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 Press DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0002

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Critical Discussions

THE HUMANITIES AT HOME WITH THEMSELVES by Mark Bauerlein

hen I started graduate school in English in the early Eighties, a typical thing happened. Those few students with a background in philosophy drifted together, shared inuences, and developed 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 Mans Rhetoric of Temporality, Shoshana Felmans Turning the Screw of Interpretation, and other weighty essays had the status of cutting-edge wisdom, and the hostility deconstruction drew from traditionalists and Marxists in the department only sharpened our commitment. 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 aspirants. In the evenings, after instructing freshmen in comma splices, we gathered to trade Nietszchean epigrams and mock professors who looked 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 the uninformed. This was UCLA, not Yale or Johns Hopkins, and personalities 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.
Philosophy and Literature, 2002, 26: 415431

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As Derrida says . . . , someone always answered, So what? We frowned on arguments from authority. Popularizations such as Jonathan Cullers On Deconstruction earned our scorn. They were one step up from Cliffs Notes, packed with servile observations like Jean Baudrillard wants to take us further, into a world where everything is so textualized that there is no space left for the real. We preferred to understand deconstruction through laborious readings of Being and Time and Beyond Good and Evil, not in watery effusions about textuality or the mechanical pairing of binary oppositions. The latter we placed among the scribes, those well-intentioned professionals canny enough to recognize the broad import of deconstruction, but not acute enough to discern the real meaning of diffrance or the radical disclosure of the ontic-ontological difference. The genius of philosophy, we thought, lay in plumbing the fundamental habits of cognition, like Hegel breaking down 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 Starobinskis book on Rousseau and Kojves lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit. Lower in our rankings were the quasi-Leftist attacks just emerging, such as Frank Lentricchias Criticism and Social Change, which cast theorists as mandarin functionaries treating interpretation as an apolitical game. They lled the page with spiteful terms like the mask of pure reason and righteous declarations like it is wrong to claim that you are 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 nullied activism and justied the status quo. Not that we thought theory bred activism. We just considered them separate activities, and saw no determinate connection between hermeneutical stance and party afliation. However, we accepted the elitist charge. How could ambitious academics avoid elitism? It wasnt hard for graduate students struggling on $900 a month to see that populist attitudes didnt suit the tenured Ivy Leaguer. Professors were paid by exclusive institutions to teach 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 as the 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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such as Andrew Rosss No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture treated literature departments as conservative enclaves blind to the cultural realities 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 voices emerging from popular culture and voices articulating political thoughts and feelings of all sorts, as one book puts it, lay the genuine force of critique, and the academic ideology that excluded them on high culture grounds was but another reactionary strategy. Once again, we conceded the premisethat the university was a high-culture sanctumbut rejected the moral. To speak of academia as a repressive society in relation to mass culture was absurdly disproportionate. Mass culture was an elephantine monster, the humanities a shrinking refuge. Every year students entered our composition classes with less book learning and more MTV/ESPN savvy. To object to literature departments keeping sitcoms and romance ction from the curriculum was to give in to the trend. Ross and others acted as if they were leading a lonely ght against the monolithic power of the Establishment, but in truth they were backed by a tidal wave of media and consumerism. We came 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 to retain the prestige and comfort of academic life. At the bottom of our rankings lay the humanists. We saw them as quaint and tweedy, spouting palaver about literature and life, citing the human condition as if theyd missed the twentieth century. They raised Arnold and Eliot as exemplars, but we fancied them more like the 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 concerns as human beings, but we wondered where they acquired the authority to stand for the rest of humanity. Derrida excited us with ingenious conceptions that denied canons of logic and common sense, and Nietzsche made nihilism into a compelling personal drama. Academic humanists cast learning as a sentimental retreat, in which theorists were cold 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 High Modernist tastes. Leftists slighted their agrarian conservatism, their antipathy to modern industrial society. Many of the theorists we read disdained their Hegelian talk of concrete universals and their Kantian praise of the synthetic imagination. Humanists moaned, By following Brooks and Warren down the New Critical path of tone and tension, we English teachers succeeded in getting life itself, with all its embarrassing features, out of our classrooms. The charges came down to one thing, that the New Critics lifted poems out of historical, political, and social contexts and treated them as independent objects. Theorists, cultural critics, and political commentators wanted to situate texts; the New Critics un-situated them. I. A. Richardss experiments in Practical Criticism were paradigmatic. He handed students poems without title, date, or author, and asked them to respond. In doing so, critics charged, he removed their contextual meaning, their ideological import. The New Criticism operated to put poetry into an elite cultural ghetto, one wrote. It criticized severely poems that were overtly political, a policy that may be attributed to nostalgia for the Old South in a group of men who had strong ties to that particular past. The criticisms didnt impress us, not least because they exaggerated the New Critical inuence on the humanities in 1985. To the assailants, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and the others hovered over literary studies like the ery cherubim guarding Miltons Garden. To us, they were a group of willful theorists from the 1930s and 40s devising cognitive grounds for a discipline of literary criticism, none of which had 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 were open-ended and indeterminate like Tristram Shandy and The Crying of Lot 49. Once in a while a principle like the Intentional Fallacy or the Heresy of Paraphrase made its way into an undergraduate class, but as an idea, not a principle to guide critical practice. Some maintained that New Criticism prevailed in Intro to Lit classes, but in truth students there were taught a formalist mishmash, borrowed as much from genre studies, prosody, rhetoric, and a half-dozen other interpretative realms as from New Criticism. By the late 80s, younger graduate students didnt even bother to open The Verbal Icon or Murray Kriegers summation The New Apologists for Poetry. The ideas had passed, the inuence had waned, so why og them?

