The Academicization of Literature

Inventing Literature 

(This essay originally appeared in American Book Review.)

In his book In Plato’s Cave, Alvin Kernan describes a career crisis that he no doubt shared with many other literary scholars of his generation:

The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal perfection of the literary text, and the belief that literature was a central pillar of culture—these foundations of Literature were all crumbling. . .Fine poems and novels were still being written, but somehow they no longer became Literature.

Kernan’s lament for what in an earlier book he called “the death of literature” has been echoed often enough over the last decade (most loudly perhaps in John M. Ellis’s 1997 book Literature Lost), but the elegiac tone of his remarks suggest a resigned rather than a combative attitude toward the passing of the old order of literary study in which men like himself were entrusted with shoring up the “foundations of Literature.” In Plato’s Cave is Kernan’s attempt to account for his career in academe, but ultimately he is willing to cede the ground to those, by now a majority, who no longer share his assumptions about the status of literature and the role of literary study.

Now that the battle between the defenders of capital-l literature and the partisans of the iconoclastic styles of scholarship identified with what has come to be called cultural studies does indeed seem to be over, the outcome decidedly in favor of the latter, what seems most striking about comments like those just quoted is the clearly implicit association, as if it didn’t need to be stated, between literature broadly conceived as verbal works of art—poems and novels—and the academic study and analysis of literature. All of the features Kernan ascribes to “literature,” such as the unique formal elegance of the literary text, are actually the products of academic theories about literature, meant to foster a certain kind of literary criticism and to facilitate classroom instruction. So accustomed are we now to thinking of literature as the subject identified  by that name in the curricula of various university departments, primarily the English department, that it is almost impossible to use the term as a way of describing specific works outside of that context. And this, of course, applies as much to the currently trendy styles of criticism and scholarship as to the old-fashioned kind of literary scholarship practiced by someone like Alvin Kernan. If anything, the champions of cultural studies are even more dependent on the exclusive right claimed by the academy to the brand name Literature—their work would be almost unintelligible without an academic literary establishment to rebel against in the first place, and the new scholarship, at least that which seeks to historicize and politicize our notions of the literary, would itself hardly be sustainable if the idea of capital-l literature were simply to be abandoned.

Even though Alvin Kernan and other like-minded literature professors were largely unable to separate an appreciation of imaginative writing from the disciplinary imperatives of academic literary study, they nevertheless generally spoke of the qualities they most admired in works of literature as qualities that inhered in the works themselves, had clearly always been considered the salient characteristics of great literature, not as creations of the very discourse these professors had adopted for their own professional purposes. It is true that the urgently serious, at times even ponderous, approach to the “canon of great books” and much of the critical lexicon of the mid-century academic literary establishment were filtered through the writings of such poet-critics as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom, but by far the most significant development in the practice of literary criticism in the twentieth century was the investment of authority over literary matters in the figure of the academic critic, from such celebrated members of the order as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Northrop Frye to current critics such as Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler, around whom is still draped some vestige of this authority, however ragged it has become. To the company of so eminent and formidable a group of “scholars” as this, no mere literary journalist or, worse, lowly book reviewer need apply: criticism would no longer be in the hands of the ink-stained wretches, namely writers, but would become almost entirely transformed into the job description of a professional class of literary experts.

As someone who once sought admittance to this class, who still considers it at its best to have embodied an attitude toward literature well worthy of respect and to have  produced a body of scholarly work both present and future readers should continue to find entirely useful, I do not believe that the assumption of such expertise on the part of literature professors was necessarily self-interested or carried out in bad faith. By and large, the institution of literary study as administered from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s was dedicated to admirable goals, even if those goals—broadly speaking, to help provide students with a modicum of a liberal education, more specifically, to advance knowledge about the nature and history of literature and provide instruction to those interested in the formal analysis of literary texts—melded uneasily, if at all, with the overall curriculum of the university, which has always reflected American society’s intensely practical philosophy of education. Like any institution, however, it came to regard its established practices as settled and incontestable (how else to go about studying literature?), and when doubting Thomases did indeed begin to speak out from within its own ranks, the response from what came to be regarded as the old guard was at first dismissive, later mostly incredulous, and finally simply enraged.

Kernan’s The Death of Literature (1990), comes from the second stage in the academic literary establishment’s response to the new ways of thinking about literature and its place in the academic curriculum. So mystified does he seem in this book by the assault on the literary values that once seemed to need no defense that he really offers none, propounding instead the idea that the era of what he calls “romantic and modernist literature” has simply passed, that literature itself as we have known it for the past 200 years or so has ceased to be relevant. In neither The Death of Literature nor  does Kernan seem able to admit what his analysis and experience clearly show: that Literature is a product of the academic environment in which it has been defined and scrutinized since national literatures became respectable subjects of academic study early in the twentieth century—that professors like himself deserve most of the credit, or the blame, for inventing Literature in the first place.

Thus what drives Alvin Kernan and his generational cohorts crazy is not just that the discipline they helped to build has fallen so easily into the hands of a new breed of scholar who question the integrity of what was built, with furthermore an insufficient appreciation of the ramifications of this development on the part of college administrators or the public at large, but that what may have been their greatest achievement, the  creation of a fascinating cultural artifact out of old books, poems, and play scripts has lost so much of its luster as to be no longer recognizable. Because most of them found their way into the discipline out of a genuine belief in the importance of these texts (In Plato’s Cave succeeds in affirming this impression), their dismay at witnessing a decline in respect for the great books must be taken as sincere, although it is tempting to judge their enmity toward the currently dominant forms of scholarship as largely a case of professional resentment. Their failure to understand their own role in summoning Literature into being at all, however, making it almost inevitable that its exalted status would come to be challenged, is less easy to justify.

A succinct statement of the way capital-l literature was constructed as an essentially academic subject is provided in another book, John M. Ellis’s Literature Lost. Against the “utilitarian” view of education held by many in American society, the professors responded with an alternative, although not incommensurate, view, according to Ellis:

The standard defense of the humanities. . .was that humanistic education provided all kinds of rewards, but the least important [emphasis mine] was the enrichment of our leisure through great literature and the arts. The most weighty arguments were that the  humanities enabled us to see ourselves in perspective, to become more enlightened citizens, and to think more deeply about important issues in our lives. A society of people educated not just for a vocation but for full and intelligent participation in a modern democracy would be a far better and happier society—so ran the argument—and this overriding social usefulness of humanistic education compensated for its not leading directly to a means of earning one’s living.

It is hard to imagine that many of the writers who actually left us with what Ellis would accept as “great literature” could have used language like this to describe their own sense of what their work was meant to accomplish. (Especially surprising would be the suggestion that the “enrichment of our leisure” should be at the bottom of our list of expectations of poems, plays, or novels.) Not even Matthew Arnold, perhaps the first great literary critic to postulate the existence of capital-l literature in anything like the terms delineated here by Ellis, could really have envisioned a formal course of literary  study with ambitions quite like these. The extent to which the notion of “great literature” has been transformed into an entire system of interlocking texts is manifestly clear when Ellis further remarks that “[t]he body of enduring literary and philosophical books of the Western tradition is. . .a remarkable set of fascinating struggles with problems and issues. Always prominent is the conflict and competition between the ideas and vision of one writer and those of others, and there is often a high degree of self-criticism.”

John Ellis believes that literature has been “lost” because this system is no longer taken for granted. Unlike Alvin Kernan, who ultimately seems mostly wistful about the dismantling of the system that once sustained him, Ellis is one of those compelled to vent his rage over what has happened. All of the usual suspects—multiculturalists, deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists—are brought forth and denounced for their apostasy, their refusal to acknowledge the supreme authority of Literature, and by the end of the book Ellis has in effect declared that with the overthrow of the traditional Western Literature syllabus, civilization itself is nearing its end. While some of his analyses of current scholarly methods and classroom practices are cogent enough (he is right in claiming that what passes now for literary study in many of the elite colleges and universities is little more than crude political posturing), Ellis is even less able than Kernan to imagine works of literature being read and appreciated outside the academic walls he has helped to put up, much less to think of literature as a still vital activity carried on by living fiction writers, poets, and playwrights. That he finally lays the blame for the perceived affront to the dignity of Literature on affirmative action, both in admissions and faculty hiring, only underscores the impression that for literature professors like John M. Ellis, the “body of enduring literary and philosophical books” properly belongs to a select group of academics teaching a similarly select group of compliant students suitably grateful for the honor.

