The New Belletrism

Style, Fall, 1999 by Jeffrey Williams

"Publicize Your Privates"

This past fall, alongside their stolid fleet of anthologies, Norton released a postcard-sized, surprisingly whimsical book called Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Boyd). Playing off the 1991 bestseller, Life's Little Instruction Book, it gathers nearly four hundred epigrams that parody the sensibility if not tenets of contemporary literary theory (a bubble on the front reads "Po-mo to Go!"), containing lines recognizable to those who might have sat through college courses through the 1990s, especially in the humanities, such as "Perform Your Gender" (presumably referring to the polemic of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) or "Voice Subjugated Discourses" (harkening to the general thrust of postcolonialism). One of the featured epigrams (one of the few that takes up a whole page), #13, is "Publicize Your Privates," referring, one surmises, to the recent turn toward autobiography in literary criticism and the proclivity to mention things like peeing and penises. [1]

I start with this because I think it emblematizes a commonplace view-- commonplace enough to be the object of popular parody--that academic literary criticism in the 1990s has been overtaken by what has variously been called "personal criticism," "autobiographical literary criticism," "confessional criticism," "the new confessionalism," or permutations thereof. [2] That is, the dominant and established mode of literary criticism has moved from the High Theory of the 1970s and 80s, epitomized, say, by Paul de Man or Fredric Jameson, and from its difficult, more densely philosophical or social-scientific, impersonal tenor, language, and style, to the more experiential, subjective, literary tenor and language of autobiography, among other things? Drawing on linguistics, continental philosophy, structural anthropology, and sociology, Theory purported a conceptual depth and precision (the attribution of "rigor" was the highest compliment one could pay to a critical work, "unrigorous" a blunt dismissal), supplanti ng the more appreciative, literary basis of the previously dominant practice of close reading. (Though the New Criticism mandated attention to the formal structures of poetry, it was an avowedly literary form that it sought to identify, and the impetus for that pursuit derived from the tacit appreciation of poetry.) One might recall that, in the early days of the Theory Years, critics sought to encompass literary studies under the banner of the new "human sciences" and saw literary criticism as a central component of the "science of signs." To amend Fredric Jameson's famous motto, the desideratum for that earlier moment might well be summarized as "Always theorize!," whereas now the motto seems to have shifted to "Always personalize!"

This shift is usually regarded as having been inaugurated by Jane Tompkins's 1987 essay, "Me and My Shadow," which renounces the "straitjacket" of the philosophical "apparatus" of the theory-driven criticism that she herself practiced [4] and, in a more informal, suggestive essayistic style, calls for criticism that "would always take off from personal experience" and feeling (Kauffman 126). By the early 1990s, this shift was decisively stamped as "personal criticism" by Nancy Miller in Getting Personal (1991), and concretized in several collections, notably The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism (Freedman et al.; 1993) and Wild Orchids and Trotsky (Edmundson; 1993), which includes essays by established critics such as William Kerrigan, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and the title piece by Richard Rorty. By the later 90s, personal or confessional criticism appeared to have attained full institutional status as a critical movement, one marked by the publication of t he Routledge anthology Confessions of the Critics (1996), edited by H. Aram Veeser, who is best known for his standard collection, The New Historicism (1989), establishing that movement nearly a decade earlier.

Alongside these institutional markers, the personal turn has been most conspicuous in the spate of academic autobiographies published through the 1990s, such as James Phelan's Beyond the Tenure Track (1991), Alice Kaplan's French Lessons (1993), Cathy Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji (1993), Lentricchia's The Edge of Night (1994), Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Colored People (1994), Marianna Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway (1994), William Pritchard's English Papers (1995), Michael B[acute{e}]ru[acute{e}]'s Life as We Know It (1996), Miller's Bequest and Betrayal (1996), bell hooks's Born Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) and Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997), Tompkins's A Life in School (1997), Tobin Siebers' s Among Men (1998), and Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love (l999). [5] What seems especially remarkable about these is that they were written for the most part by people who had significant academic reputations as theorists. For instance, Lentricchia was the author of a seminal document establishing T heory, After the New Criticism (1980), Tompkins a central figure in establishing reader-response theory in her collection Reader-Response Criticism (1980), Gates perhaps the prime figure in establishing African-American literary theory in his collection Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984) and his deconstructively inflected The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988), Miller a prominent representative of second-wave feminism in The Heroine's Text (1980) and Subject to Change (1988), and Sedgwick the formative figure in establishing queer theory, in some sense inaugurated with the publication of her book Between Men (l985). [6] It is also notable that many of these reformed theorists were from that haven of High Theory, Duke University thus seeming synecdochally to represent the institutional turn from Theory to personal writing. [7]