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Maybe professors needed to inate the power of the past in order to foment 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 redene literary studies. The New Critics faced a crisis, tooloose historicism, impressionism, no disciplinary standards in the classroomand formulated rules for reading and norms 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 and Ivory Tower privilege, they didnt know what kind of institution should replace them. The changes they proposedopening the canon, making scholarship activistic, legitimating popular culturecountered the distinctions on which the humanities were based. The New Critics were all-too-comfortable with them. Because we had no ambivalence about the institution we were trying to 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 Richardss decontextualization of poems as a classroom experiment, not a political plank. It was and would remain part of the history of criticism, 1930 to 1965, while the Eighties critics, acting on institutional resentment, would pass into oblivion once institutional conditions changed. They relied more on attitude than argument, and each camp had its humor: the popularizers earnestness, the Leftists indignation, the pop culture critics irreverence, and the humanists sentiment. We thought attitude couldnt 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 all 150 English students automatically belonged. Its functions were to send a representative to meetings of the faculty committee on the Ph.D program, to inform students of changes in curriculum, and to communicate student concerns to the Chair. A few got heavily involved, but most of us barely noticed its existence. Nobody thought of it as a political organization. But, apparently, the new leaders of the group that 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 all investments from companies that reaped prots in South Africa. A few spoke about multinational corporations, diamond mines, and Mandela in prison. One blasted the Reagan Administration for ignoring the problems, another cited antiapartheid stands taken on other campuses. It was time to call the UC Regents to account, they pressed, and a published broadside just might shame them into altering their portfolio. One of my friends spoke up. How will the statement be signed? The others hesitated, having learned to mistrust his simple openings. Too often in seminars he had trapped them with disingenuous questions that 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 Graduate Union. But what if some of us dont agree with the editorial? my friend asked. Thats what were here to discuss, she replied. Okay . . . ? There was a pause. One of the more moderate supporters wondered what he didnt like about the statement. I didnt say I didnt like it, he noted. Im 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 dont know but that having companies withdraw from places like South Africa might make conditions worse. Second, were in something of an ambiguous position. Huh? Well, youre demanding that the Regents pull money out of companies invested in South Africa, which sounds ne, but how do you answer outsiders who say, You work for the university, so youre implicated, too? Theyre right! one blurted. Thats why weve got to do this! Several mumbled their agreement. Oh, then, I concluded, if the Regents do nothing, were all going to quit. More silence. The bearded man rose and stepped to the center of the room. Everythings connected, he said slowly, glancing around with a somber regard. Its easy for us to ignore whats going on half-way