In arguing that those currently in charge of literary study in American universities have banished, killed, or otherwise discredited literature, however, Kernan, Ellis, and company misleadingly suggest the new literary scholarship no longer accepts the academic concept of capital-l literature and its attendant history. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature remains a significant category in scholarly publishing, and most of the books published in this category do little to challenge the legitimacy of the underlying idea—especially not those books that explicitly claim to question the “hegemony” of canonical literature. Take, for example, Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1998). Radway presents her study of what might be called the book club aesthetic as an alternative to the conventional kind of literary analysis that emphasizes “intricacy, subtlety, and complexity.” Radway’s problem with “serious” literature, especially the more formally complex works of modern literature, is their lack of immediate accessibility:

The books that came to me as high culture never seemed to prompt the particular shudder, the frisson I associated with the books of my childhood, because they carried with them not mere promise alone, but also a threat, the threat that somehow I might fail to understand, might fail to recognize their reputed meaning and inherent worth. I developed, as a consequence, an aloof, somewhat puzzled relationship to “Literature” and to the ways of reading required and rewarded in my graduate seminars.

Radway clearly wants us to believe that the sort of book traditionally offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club (the sort that might excite in its reader the “shudder, the frisson”) deserves the same kind of respect as those books associated with “high culture,” but no one reading A Feeling for Books could conclude that its author advocates giving up either the class of books she learned to regard as Literature or the modes of analysis the study of such books gave rise to in the academy. For one thing, it is only in opposition to high-brow notions of literature that the competing notion of the middlebrow that informs Radway’s account of the Book-of-the-Month Club can even be formulated.

Paradoxically, those who most want to topple literature from its high culture pedestal are obliged to keep it fixed there in order to extol the equal value of popular or non-canonical forms of writing. Further, Radway’s chosen critical method could not be more immersed in the conventions of the academic style. Indeed, the dense and jargon-choked middle section of A Feeling for Books (a laborious examination of her subject’s “ideological position”) seems to presume a reader at least as specialized as any unrepentant formalist, and Radway doesn’t really invalidate qualities such as “intricacy, subtlety, and  complexity” as standards by which to appraise some forms of expression. Instead, she simply elevates what seems a question of taste—a preference for poetry and fiction that are more emotionally direct, that provoke the “shudder, the frisson”—to a level of purported theoretical reflection that itself manifests a formidable degree of complexity.

Despite the inability, or unwillingness, of writers like Janice Radway and John Ellis to inquire into their own deep-seated and mutually unexamined assumptions, it is nevertheless certainly true that literature as an academic subject has been radically transformed in most upper-tier colleges and universities, and its survival in something resembling its orthodox form in some lower-rung schools is not likely to save it from eventual obsolescence. As traditionalists like Kernan and Ellis maintain, literature has lost the respect it once enjoyed from those devoted to its study, and it is not likely to regain that respect any time soon. And, as radicals like Radway would have it, capital-l literature has been promulgated with at best an overly reverent solemnity, at worst a kind of smug elitism that made the appearance of A Feeling for Books and similar rebellious efforts wholly predictable. However, while I could agree with the radicals that the institution of literary study came to be enveloped in an atmosphere of pretension and self-satisfaction, their current occupation of the grounds has hardly been an improvement.

Only if one accepts that literature and the academy are linked in some necessary and unavoidable way will one also feel that Literature’s fall from academic grace is quite the catastrophe the traditionalists make it out to be, however, or that its influence had to be counteracted in the name of other causes one values more highly. Once this link is broken, Literature ceases to be, and the forms of writing that have long been held hostage to it—“fine poems and novels”—would then no longer be subject to any of the agendas academic scholars and critics bring to the discipline-based study of capital-l literature. I am convinced that this would be the best possible outcome of the curricular wars, both for the survival of those older works that once formed the core of the academic canon and for the work of living writers, which has generally either been considered unworthy of attention at all or otherwise made the objects of the most politicized, coarsest forms of analysis. Freed from the pomposities and prejudices of the literature professors, perhaps the books that have been drained of interest to all but those who want to believe in Literature can find the audience they still deserve, and, more importantly, perhaps even  small-l literature might continue to be a meaningful term, especially if it were used to describe a continuum of “literary” activity that, if anything, privileged contemporary writers whose work is able to extend and replenish the genres comprising what can truthfully be called an enduring tradition of imaginative writing.

Cutting the ties that have kept literature bound to the academy could in addition have the salutary effect of reviving literary criticism as part of the potential renewal of an authentic literary culture apart from the enervating influence of the academic critics. While some may question whether the United States has ever had, or ever really could have, a literary culture worthy of the designation, certainly the invention of Literature has proved to be at best a synthetic substitute. One could easily conclude from the lively coverage of the literary scene by web-zines like Salon, from the multitude of other literary e-zines publishing book reviews and critical commentary, as well as original creative work, from the proliferation across the country of book discussion groups, that an interest in small-l literature persists among non-academic readers, that were the remaining superstructure supporting academic Literature to collapse entirely from its own dead weight (there are reasons to believe this is happening—see Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English), a more finely-tuned, less grandiose kind of literary criticism would soon enough emerge from its ruins. Such criticism might even be practiced by many of the would-be critics who currently regard academe as the only plausible option for anyone who takes literature seriously; professional without being professionalized, this sort of criticism would ideally combine an immediacy of response not often to be found in even the best academic criticism with an ability, developed through simple attentiveness, to contextualize and to read closely, as surely any seriously conceived and executed attempt at literary art deserves.

It is certainly possible, of course, that nothing like what I am describing here will ever come to pass. Capital-l literature will continue, in however debased and beleaguereda form, as the self-claimed domain of academic “experts,” and non-academic criticism will remain a scattershot affair, confined to routine book reviews in the usual periodicals, at best to the websites and journals most committed to the informed discussion of new writing. It is even possible that what we now call literature will simply vanish into the virtual ether of cyberspace, recognized only as an artifact of intellectual history, if at all.

Such a fate seems to me almost inevitable, in fact, if those who retain an interest in the possibilities of literature (small-l) hold on to the assumption that the responsibility for ensuring its survival lies with the academy. The folly of this assumption cannot now be more apparent. Fine poems and novels are still being written, and we can only hope they never become Literature.

Creative Writing and Literary Study

(This essay first appeared in RE: Arts and Letters.)

In his essay "Creative Writing and Its Discontents" (The Writer’s Chronicle, March/April 2000), D. W. Fenza defends university creative writing programs against what he considers the distressingly widespread assumptions that they contribute to a kind of "dumbing down" of literary culture and that they lack the rigor necessary for them to be truly valuable parts of a university curriculum, much less to produce significant new writers. Unapologetically partisan on behalf of creative writing as an academic discipline, Fenza marshals together all of the arguments (which he presents in a 13-point list for added emphasis) that can be, and generally have been, offered as justifications for including creative writing in the curriculum, although one would have thought that these justifications had long since carried the day in practical terms, since it seems highly unlikely that any prominent colleges or universities will very soon seek to abolish their programs, either on the undergraduate or graduate levels. After all, it is the very popularity of creative writing in American colleges that to a large extent has prompted the criticisms Fenza seeks to refute.

Fenza seems especially sensitive to the charge, in this case made from within the profession itself, that creative writing programs pay insufficient attention to the career prospects of their students, that they merely exploit the vanity and ambitions of these students without preparing them realistically for the exigencies of the literary marketplace or enabling them to pursue more reliable professional goals. As Fenza paraphrases one such challenge to the integrity of creative writing, David Radavich’s "Creative Writing in the Academy (in MLA’s Profession 1999), "writers in the academy should earn traditional Ph.Ds and become more like scholars." This is undoubtedly an oversimplification of Radavich’s argument (as Radavich indeed insists it is in a reply to Fenza in the September 2000 issue of Writer’s Chronicle), but the tension between a view of creative writing as a service to literature and a view of it as a service to the academy surely does inform the analysis of the role of creative writing offered by both Fenza and Radavich. Unfortunately, while both writers maintain, sincerely, no doubt, that the future of literature is their ultimate concern, neither is actually able to separate the continuity of "literature" from its current status as primarily an academic "subject." Fenza sees the future of literature as continuing to be closely bound to the study of literature as part of the academic curriculum; he merely wishes to see creative writing survive, on its own terms, as a branch of the literary curriculum. Radavich also does not envision the abandonment of creative writing by academe; he wishes to see it become more like other disciplines, with even closer ties to the academy, which he believes will help ensure its survival. To this extent, the conflict between D. W. Fenza and David Radavich amounts to a struggle over how best to define "creative writing" so that it continues as a viable subject within the university.

