been the last refuge of the discipline’s antitheoretical scoundrels. It was what they did, what they stood for, the rich, material ground they invoked against the lemming-like rush from theorist to theorist that seemed to mark the enthusiasms of the young.
There were counterclaims for history from theorists in those days, but they remained atypical. “Always historicize,” cried Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious in one of the 1980s’ most famous opening salvos. Oddly enough, to the extent he believed in Marxism’s predictive powers, he partly meant to invoke principles that a Catholic bishop might have welcomed—focus on mankind’s ultimate destiny in interpreting a mutable world; ask where all of us are (and should be) heading; what telos is hidden in the trials of local time? Of course Jameson and the prelate would have different stories to tell about history’s trends and ultimate meaning, but both would prove equally principled and confident in their application. What Jameson did not mean by asking us always to historicize was to seek a contextualization so radical and relative that no universal generalizations about human history could be made.
A decade later it was clear the return to history had gone back to the past without any guarantees about its meaning. Now history was as slippery as textuality, and that was not what traditional literary historians had in mind. “History” indeed seemed yet one more phase in the shape-changing story of contemporary theory. Of course it was more than that for many; its materiality was elaborately recovered and treasured by many involved in the return to history. But that was not enough to relieve the burden of a history without guarantees.
One final turn of the wheel of theory delivered the possibility of an end to literary studies as we knew it—the belated arrival of cultural studies on the American scene. For cultural studies threatened to import into the English curriculum a whole range of objects not only outside literariness but also outside any plausible account of the aesthetic. The underlying basis of literary studies’ high cultural prestige might be lost. Moreover, that was not the only threat. The whole notion of a discipline with consensual boundaries was in doubt. Unrepresentable in their entirety in any single department, the range of new objects attracting interpretive interest in cultural studies might simply overwhelm the study of literary texts.
One interesting result of these two developments—the arrival of a selfconsciously theorized historiography and the rise of cultural studies in America—was