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around the world, but everything we do has consequences for everyone else. He looked at us. Thats reality. No, my rst friend corrected with a smile, thats paranoia. Lets calm down, the head of the EGU said. No, another insisted. These companies are making money off of racism, and were gonna try and stop it! Then you better stop drinking that Coke in your hand, my friend observed, and nobody use that xerox machine upstairs anymore. I dont recall how the meeting ended, except that we left it halfannoyed and half-amused. I wanted to dismiss the whole scene as a farce, or to diagnose it as students facing a tight job market and shifting their 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 something sinister in using a tiny student organization to do it. The initiative had no 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. Younger students didnt 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 hopesthey wont work in an institution that thrives on privilege and hierarchy. The Eighties attitude will soon exhaust itself and its ideas will be insufcient to stand on their own. That was our prediction. Of course, our judgment probably had as much to do with student rivalry and our own insecurity as it did with principle. If this is the direction of the profession, we may have calculated, if political affect trumped intellectual devotions, then we could look forward to long 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 little history, who presumed that their little forensic games amounted to scholarly thinking. That was fteen years ago. Our faith that bad attitudes and bad ideas couldnt 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 198795. In a bitter case of cosmic irony, the professors got exactly what they wantedexposure outside the Ivory Towerand 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 lecture titles, all of which enhanced their prestige within academe. But once the public found out, the outcry was startling. Neoconservative rebukes reached the mainstream pressfor instance, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimballs annual reports on the MLA Conventionand professors didnt know how to respond. Having spent their lives communicating with people of similar outlooks within the selective setting of classrooms and symposia, they couldnt understand how anyone but the most benighted reactionary could ridicule their race, class, and gender thematics. As journalists and public gures across the political spectrum echoed the criticisms, professors grew strident. They wrote op-eds comparing themselves to great writers of the past who had undergone public censure. They devised speech codes that legal scholars judged un-Constitutional. They formed panels to complain about their ill treatment. The press didnt buy it, nor did the reading public. They perceived too many ambiguities in the professors position to take their claims at face value. First of all, it seemed that professors were shirking their professional charge. Parents paid $25K a year to have their sons and daughters learn about King Lear, not crossdressing. State legislators disapproved of budgets that supported teachers who schooled students in the evils of U.S. capitalism. Intellectuals who relied on the humanities to impart traditional learning to undergraduates accused the instructors of betraying a public trust. Second, professors claimed to be discerning ideological analysts, yet they displayed a childish navet in public dispute. They played the pater les bourgeois game, then acted dismayed and angry when the burghers shot back. They assumed that their academic status granted them 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 academics professed and the demeanor they bore. They spoke for equality and diversity, and yet they behaved with arrogance and condescension. When they politicized the humanities and enlisted education in the cause of social justice, they involved themselves in wider social policies in which other parties have a rightful say. But academics treated those others as lesser persons. They interpreted all opposition as political and ideological, while in fact most people agreed that some measure of