I would like to suggest in this essay that if the long-term vitality either of creative writing or of literature as a whole is truly at issue here, then neither of the sides in this skirmish presents a very defensible position. Fenza, who correctly points out the way in which the English department, through the rise of what he simply calls "theory," has increasingly foregone the teaching of literature as a subject of humane learning, does not advocate the severing of ties with this department, even though the metamorphosis of English into a radicalized branch of sociology has done more harm to the image of literary study, a part of which Fenza wishes creative writing to remain, than any of the "cultural pundits" he cites could ever have done on their own. Fenza proposes instead that creative writing serve as a kind of counterbalance to theory in today’s English department—its heart as opposed to the pure intellect provided by theory—and that exposure to both would ideally give students a more fully satisfying literary education. Radavich, in calling for creative writing to integrate itself even more fully into the current academic structure, would presumably have the boundaries separating creative writing courses from the rest of the literature curriculum reduced, thus blurring the distinctions that can still be made between instruction in the art of writing fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction and instruction in the finer points of scholarly and critical analysis.

It is not that both Fenza and Radavich are entirely misguided in their analyses. Creative writing does now allow students to cultivate a more agreeable, less mediated relationship with literature, whether or not all students go on to become successful writers themselves. Certainly it does not produce graduates trained to be hostile to the very idea of literature. Further, I do not think Radavich is wrong in at least implying that creative writing and the study of literature could more comfortably inhabit the same professional space, even that the perceived divide between the goals of the creative writing class and those of the literature class might be bridged. But the cause of creative writing will not finally be helped, nor ultimately will an idea of literature of the sort creative writing needs to maintain a coherent identity even likely itself survive, as long as the latter continues in most cases simply as a "major" attached to, and dependent on, the English department. The problem here cannot be construed as primarily administrative; additional autonomy, especially on the graduate level, to define goals or set standards without accompanying curricular control would be no solution to what is finally more than an academic problem. In my opinion, creative writing programs need increasingly to be fashioned not merely as literature’s branch of applied knowledge but as the very center of debate about, inquiry into, and, yes, instruction in literature itself.

This would mean that everyone who shares the ideals to which Fenza appeals, as well as everyone who understands, as does Radavich, the rules of engagement that obtain in the new corporate university (whether they approve of them or not) would need to begin anticipating the day when the study of literature as it has been known in the post-World War II era has undeniably become a relic of that era. Although the process whereby literature ceases to be seen as a legitimate academic subject in its own right is already well advanced, attempts are still made by those who speak for the disciplinary establishment (the MLA, for example) to deny that college literature courses no longer focus on "the literary" in any constructive way, indeed that the very concept has been discarded when not actively reviled. Such denials are somewhat peculiar, since no one, either among those thus spoken for or among those whose criticisms elicit such responses in the first place, believes they are offered with any sincerity, much less believes them to be true. In any case, the need to keep hiding behind Literature will almost certainly be short-lived, mostly because the constituency for a curriculum based on the serious study of literary art has never been very large, and should the literature curriculum finally give way to a curriculum explicitly labeled "cultural studies," whatever minimal outrage that could be mustered on behalf of literary study will already have been spent.

Could creative writing survive the final collapse of the structural supports propping up the study of literature in American universities? In my view, there is very little reason to believe that it could, at least not if it simply continues to assume its present form. As Fenza’s own brief history of creative writing in the academy demonstrates, the rise of creative writing closely parallels the rise of literary study itself—that is, literary study as the study of literature for its own sake, rather than as a source of philological or other purely historical inquiry. Unfortunately, creative writing came to have the same relationship to the "real" literature curriculum that literary study had once had to philology: such courses were regarded by the literature scholar as less serious, less important to the mission of the university, and were at best tolerated as courses that might help recruit students into the English department, where they would still be required to take the more rigorous courses that defined literary study as an academic discipline (and that were taught by these scholars, of course).

Creative writing’s status as literary study’s wayward cousin may have involved more than a little condescension and even outright ill-will, but it could be said that their uneasy coexistence nevertheless benefited both—literary study through the enhanced enrollment just mentioned, and creative writing through an association with the discipline entrusted with the professing of literature, which until recently did manage to project an aura of seriousness in whose reflected glow creative writing programs could shine sufficiently that they were on the whole not regarded as either purely vocational (as essentially an extension of arts-and-crafts) or as opportunities for students merely to satisfy personal vanity or indulge in aimless subjectivity.

This aura has palpably faded. Although literature professors continue to take themselves seriously indeed (it is hard to imagine a species of literary scholarship more humorless than what goes by that name today), the public image of the English faculty has been tarnished beyond restoration. For a while the abandonment of interest in literature as it was traditionally studied met with some resistance and statements of concern. Now the English department is more likely to be considered as a national joke, an object of ridicule and derision. To persist in an already unequal partnership under these circumstances is likely only to inflict collateral damage on the reputation of creative writing and ultimately sacrifice whatever chance remains to salvage the good name of literature itself. It is clear that the literature curriculum, which for the past half century has been seen as essentially identical with the very mission of the English department, is no longer in the hands of people who regard its integrity as something to be protected. But without such a curriculum in some form, creative writing programs would hardly be tenable, deprived as they would be of the context and the history without which "creative writing" becomes a fundamentally empty concept.

What specifically, then, could be done to avert such an outcome? If nothing else, creative writing faculty members should forcefully oppose the belittlement of literature in English departments—and, in fact, if anecdotal evidence can be trusted, there is actually reason to believe this is to some extent taking place. While relations between creative writing professors and "regular" literature faculty have never been particularly congenial, it seems fair to say that at present the conceptual and procedural differences between the two have never been more pronounced. The former still believe in the relevance of literature, the latter do not. The former still consider the identifiably "literary" qualities of the writing they teach to be their true subject, and the latter do not. Perhaps simply by holding on to these beliefs, creative writing faculty and students can lead by example in making a case for the serious consideration of literary art within the university.

But unfortunately this would not be a truly decisive victory. If simply allowing literary art itself to flourish is the object, it is difficult to see why maintaining its presence in the university alone would be considered any kind of victory at all. Unless we have come to the point of conceding that literature cannot flourish outside the university—that in order for it to survive in modern American culture it had to be transformed into Literature, presided over by a self-selected caste of academic masters—why would it be thought important that literature even in a diminished state had managed to hold on to a neglected piece of ground inside the walls of academe? The initial advocates of including literary study in the college curriculum were able to carry the day by arguing that literature deserved its place in the curriculum because of its own inherent value to those who thus encountered it; that literary study could also enhance the appeal and credibility of academe might be a secondary benefit, but the elevation of the academic over the literary, an allegiance to the academic per se, was certainly not part of the original vision.

Because creative writing programs almost necessarily continue to maintain an allegiance to literature, creative writing can potentially serve as the agent charged with preserving its integrity within the academy and in the process ensure its own survival as a discipline devoted to developing and promoting contemporary prose, poetry, and drama. However, to accomplish these related goals would require ambitions more expansive that those expressed by Fenza and less purely utilitarian than those informing Radavich’s account. Yet, the justification for broadening the horizons within which we may view the proper boundaries of creative writing is provided by both writers, who might after all be said to share a common understanding of the potential of creative writing when its goals are conceived more comprehensively. Fenza maintains that "the study of literature is simply incomplete without creative writing, just as the study of creative writing is incomplete without the scholarship and appreciation of the great literature of the past. The literature of the past can seem remote and irrelevant without the controversies of contemporary letters to animate it, just as contemporary letters can be shallow and vain without a knowledge of the older legacies of literature." Radavich, for his part, believes that "[a]ny creative writing course worth its enrollment needs to teach reading, critical thinking, and awareness of historical context, as well as the particulars of form and evocative expression." Both are surely right, and perhaps both would further come to agree that rather than creative writing continuing to seek a modus vivendi with literary study as administered by an English department that at the very least has proven itself inherently mercurial, it would be more productive to incorporate within creative writing a curriculum of literary study of its own—to in effect take from English some of the kinds of literature courses that were once at the very core of its identity.