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multiculturalism in higher education was benecial, that gender roles should be liberalized, and that popular culture had its merits. What defeated academics in the public arena wasnt 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 language riddled with jargon and morally tendentious. Neoconservatives, editors at the Wall Street Journal, researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, and Republican politicians werent the only ones painted as repugnant. They maligned anyone who doubted afrmative action, backed Reagans evil empire speech, was Pro-Life, or praised Great Books programs. Their high-handed judgments convinced nobody, and earned the labels Leftist McCarthyism and Dictatorship of Virtue. Commentators captured those attitudes at their worst, and the reading public made best-sellers out of polemics such as Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal Education. Isolated and harried, humanities professors couldnt sustain their haughtiness, except in secure tenured enclaves. They aimed to be intellectuels engags, but couldnt nd an extramural readership. Without a sustaining public, the attitude imploded, spent itself in repetitious conferences 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 impressed 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 todaya 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 popularizations that sank on our scale of merit, even the fuzzy nostalgias, survivenot 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 Foucaults alliance of truth with subjection as insights to be elucidated. They are bits of humanities principia, certain and secure. Academics wield them

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as casual verities, the patent grounds of cultural critique, and when someone gainsays them, academics merely cite them as salient reminders, as if the poor eccentric had forgotten his copybook. Last fall, novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) caused a stir when he derided Oprahs Book Club after being chosen for inclusion. I feel like Im solidly in the high-art literary tradition, he said, and though Oprah has chosen some worthy books, shes picked enough schmaltzy, onedimensional ones that I cringe. Here is Janice Radway, a professor at Duke, commenting in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Whats interesting is Franzens citing of high-art literature. He seems to be 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 is literature. Over the last 25 years, those categories of high and low have broken down. People who might have defended a literary artist, someone with what are called standards, are not defending him. (30 November 2001)

Pity Franzen. Twenty-ve years out of date, irting with cultural studies but misconstruing the message, abandoned by former defenders. And envy Radway. She knows the difference between old-fashioned and timely, and registers surehandedly the advent of poststructuralism. That all of her points are, to say the least, debatable doesnt shake her condence a bit. She believes that poststructuralism undermined highart conceptions, but the corpus of Derrida, de Man, Lacan, and Said shows them as high-culture devotees. She suggests that cultural studies appropriated the term high-art literary tradition, making its use viable only in a critical mode. She thinks that because academic theorists interrogated the division of high and low in the 70s, the rest of the culture 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 thats that. Poststructuralism changed the world, and theres no going back. Franzens ungrateful remark (which he retracted) is blank ignorance, so that instead of arguing against him, Radway need only mutter the snide seems to be familiar with and the sneering with what are called standards. This is the current forensic. One but recalls the truisms of theory and the morals of critique to dispense with opponents. The provocative declarations of the past have settled into academic lore,

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separating the knowing from the naive. They dont work as tools of argument. Theyre like entrance fees: subscribe to them and you may join the humanities conversation. Of course, every discipline including the sciences has its consensus knowledge, ideas everyone embraces and norms everyone follows. Without a base agreement, inquirers speak at cross-purposes and peer review lacks universal criteria. Only after forging common ideals and goals can practitioners begin to disagree meaningfully. The difference between the humanities and the sciences on this score is that scientists adhere to certain epistemological standards (scientic method), but from there they test hypotheses, pose theories, and dispute results, ferociously winnowing out incorrect and weak ideas. Humanists also enter the eld in accord with select standardsvarious kinds of rectitude and institutional politicsbut from there they labor with a surprising pluralistic tolerance, allowing a swarm of different and contradictory theories and methods to coexist. New historicism, trauma theory, subaltern studies, Althusserian Marxism, cultural studies, neopragmatism, ecocriticism . . . they prosper side by side, untroubled by 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 their commitments in department meetings. They still condemn pre-70s habitsformalism, history of ideasbut toward each other they exercise a temperate respect, an I do what I do and they do what they do custom. Those who persist in disputing whos right and whos wrong nd themselves shunted into alternative groups like the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics or stigmatized as cranks. The hierarchy we prized 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 Scholess The Crafty Reader, recently published by Yale University Press. The book is a model 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 the humanist gush to the populist joys to the anti-New Criticism. The ostensible goal of The Crafty Reader is to promote crafty reading, an artisan-like skill in handling texts. Each chapter takes a different object of readingpoetry, the world (Textual Realities), personal chronicles,