Such a move might seem implausible, the necessity for it not yet obvious or the moment for it not yet ripe. Under existing circumstances, a takeover of the literature curriculum would probably have to be a hostile one, although the possibility that the most "progressive" English departments are already indifferent enough to literature and its future that the battle would not be that intense should not be quickly dismissed. However, in proposing a new Department of Creative Writing and Literary Criticism I am not so much suggesting that such an entity should immediately be created, or even that my version of it ought to prevail, as that the concept itself is not at all outlandish, is in fact quite sensible and eminently practical, and that if it were to be put into practice, perhaps with just a few of the more adventurous colleges and some more enlightened faculty leading the way, it would prove to be a coherent, potentially satisfying solution to the problem I have endeavored here to identify. In the remainder of this essay, I would like to explain further what this department might look like and what it might accomplish in terms of the more immediate goal of upholding a legitimate role in the academic curriculum for the serious study of literature, but also toward the ultimately even more important goal of reimagining the nature of that role, as well as the contributions of creative writing and of the literature course in defining it.

The first step in making a department that joins creative writing with any kind of formal literary study at all possible would probably have to be an initial willingness to put aside the bad feelings that have developed as a result of the fifty-year-old cold war between the two. Few could deny that literature professors, on the whole, tend to have a patronizing attitude toward creative writing, while creative writers, students and faculty, justifiably resent the ill-disguised sneers and frequently enough express their own hostility toward and outright contempt for the courses offered by the literature professors. (Fenza describes this conflict rather diplomatically: "scholars, literary theorists, and writers are not compatible in their endeavors or temperaments, and they, necessarily, will be compelled to criticize one another to protect and promote what they believe to be crucial to the enjoyment of literature and its future.") I myself recall how impatient many of my fellow creative writing students were with the literature courses we were required to take in the graduate creative writing program I attended, and later, when I was working toward a Ph. D in literary study, I heard equally harsh and intolerant things said by both graduate students and literature faculty about the alleged shortcomings of creative writing.

The current partition between creative writing and literary study is, in my view, entirely artificial, a product of academic politics and of the historical contingencies that brought both subjects into academe in the first place. Perhaps the differing expectations and assumptions of the would-be literary scholar and the apprentice poet or novelist reflect real differences in temperament that have always obtained between the critical and creative sensibilities, but surely these differences do not have to prevent the critic and the creative writer from finding common cause by acknowledging the differences but also acknowledging that these differences could actually enrich a departmental curriculum the ultimate goal of which was to offer students a meaningful opportunity to consider both the aesthetic and the exegetic possibilities of serious writing in all of its forms. Arguably in such a department the former should retain pride of place, since it is the special status of literary writing that justifies singling it out to begin with, and this status is conferred precisely because of the perceived aesthetic qualities distinguishing literature from other kinds of writing. In agreeing, in effect, that creative writing would be the curricular core of this department, the literary critics in its ranks would be abjuring the view that criticism is a singular activity bearing only an incidental relation to the literary texts it considers and would avow that critics and writers are engaged in mutually reinforcing activities.

Creative writers, on the other hand, would also have to grant that the practice of criticism, of bringing works of literature under careful but respectful analysis and of making critical judgments, is not a distraction from or threat to the purity of literature. They would be correct, in fact, if they were to go further and affirm that literature only benefits from engaged and conscientious criticism, that without this accompanying critical element literary art risks becoming perceived as excessively subjective, essentially personal in its appeal and ultimately regarded by some, perhaps, as not genuinely worthy of the attention of serious-minded people. The cause of literature (not to mention the future of creative writing in the academy, which could not be sustained shorn of all association with the idea of literature, at least as a goal to be pursued), is not served by either an attitude of condescension toward the "mere" exercise of imagination or by resentment toward the alleged impositions of literary criticism, and an academic department that attempted to integrate the creative and the critical would have to repudiate this kind of useless conflict.

As someone with both a graduate degree in creative writing and a doctoral degree in literary study, who has taught both creative writing classes and conventional literature courses, I believe I have acquired a perspective by which to judge whether a department that did attempt to integrate mastery of craft and critical analysis would have a plausible chance of succeeding in its goal. An immediate requirement my proposal would need to meet, of course, is simple clarity about how such a department might be structured. While I don’t think a detailed listing of possible courses would be very useful in the context of the present essay, it is appropriate to explain in general terms how a balancing of ends and means could bring a necessary coherence to the department’s curriculum, no matter what specific courses get included at any one time. If "mastery of craft" is to be truly integrated with the exercise of critical intelligence, then "craft" must be at the core of instruction in both creative writing and literary analysis. That is, the goal of instruction in the latter should be, at least in part, to acquaint students with the skills they would need to become practicing literary critics. (At the same time, one would not want to foreclose entirely the possibility that some students, particularly undergraduates, might benefit from classes of either type in personal, unquantifiable ways separate from their ultimate vocational benefits.)

Among these skills I do not include those currently associated with academic "scholarship." Most of what is now called literary scholarship cannot really be considered criticism in any historically cogent sense of the term, although it has in practice certainly all but occupied the territory once claimed by independent literary criticism. As a result, while creative writing instruction tends to be, at its best, dynamic and interactive, literary instruction under the domination of the scholarly paradigm encourages passivity, even in the case of those students who acquire the skills required to become literary scholars, since the mastery of these skills is almost never itself the focus of most courses. Direct engagement with the texts at hand, especially in the form of sustained, dispassionate analysis, is inevitably discouraged in these circumstances, as such an approach must succumb to the scholarly imperative to produce "new knowledge"—and this imperative is most obviously met by subjecting literary texts to various kinds of "theoretical" reflections rather than producing interpretations, no matter how rigorous, based on close reading.

This is why New Criticism, for example, which did emphasize the centrality of close reading in the study of literature, was destined to be discarded as criticism came to be superseded by scholarship. Despite the myriad methodological objections its opponents have raised against it, its fatal flaw within the academic context was that its profoundest dedication was to literature rather than the academy. I do not suggest that the brand of literary criticism purveyed by a department of Creative Writing and Literary Criticism must be something like that advanced by the New Critics (especially as accompanied by the overarching claims of what Curtis White, in a recent essay that otherwise attempts a limited rehabilitation of New Criticism, calls "New Critical metaphysics"), but for this department to avoid the cycling and recycling of intellectual fashion that has caused the English department to drift gradually into irrelevance, it would need to encourage critical approaches that seek to elucidate and evaluate works of literature because of the intrinsic value of the effort rather than as a means to other ends, ends that usually amount to the reinforcement of the values most strongly held by the academy.

The best way to avoid pledging fealty to academic values would be to adopt a curriculum that resists being fixed in place, refuses to be established, however fleetingly, as an authoritative expression of what is "essential" to the study and practice of writing. Such a curriculum might offer survey courses of literature according to period or genre or ethnic/national identity, but only because those teaching the courses believed them to be useful for anyone wishing to write about literature in an informed way. Creative writing workshops in their current form might continue to be offered as a demonstrably effective method of instruction, but perhaps other courses could experiment with alternative methods of, say, integrating writing instruction with critical reading, or even could substitute individual mentoring for the traditional classroom. While certain minimal requirements for obtaining a degree, whether undergraduate or graduate, from this department would have to be devised, these requirements would ideally be as flexible as possible while also embodying the core principle that all courses contribute to the education of writers and critics. (Although it would also be desirable that any particular course be potentially useful or interesting to non-majors, or graduate students from other departments.) The ultimate decision about the kind of course offered, and about the scope and approach of the course, in other words, ought to be made by individual instructors, who would be implicitly considered the appropriate authority about both the subject at hand and its role in furthering the department’s underlying objectives.

Such a department as this would most likely attract—should seek to attract—those students whose interest in creative writing extends to a wider interest in the nature of literature as a whole, as well as those whose interest in literature prompts them to recognize that its vitality in the present, and its potential to remain a valid mode of expression, are at least as important as its accomplishments in the past or its convenience as a subject of critical discourse. It might no longer attract students for whom either creative writing or the study of literature is largely an exercise in self-indulgence—students who romanticize or idealize the writer’s role, who balk at the real work required to write serious prose, poetry, or drama, who ultimately view writing not as a craft to be learned, nor even as a calling to be followed where it leads, but as an appealing, although temporary, diversion. In my experience, as both student and professor, such students are common enough around both creative writing programs and English departments, and while they may help to foster a kind of bohemian atmosphere some of us find otherwise appealing (and help fill the classes that keep each of these entities in business), the more focused, frankly more pragmatically organized department envisioned here would probably not easily accommodate the looser allegiance of this sort of student to the literary values it would seek to advance.

This department additionally might prove less attractive to the kind of student who now majors in English as undergraduate preparation for later study in professional schools such as law or business. It could certainly still be possible to acquire from Creative Writing and Literary Criticism the enhanced writing and analysis skills the pre-professional student presumably would be seeking, but its emphasis on more directly cultivating a commitment to a literary vocation is not likely to seem as serviceable as the broadly distributed array of courses offered currently by most departments of English.

Perhaps it is odd to advocate an academic curriculum that probably will interest fewer students than would an approach that announced less strictly delineated goals; however, I believe that the decline of English into its present desuetude was I part caused by its capacity to be—or to try to be—everything to everyone, to the point that it now has essentially no identity at all. A discipline that made clear its loyalty to the cause of literature would have the virtue not only of validating the importance of that cause but of insulating itself from the most hazardous winds of academic fashion, which, unfortunately, have tended to swirl at their fiercest in and around the English department.

Certainly one could anticipate objections to a proposal such as this, although the most strenuous would not come, I would guess, from the literature professors whose approaches to literary scholarship are currently dominant—those caught up in this era’s intellectual haut couture. They have no special partiality for the disciplinary structure as it is currently configured, and would no doubt be just as content to do their work out of Anthropology, or History, or Communication, or a new and autonomous department of Cultural Studies. The remaining unrepentant humanists in the American academy are more likely to find this proposal unacceptable, a solution at least as discouraging as the problem it seeks to solve. However, as even they increasingly admit (through, for example, the titles of recent books such as Literature Lost and The Rise and Fall of English), the humanists’ ranks continue to dwindle, especially in the elite universities, and a good case could be made (I have attempted to do so in "Inventing Literature," American Book Review, November/December 2000) that their own collective efforts to assimilate literature to the norms of academe was an initial step on the path leading to the very morass of conflicting assumptions they now decry. In the end, the humanist scholars of literature cannot disclaim the process by which it becomes subordinated in the academy to a non-literary agenda; they can only insist that the agenda should properly be theirs.

Yet given the picture that emerges from the survey of the academic landscape provided by Fenza and Radavich (on which I have attempted to enlarge), it may turn out that creative writing programs will de facto be required to incorporate some elements of traditional literary study simply in order to accomplish their goals as these are currently defined. An English department that no longer reliably offers a literary education in any even nominally useful form will not be the at least indirect ally it has been—albeit somewhat inconstantly—during the period of creative writing’s ascendancy. At best creative writing could come to seem merely an ornament, the last tenuous connection to an era when its concern for the artistic possibilities of literature still formed part of the department’s ostensible identity; at worst it could be perceived as wholly irrelevant to the ambitions of whatever kind of hybrid discipline English becomes and cast adrift anyway, left with no obvious alternative affiliation and no functional curriculum of its own. In any case, merely maintaining the status quo, as Fenza more or less wishes to do, could prove to be inadequate to the task of preserving creative writing in the academy, and while professionalizing the creative writing degree according to more conventional academic models, as Radavich would prefer, might protect it from institutional disregard, it would do almost nothing to elevate—indeed could only diminish—the status of literature.

Thus, the most compelling objection to any proposal to consolidate creative writing and literary study in the name of greater efficiency, or more effective integration into the university curriculum (or even just to better insulate both from the destructive consequences of the ongoing transformation of English into something other than a humanistic discipline) might be the one that could (should?) have been made to the curricular establishment of literature and of writing instruction when supporters of each were still seeking academic respectability: not that they came unaccompanied by academically acceptable methods of pedagogy and research sufficient to make them plausibly successful additions to the university, but that the very attempt to develop such methods could only lead to the elevation of the methods themselves—and the inevitable disputes over their saliency—to the status of paramount object of disciplinary attention. By all laws of academic logic, the diminution of literature was all but inevitable, and it is entirely reasonable to question whether any kind of continued association with academe is in the best interest of those who wish to ensure a relevant future for serious imaginative and critical writing.

There is no reason to assume that the efforts made over the course of the last century to include both literature and creative writing in the university curriculum were at all carried out in bad faith. Although professional aggrandizement and academic politics inevitably played some role, the relocation of the literary world’s center of gravity to the university was by and large a well-intentioned attempt to enhance the status and prestige of literary writing. But at best the endeavor has produced unintended and self-defeating consequences, and at worst it has ultimately failed outright. English has essentially reverted to the approach one associated with philology—using literature for its convenience as a means of investigating historical and cultural matters—and in whatever direction this discipline moves under the auspices of the corporatized university, it is unlikely to veer so sharply as to once again invest its resources in the creation and support of an academic literary culture. Under the circumstances, simply to hope that the university becomes a more comfortable place for those inclined to take literature seriously on its own terms would be foolish indeed.

Among the harmful consequences of in effect granting custody of literature to the academy, moreover, has been the all but total disappearance of literary criticism in anything other than its most theory-laden mode, published in the most inaccessible and little-read scholarly journals. Although the proliferation of creative writing programs over the past forty years has been accompanied by an equally impressive increase in numbers of "little magazines" offering new poetry and fiction, by and large these journals have restricted themselves to publishing creative writing and have not performed the useful function they might of contesting the domination of academic criticism by also including intelligent, text-based criticism relevant to a non-specialized literary audience and consistent with their ultimate goal of finding such an audience for contemporary writing. Nor have newspapers, book reviews, or other outlets for literary journalism stepped in to fill a void opened up by the usurpation of the independent critic’s role by the literature professor. When not in fact penned by professors putting the occasional public face on their activities, the essays and reviews appearing in these venues, with notable exceptions, are usually glib and superficial, more often than not no more than plot summaries and idle gossip laced with "attitude," or "edge." (Unfortunately, "literary" websites on the Internet have so far proven to be particularly inclined toward this style of facile chatter; whether serious writing of any kind can ever truly find a home in the cyberworld is perhaps still an open question, but there seems little in the technology itself that would make it an especially felicitous medium, experiments in "hypertext" notwithstanding, for either fiction and poetry or literary criticism of any sustained kind, all of which are irretrievably committed to the material arrangements of the written word.)

Finally even those, like myself, who think that radical solution such as the one I have proposed would be necessary to sustain a place for literature in the academy, confront a difficult choice. To the extent that maintaining a presence for it in the university curriculum helps to provide literature with a certain cultural standing or promises to educate new readers—perhaps even to attract new readers who might otherwise be lost—then working to secure that presence seems worthwhile, even obligatory. But to the extent that this would continue to encourage a perception that literature is primarily a subject of academic study it can actually limit the attention paid to contemporary writing, not least because this perception inhibits the development of the opportunities for critical scrutiny and debate all writing that aspires to the status of literature requires (and deserves). Certainly at its present level of popularity on most campuses, creative writing would be safe in something like its current incarnation for the immediate future, but in the absence of literary criticism that can in any way live up to its ample inheritance, or of pedagogical practices that take advantage of criticism’s insights to help create a suitable audience for literary writing, who can say that what both D. W. Fenza and David Radavich really fear the most—the trivialization of literature, through the imposition of either unsuitable professional or corporate standards—won’t eventually come to pass?

Meanwhile it is not entirely unwarranted to feel that such trivialization is already well under way, especially in the curriculum and the professional discourse of traditional literary study. Likewise, it is not unreasonably alarmist to fear that creative writing programs, where regard for the work undertaken by literature still prevails, will inevitably suffer from a continued dependence, however informal, on what remains of the English department. Perhaps if nothing else, a revival of nonacademic criticism could help revitalize a literary culture outside the university thoroughly enough to enable writers and critics to separate themselves—psychologically, if not at first literally—from the now tangled groves of academe. Indeed, the most important task that literary criticism could perform right now might be to encourage and justify this separation by reminding us all that the literary and the academic are not synonymous and by redefining "creative writing" as an ongoing artistic project of abiding cultural importance, a collective project that takes inspiration where it can from what has come before but that otherwise, through the achievements of those presently working at it, provides the measure of what we understand "literature" to be. No additional seal of approval from academe would be required.