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private-eye novels, science fantasy, a Pauline epistle, a Norman Rockwell paintingand 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 pedagogical imperative few academics would defy. A liberal outlook, a little close reading, some semiotics, a shot of historical context, a touch of French theory, bits of mass culture and even a few Great Books come together with a call for improving the reading habits of literature majors. These form the equipment of craftiness. The scheme is inclusionary, and sometimes 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 their lives (p. 36). He objects to New Critical school-talk, the articial concerns of symbol, tone, and irony (p. 24), but later praises a passage from 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 pages leaps from Allen Tate to Sacco and Vanzetti to Swann in love to cultural studies to Kantian disinterestedness to Brooks and Warrens Understanding Poetry to America Online bulletin boards. Twenty-ve years ago, such elements squared offhere they confederate. The ingredients are derivative, but the attitude is new, post-Culture Wars. Gone is the radical bluster, the provocateur ethos. Instead, Scholes introduces his topics with a pedantic avuncularity. His conclusion reproduces Rockwells painting of Abe Lincoln, then begins: My epigraph is truly graphic, an image rather than a set of words. Let us read it (p. 241). In the chapter on science fantasy he announces, Having established myself as a nontheoretician, I shall now proceed to theorize, boiling a few roses and serving them up as a dish for the crafty reader (p. 184). Fifteen pages later, he repeats, This introduction provides 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). In Scholess rendition, the portentous ideas of radical criticism become the property of all. The world of the hyperreal isnt an exotic posthuman land; 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 is common; it can be learned. . . . This book is about that craft. It is an attempt to explain and embody ways of reading that anyone can learn

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(pp. xiiixiv). Here is the seasoned professor, earnest and expert, administering Seventies theory and Eighties critique as a benign knowledge ready for use. To balance the parts of crafty reading, Scholes maintains a judicious restraint of each. He breaches the high culture/low culture divide, but Without rejecting the notion that some texts are indeed better than others (for some purposes) (p. xv). He plays with critical tools like tone, 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 be right (p. 184). He values Great Books, but deprivileges them: we use this literary training not by expounding the Truth that is to be found in the Great Books but by teaching the craft of reading that we have learned by reading those books and other cultural texts (p. 215). He insists on close reading, but remarks, I see the craft of reading as having denite political implications (p. 217). Scholess moderations reconcile different approaches, make the critical choices less stark. Political criticism is less partisan, theory less abstract, humanism less naive, 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 Southern Baptists 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 human qualities 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 the text precisely as gaps and contradictions, they end up silently lling those gaps with ideological cement (p. 223). Crafty readers know better and are less certainless patrician than the New Critics and less dogmatic than the Christian Rightthe humanities having taught them to suspect the objectivity of the interpreter and the literal meanings of the text. One senses here an ambition to synthesize and solidify the practices of 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 80s a semiotician with a political edge, in the 90s a gender critic and then