The Organized Effects of the Program (On McGurl's The Program Era)

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy--and a times great brilliance--by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers" is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the "tremendous energy" and frequent "brilliance" that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that a "vast" number of energetic and brilliant writers have been "students and teachers" in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing "program" to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor is to say that, on the whole, the "program era" has produced "a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing" to say that, however "multifaceted" it might be," this body of work is "rich" all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by "the program," even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly "rich." I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced "excellence" of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program--to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before--there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing "improved" American literature as we get—it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in "literary ambitions" this inevitably entailed, and to encourage "habits of self-conscious attention to craft." Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs—the "workshop" method—is shown in particular to have resulted in the "excellence" of the system, although the focus on "craft" has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the "literary fiction" that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman's critique (London Review of Books) of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise makes some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl's book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to "a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems," unavoidably considered and addressed those problems, and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement. Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she's not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman's indictment (Los Angeles Review of Books), he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the "complex" problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman's reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren't germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn't much different from many other academic studies of postwar or "contemporary" fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as "systems novel" or "radical innocence" or "dirty realism" as candidates. ("Black humor," "metafiction," "minimalism," and, indeed, "postmodern" began as such terms.) McGurl proposes "program fiction." As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl's analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, "contemporary literature" is by definition undefined. The literary "fields" predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can't help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates—the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author's affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of "program era" as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn't quite fit McGurl's notion of "technomodernism," his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

"Program fiction" becomes in McGurl's analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally "program era" doesn't suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of "the program" and those "aesthetic problems" swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) "Creative writing" did not entirely replace "fiction" and "poetry" as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way—number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of  a program's graduates, etc.—poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to "write what you know" or the impulse to find one's "voice" or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims he makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction, and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete.

A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing—particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the "little" magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history—past, present, and future—needs scrutiny as well.

Performing Literature

Although Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature is clearly intended to be read primarily by graduate students or instructors just beginning their teaching careers, one can also read the book, against the grain of the author’s own rhetorical goals, perhaps, as a guide for the academic outlander to the curious practices of that disciplinary subculture responsible for what still passes as literary study. Those who retain an image of the English professor as a high-minded if pedantic guardian of the treasures of Literature will find provided here what amounts to the finishing touches on the recast image the profession has been working on for over 30 years. Just as high-minded but in a more earnest, socially-conscious way, even more firmly attached to scholastic attitudes and the conventions of academic discourse, the self-appointed curators of this recast image have nevertheless worked very hard to dissociate literary study from its former aspirations to establish works of literature as a kind of secular scripture, an authoritative source of time-tested wisdom and a superior sensibility. Unfortunately, in the process they also have succeeded, as Showalter’s book finally demonstrates, in dissociating it from literature as well.

The story of how “literature itself” came to be the focus of study in the English departments of American universities has been admirably told in Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Over the course of the 20th century the role of literature in academic study was transformed from being a source of philological analysis to being a “subject” in its own right, a source of distinctive knowledge to be pursued for its own value. But as Graff’s account shows, this change in status took place amidst great disagreement over ultimate purposes, even among those proposing it, and in many ways the metamorphosis was never really completed, as no real accord was ever reached about how the literature curriculum ought to be organized, how best to teach it, or even finally how to define “literature” in such a way that its disciplinary principles could be well understood and its boundaries well identified. As a result, American literary study has been characterized mostly by its instability, as one new wave of revolutionary thinking about the way it ought to be done has followed upon another, the only certainty being that the approach you now believe to be truly conclusive ten years from now will be moribund.

It has happened to the New Humanism, Marxism, the New Criticism, the Chicago School, Myth Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism (as happened also to the Old Historicism), multiculturalism in each of its variants, to the ideas of Freud, Sartre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Eco, Eagleton, Lacan, Jameson, Bloom, Fanon, Tompkins, Sedgwick, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, hooks, Burke, Auerbach, Kermode, de Man, Hartman, and Lentricchia. Not all of these movements, critics, and theories have been discredited or entirely discarded, of course, but none of the systems or elaborate critical structures erected in their names could still plausibly be considered the definitive method of literary study and criticism, the one method making all others, past and future, superfluous. To the extent that academic literary study has come to be perceived by the public, as well as by other academics, as frivolous, intellectually capricious at best, it is a consequence of this instability of approach built in at the very origins of the discipline’s historical identity, rather than any of the specific excesses that have been attributed to current practices and particular scholars.

The present lack of obvious purpose in the English department, more pronounced than during the height of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s but no less a sign of the disorder inherent in the discipline from the start, is fully reflected in Showalter’s attempt in Teaching Literature to survey all of the options available to the college literature instructor. Ironically enough, Showalter’s obvious, even admirable, effort to include references to numerous possible approaches to the teaching of literature, and thus not to “privilege” any one approach in particular, only reveals more plainly the degree to which the organized study of literature in American universities finally neither involves nor requires any particular regard for literature at all, not even the sort of unstated “resentment” Harold Bloom ascribes to the contemporary literary academy. The clear implication of Showalter’s account of what teaching literature is good for, in fact, is that if the whole endeavor is good for anyone, it is the teacher him/herself, whose well-being and sense of professional accomplishment are the incessant focus of Teaching Literature.

The book’s concern to raise the level of the college English instructor’s self-esteem is sounded in its very first chapter, “The Anxiety of Teaching,” in which Showalter anatomizes the various causes of such anxiety and explicitly offers her succeeding chapters as the sort of informed advice that can alleviate them if sincerely considered. Some of her advice is perfectly sound, to be sure—as is the more general contention that teaching induces its own distinctive kinds of anxieties—and that which touches on such unavoidable, perhaps more quotidian issues of class preparation and grading could of course be useful to those readers unable to acquire such information through more immediate means. Showalter is entirely correct in maintaining that much of the ordinary work of college teaching is systematically ignored in English graduate study, and is not much discussed by a younger instructor’s potential mentors among the faculty either, and thus any pedagogical guide that addresses this problem is undoubtedly to be welcomed. But this worthy intention is altogether undercut in a book that otherwise encourages its readers to view literature as essentially an adjunct to the act of teaching itself, as the platform from which the literature professor performs the salutary (and self-assigned) service only he/she (for reasons however vague and indefinite) is able to render.

“Performance,” as a matter of fact, is an important concept in Teaching Literature, as it would almost have to be in a depiction of the work of the literature professor that emphasizes so minimally an appreciation of the intrinsic merits of the subject purportedly being professed. Performance doesn’t necessarily involve simply the theatricality with which the professor chooses to present works of literature (Showalter explicitly disdains what she identifies as “teacher-centered” methods of instruction), but extends as well to the transformation of the classroom, indeed, of the literature course itself, into a kind of performance art whereby literature becomes the inspiration for the instructor’s own ingenuity in attracting students’ interest, but otherwise fades into the background as the more pressing requirements of the classroom drama necessarily take precedence. For example, Showalter describes her own method of imposing suitable order and form on courses in the novel, by which she gives such courses their own narrative structure, complete with “Beginnings,” Middles,” and “Endings.” Further:

In my fiction classes, I try to incorporate elements of narrative into the teaching process, and also make students aware of how these elements operate to define experience as a story. I compare lecturing to narration in the novel, demonstrate ways to vary and violate it, and encourage students to think of how it might be done. (Once to show how you could rupture or break the narrative frame of the classroom, I had a graduate student interrupt the lecture by loudly announcing he had a pizza to deliver to a student. Readers will recognize the homage to Fast Times at Ridgmont High. But every semester provides its own spontaneous frame-breakers, from a squirrel running around the auditorium to fire drills to students streaking.)

 Something like this mirroring device seems to be what Showalter has in mind when claiming that “the most effective members of our profession are those whose literary theory is consistent with their teaching theory and practice.” In other words, one’s “theory” of the significance literature bears ought not merely to inform one’s scholarly work, or the choice of text to assign and study in the classroom (both of which already go a long way toward creating a distinct context in which the ultimate significance of literature is to be understood), but also ought to provide the mold into which one’s very classroom practice is to be poured. At first this highly artificial approach seems somewhat at variance with Showalter’s further statement in the same discussion of “Personae: The Teaching Self” that “although a persona can protect you against the intimacy and threat of self-revelation in the classroom, it can also prevent you from achieving the real exchange of ideas that makes teaching memorable” as well as from revealing the literature instructor’s “true self.” But finally these seemingly contradictory impulses—toward pedagogical contrivance and toward authentic self-expression—are bound together, part of the same goal of using the literature classroom for what Teaching Literature really affirms as the most compelling rationale for the activity named in its title: the valorization of the good intentions of the literature professor, provided the appropriate assurances of concern for the welfare of students can be made with credible conviction at the same time.

To those who believe that the tarnishing of the image of literary study is due mainly to the hyperpoliticization of literary scholarship over the past 15 years, I would argue instead that literature’s observable loss of luster comes as much from this more general evolution of literary study into the vehicle for the professor’s own self-aggrandizement, the current dominance of politically-minded scholarship being its most prominent manifestation for now. What the future developments of this tendency might bring about is anybody’s guess, but in my view that it certainly will mutate into some other method of the moment is beyond question. Whether the study of literature for its own sake, free of the enshrouding accumulations of which the self-projection advocated in Showalter’s book is only the most recent, will find its way back to the curriculum of the English department—or any other academic discipline that might arise in wake of its ultimate demise due to its lack of utility to the corporate university—is equally open to speculation, but if the history of literary study over the past century is any kind of reliable touchstone, such a renewal of purpose could only prove temporary.

Ultimately Teaching Literature inadvertently demonstrates that literature functions poorly as a subject of academic inquiry, not because it lends itself to no plausible method of focusing this sort of inquiry but because it lends itself to so many possible methods. That works of literature themselves invite readings that find their own particular centers of interpretive gravity, angles of approach that are almost infinitely variable and determined by the individual reader’s own presumptions, is so obviously true that it seems in retrospect somewhat peculiar that such an unavoidable consequence of academic literary study would have been ignored by those who persevered in the struggle to install literary study as a recognized academic discipline. Alongside so many other disciplines with true discipline—that have a single center of gravity, or at the very least do not encourage a proliferation of interpretation for its own sake—literary study was always fated to appear to circle around its purported subject without ever conveying the impression that its essential work helped to get us closer to an informed understanding of the subject—or even that it has anything that could be called essential work to do. Even the initial dispensation prevailing in literary study, whereby works of literature were considered primarily for their claims to possessing literary qualities (judged to be good things to have) and the ultimate justification of which was to clarify our ideas about the very category of the literary, produced “knowledge” of frankly dubious value all too easily dismissed by an academy that esteems instead processes more objective and results more exact that literary critics-even when transformed into “scholars”-are generally able to provide.

Literary scholars have not failed at conforming to this model through want of trying, however. Various attempts to make literary study and scholarship more “scientific,” either in spirit or in fact, have been made, from the more doctrinaire applications of New Criticism to the virtual conversion of literary scholarship into a branch of social science found in the move to cultural studies to the data mining that characterizes “digital humanities.” And while on the one hand this is just the predictable consequence of trying to bring academic “rigor” to the study of literature, on the other the more extreme of these approaches (including the extreme laissez-faire approach encouraged by Elaine Showalter) manifests an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the inherent and more immediate benefits that works of literature have to offer, benefits that presumably draw most readers to them to begin with—namely aesthetic delight, the pleasures of a compelling reading experience, particularly those pleasures that can be the result of meeting the challenges posed by complex or innovative works, of actually expanding one’s capacity to enjoy satisfying reading experiences. It is precisely that imaginative writing that does elicit this kind of response most readers would identify as “literature,” and such a pragmatic definition of the term is probably as useful a way to distinguish what these imaginative works have in common as can be devised.

This may seem markedly similar to the definition Showalter endorses, literature as “what gets taught.” But actually it here I am in the starkest disagreement with Showalter’s own theory. It is a measure of how far the assimilation of literature to the academy has gone—some might say how thoroughly trivialized it has become—that apparently for many people it is unexceptional to so readily conflate works of literature (what gets read) with their place in the classroom, their potential for being taught. Furthermore, while this close association of the literary and the academic might seem to lead to a perception of literary study as largely an elite activity (as at an earlier period it probably was so perceived), Showalter explicitly renounces elitism by welcoming to the literature syllabus any fiction, poetry, or drama, “whether by Wordsworth or Maya Angelou. . .Jane Austen or Stephen King. . . .” (She also approves of film, television, and other “cultural materials,” although considers their use to be separate from “teaching literature” proper.) Ultimately, Showalter’s come one, come all attitude to determining the borders of literary study only confirms the effective purgation of all meaning from the very concept of literature among the current coterie of literature scholars and teachers.

Yet I for one finally cannot muster any great enthusiasm for the idea of reclaiming literary study on behalf of something similar to the more focused, literature-centric conception I have myself advanced. To believe that works of literature are valuable first and foremost for those qualities that sharpen the individual reader’s critical faculties and enhance that reader’s aesthetic sensibilities is not to conclude that these are values that can easily be conveyed through formal classroom study. In fact, to believe that what literature is good for is to provoke this kind of encounter between one reader and the latent if still unexplored possibilities of the imagination and of human language, a fundamentally subjective and personal achievement on the reader’s part, is probably to conclude that the study of literature in a classroom setting can only be a distraction from fostering such an encounter. Indeed, the perhaps inevitable result of bringing literature to the classroom at all is exactly the indulgent, aimless fragmentation depicted in Teaching Literature.

The best way out of the dilemma paradoxically created by academic critics hoping to elevate the status of literature in American culture would be for a new generation of literary critics to bypass the academy altogether and seek out some fresh and more reliable direction by which to guide readers to their own recognition of literature’s abiding merits, which as ought surely to be evident by now, most productively occurs only outside the college classroom

Literary Periods

There are some writers who are, and likely always will be, inextricably linked to the “period” with which their work is associated, and in many cases helped to define. Surely Wordsworth and Keats will always be “Romantic” poets, while Faulkner and Woolf will remain modernists, as the term “modern” has been fully appropriated to describe the historical era beginning just before World War I and ending with the coming of World War II (the 1920s in particular representing the truest efflorescence of modernism). Anyone who has taken a college literature course knows that the English department (and literary study more broadly) organizes itself using these sorts of historical designations, but this way of understanding literary history has become so pervasive that probably few readers regard it as an especially “academic” assumption.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Modernism

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it:

Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure.

Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.”

Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.”

Frost develops her argument that a chief characteristic of modern fiction is its distinctive preoccupation with redefining pleasure through a series of chapter-length interpretations of the work of a multifarious group of modern writers. In the first, “James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity,” she considers the motif of aroma (especially perfume) as it is manifested—quite often, it turns out—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The second chapter analogizes the particular kind of difficulty embodied in the work of Gertrude Stein to the ambiguous “pleasure” provided by tickling. A chapter on D.H. Lawrence unsurprisingly focuses on Lawrence’s troubling ideas about the proper degree of pain and pleasure required for a “healthy” female sexuality, while the subsequent chapter on Aldous Huxley highlights the critique of modern forms of narcoticizing pleasure in Brave New World. Chapter 5 discusses two less iconic modern writers, Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and concentrates on the problematic relationship to pleasure, often explicitly joined to pain, experienced by the two writers’ protagonists. It is the chapter in this book that comes closest to suggesting that the “problem with pleasure” among modern writers is a masochistic one, after all. A final chapter takes up the career of the now somewhat forgotten Anita Loos, specifically her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that Loos’s attempt to give a rather more populist spin to the difficulty valorized by modernism actually prefigured the more playful attitude to the pleasure and seriousness exemplified in postmodernism.

On the whole, The Problem With Pleasure makes a convincing case that modernism was, at least in part, a response to the rise of mass entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a kind of entertainment that seemed to many modern writers to offer only “cheap” pleasures. Writers like Joyce and Stein (or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner) were certainly well aware that many readers would find their work unorthodox and intimidating, but hoped that these readers would rise to the challenge and put aside their expectation of immediate gratification to find a more lasting satisfaction in the willing struggle with their books for the sake of breakthroughs to a kind of higher awareness—both of their own capacities as readers and of the capacity of literature to offer profounder pleasures. Frost’s readings are insightful and should be accessible even to general readers uninterested by the practices and protocols of academic criticism. Although Frost in her introductory chapter situates her book in the context of prevailing scholarly approaches to modernism (mostly focused on the influence of class and gender), she commendably avoids dismissing modernism for its various retrograde assumptions. While also pointing out where such assumptions are clearly evident—Lawrence’s attitude toward women, for example—Frost takes seriously the collective effort to redefine pleasure and generally affirms modern fiction’s success in turning “difficulty” into a virtue.

The strongest chapters in the book are those on Joyce and Stein. Both present fresh and persuasive readings of these core modernists (something that is by now not easy to do). Almost no one before has looked so closely at scent as a motif in Ulysses, although certainly it is a novel saturated in sensory detail, as well as one that emphasizes its characters’ experiences of pleasure. As Frost herself notes, Joyce is “far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists.” Her discussion focuses on the way in which the scent of perfume, especially for Leopold Bloom, works as a correlative of the more complex understanding of pleasure required to read a novel like Ulysses successfully. Bloom’s preference is for perfumes that mingle the fragrant and the faintly disgusting, the pleasant and the “base,” that produce pleasure partly through unpleasure. For example,

[t]he perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a…complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, ‘Spanish Skin,’ is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s ‘animalic’ tendencies…. Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents, musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human.