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a veteran reecting upon the rise and fall of English. Now, he intends to expel the enemy once and for allformalists and fundamentalists and reconcile diverse humanities strands into a reasonable and engaging multivocal method. It is a worthy goal, for fundamentalism is contrary to the goals of liberal education, and the internal squabbles of professors have damaged higher education and provided fodder for neoconservatives and reporters hungry for bad academic behavior. But the humanities synthesis, Scholess or any other, cannot work, for two reasons. One, the methods and principles Scholes unites into crafty reading do not, in fact, support one anotherthey subvert one another. When they rst appeared from the late-60s onward, they did so antagonistically. Deconstructionists dismantled the Romantic aesthetics of the New Critics, neopragmatists announced an Against Theory program, feminists attacked Harold Blooms masculinist model of inuence, political critics accused de Man of aestheticizing all things, and so on. Early practitioners knew what Scholes ignores, that the premises of respective schools are incompatible. They begin with different denitions 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), so he asks teachers to explore how any particular text connects to life as it is lived (p. 44), to select poets whose poems clearly emerge from and connect to the ordinary events of human life (pp. 3738). But this vision of mundane experience and ordinary life hardly ts the postmodern temper, a mood of ironic skepticism that regards life as fraught with self-consciousness, simulacra, mass delusions, kitsch, and irreverence. To a postmodernist, life as it is lived is just as much an aesthetic formulation as the poem, and the connection between them as arbitrary as the person doing the connecting. Scholes tries to push life in a postmodern direction by insisting that We live in a textual reality (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. Scholess assertions, by their repetitiousness, admit as much. One could say the same about other discrepancies, such as his pop culture enthusiasm for Harry Potter books vs. the cultural-studies distrust 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 acknowledges 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 less strange, 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 all the entangled orders of simulation (Simulations). The passage notes the 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 Baudrillards nal sentence is a shock: The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lota veritable concentration campis total. To cast the parking lot as a concentration camp is either a perverse joke or an insane judgment. Remarkably, Scholess comment overlooks it entirely: We should notice that Baudrillard is not simply another Frenchman trashing America. He likes some of what he sees (p. 83). Draining Baudrillards remark of all political and historical baggage, he interprets the Disneyland 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. Scholes extends Baudrillards vision to Monica Lewinsky and The Truman Show, episodes that highlight the scripted nature of postmodern life. Eager to nd the warp and woof of the cultural text (p. 81), to argue that we live not in a chaotic world of random events but in a world of gures or cultural codes (p. 80), Scholes misses the hatred underlying Baudrillards exuberance. Just before The Crafty Reader was published, Baudrillards animus became quite explicit. It appeared in his notorious article 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 unacceptable to 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 erase it. (Reprinted in Harpers, February 2002)

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One cant help noting the arrogance of a Left Bank intellectual imputing 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 the terrorist attacks, but the step from concentration camps at Disneyland to U.S. world terrorism is a short one. A crafty reader would apprehend Baudrillards loathing at rst sight. But then, if Scholes were to expound the political implications of Baudrillard, he couldnt accommodate him to the life-talk, the populism, and other strains in the book. The humanities synthesis couldnt happen. Scholes extols J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter booksthe 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 English public-school delirium. Limiting Baudrillard to hyperrealism forecloses that critique, and makes him a reliable advocate of crafty reading. The other problem with the synthesis bears upon the antagonism Scholes preserves, that between humanities professors and, together, the New Critics and the fundamentalists. It is hard to believe that after a 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 doesnt even get an entry. A quick glance at any conference program or seasonal book list reveals how remote New Critics are from current practice. So why, yet again, fault them for including only ve women poets in the anthology Understanding Poetry, or for overlooking those who felt ignored or oppressed by the dominant culture (p. 34)? Continuing the attacks suggests that latter-day movements need the New Critics in order to have something to say, forgetting that dening oneself against a long-gone straw man doesnt 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 Biblical texts. Scholes observes, We who live in English departments are by and large a docile group, who would rather avoid conicts with the outside world than engage in them (p. 218). He then declares, we shall have to risk doing so, and proceeds to chide the Southern Baptist Convention and Pope John Paul II for their reading of Ephesians and 1 Corinthians. But in truth, Scholes risks nothing. The chances are slim that 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 community of inquirers, and doing so in a community document, a universitypress publication read only by other professors. He externalizes conict. The bad guys are all in the past or in the church, not in humanities departments. If he wanted to discourage uncrafty reading, Scholes might just as easily have gazed inward and chosen ideological critics, whose moral vision is as rigid as the Southern Baptists; deconstructive critics, whose acts are as predictable and derivative as any church choirs; or race, class, and gender critics, who prefer group advocacy, promoting this congregation and that. But Scholes wont chastise his own. 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