As she does here, Frost connects Joyce’s use of the odor motif to the more general portrayal of sensual pleasure in the novel, especially erotic pleasure: “Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult….” By examining the interactions of pleasure and unpleasure in the novel’s depiction of these particular “somatic pleasures,” Frost provides us with the kind of “active, analytical reading” modernist fiction requires, but also demonstrates that such a reading practice makes possible a “cognitive pleasure” that is indeed enjoyable.

Where the difficulties of Ulysses come from both its formal and stylistic variety, the difficulty posed by Gertrude Stein’s work is fundamentally stylistic, produced by the complex effects (of diction, grammar, and syntax) she achieves through her enigmatic orderings of otherwise simple language. Frost proposes that this complexity could be usefully regarded by perplexed readers as a kind of verbal tickling, intended to both provoke and amuse, to “tease” the reader with writing that withholds clarity but also can make the lack of clarity itself oddly satisfying:

Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Frost examines these lines from Tender Buttons, for example:

Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful

Frost then remarks:

As this passage illustrates…Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The ‘rubbed purr’ fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended, they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

Stein’s work even more directly and insistently than Joyce’s (except in Finnegans Wake) tries to induce the reader to redefine difficulty and indeterminacy as pleasurable in themselves when they enhance our awareness of the satisfactions reading well can provide. The attentive reader will, of course, note the “infantile” and “erotic” qualities of Stein’s writing (no doubt they are closely related), but these more recognizable pleasures can only be accessed through those “analytical reading practices” that often make modern literature seem to involve more work than pleasure.

The remaining chapters in The Problem With Pleasure, while not without interest and generally informative about the writers surveyed, are ultimately less convincing. Including writers like Lawrence and Huxley provides additional perspective on the historical circumstances that motivated modern writers’ suspicion of the cheap pleasures to be found in popular culture (in a period when what we now identify as “popular culture” was gaining ascendance), but they are much less representative of the formal and stylistic experimentation that is typical of modernist fiction, and that gained it its reputation as being “difficult” in the first place. The book’s subtitle asks us to consider “modernism and its discontents,” and while both Lawrence and Huxley were certainly discontent with many features of modernity, their discontent did not so much extend to the formal assumptions of fiction itself, a kind of discontent that did indeed inspire most of the writers associated with modernism as a literary movement. If anything, the books of Hamilton and Rhys are even less representative of formal and verbal complexity, however much they reflect the conflicted views of pleasure Frost shows to be more widespread in modern fiction as a whole. The chapter on Anita Loos is an entertaining survey of Loos’s career as a writer of silent film titles and her elevation of title-writing to a more “literary” status; but finally the way in which this experience informs Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is of only modest interest, since it seems unlikely that the novel will survive as an important work of modern fiction.

This variability of focus is arguably not a lapse in judgment on Frost’s part but instead an almost inevitable consequence of the sort of book The Power of Pleasure represents. A work of academic criticism by an academic critic, it exists first of all to find its place in its “field” of professional literary scholarship. While Frost’s book is accessible enough to appeal to non-academic, non-specialist readers, its ultimate value to them is weakened by its more diffuse discussions of writers only loosely related to each other as chronologically “modern.” Ultimately Frost’s most important insight, that the signature “difficulty” of modernist fiction was not a rejection of readerly pleasure but an attempt to redefine and thus enrich it, could surely have been conveyed very effectively in an essay devoted to Joyce and Stein, an essay that would both be credible as a contribution to the scholarly commentary on modern fiction and enlightening to general readers about the motives of writers who otherwise might be perceived as willfully obscure. However, the requirements of academic publishing, as part of the academic system that dispenses recognition and rewards, prescribe instead a “study” that can be extended to book length (the “academic monograph”) as evidence of achievement and seriousness of purpose.

The value of literary criticism ought to be determined by how well it enhances our comprehension and appreciation of works of literature, and ultimately of literature itself. By this measure, early academic critics remain valuable for the rigor and breadth of knowledge they added to the critical repertoire. By now, however, academic criticism has, perhaps inevitably, shifted its ambition from explicating literature to reinforcing its own conventions. It would be a shame if this book’s adherence to these conventions caused readers to avoid it, since it does offer fresh and useful ways of approaching the most important literary phenomenon of the 20th century.

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Conte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Conte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Conte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Conte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Conte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Conte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Conte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Conte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Conte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Conte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Conte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Conte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Lies trilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Conte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Conte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Conte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Conte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.

(This essay first appeared in RE: Arts and Letters.)

In his essay "Creative Writing and Its Discontents" (The Writer’s Chronicle, March/April 2000), D. W. Fenza defends university creative writing programs against what he considers the distressingly widespread assumptions that they contribute to a kind of "dumbing down" of literary culture and that they lack the rigor necessary for them to be truly valuable parts of a university curriculum, much less to produce significant new writers. Unapologetically partisan on behalf of creative writing as an academic discipline, Fenza marshals together all of the arguments (which he presents in a 13-point list for added emphasis) that can be, and generally have been, offered as justifications for including creative writing in the curriculum, although one would have thought that these justifications had long since carried the day in practical terms, since it seems highly unlikely that any prominent colleges or universities will very soon seek to abolish their programs, either on the undergraduate or graduate levels. After all, it is the very popularity of creative writing in American colleges that to a large extent has prompted the criticisms Fenza seeks to refute.

Fenza seems especially sensitive to the charge, in this case made from within the profession itself, that creative writing programs pay insufficient attention to the career prospects of their students, that they merely exploit the vanity and ambitions of these students without preparing them realistically for the exigencies of the literary marketplace or enabling them to pursue more reliable professional goals. As Fenza paraphrases one such challenge to the integrity of creative writing, David Radavich’s "Creative Writing in the Academy (in MLA’s Profession 1999), "writers in the academy should earn traditional Ph.Ds and become more like scholars." This is undoubtedly an oversimplification of Radavich’s argument (as Radavich indeed insists it is in a reply to Fenza in the September 2000 issue of Writer’s Chronicle), but the tension between a view of creative writing as a service to literature and a view of it as a service to the academy surely does inform the analysis of the role of creative writing offered by both Fenza and Radavich. Unfortunately, while both writers maintain, sincerely, no doubt, that the future of literature is their ultimate concern, neither is actually able to separate the continuity of "literature" from its current status as primarily an academic "subject." Fenza sees the future of literature as continuing to be closely bound to the study of literature as part of the academic curriculum; he merely wishes to see creative writing survive, on its own terms, as a branch of the literary curriculum. Radavich also does not envision the abandonment of creative writing by academe; he wishes to see it become more like other disciplines, with even closer ties to the academy, which he believes will help ensure its survival. To this extent, the conflict between D. W. Fenza and David Radavich amounts to a struggle over how best to define "creative writing" so that it continues as a viable subject within the university.

I would like to suggest in this essay that if the long-term vitality either of creative writing or of literature as a whole is truly at issue here, then neither of the sides in this skirmish presents a very defensible position. Fenza, who correctly points out the way in which the English department, through the rise of what he simply calls "theory," has increasingly foregone the teaching of literature as a subject of humane learning, does not advocate the severing of ties with this department, even though the metamorphosis of English into a radicalized branch of sociology has done more harm to the image of literary study, a part of which Fenza wishes creative writing to remain, than any of the "cultural pundits" he cites could ever have done on their own. Fenza proposes instead that creative writing serve as a kind of counterbalance to theory in today’s English department—its heart as opposed to the pure intellect provided by theory—and that exposure to both would ideally give students a more fully satisfying literary education. Radavich, in calling for creative writing to integrate itself even more fully into the current academic structure, would presumably have the boundaries separating creative writing courses from the rest of the literature curriculum reduced, thus blurring the distinctions that can still be made between instruction in the art of writing fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction and instruction in the finer points of scholarly and critical analysis.

It is not that both Fenza and Radavich are entirely misguided in their analyses. Creative writing does now allow students to cultivate a more agreeable, less mediated relationship with literature, whether or not all students go on to become successful writers themselves. Certainly it does not produce graduates trained to be hostile to the very idea of literature. Further, I do not think Radavich is wrong in at least implying that creative writing and the study of literature could more comfortably inhabit the same professional space, even that the perceived divide between the goals of the creative writing class and those of the literature class might be bridged. But the cause of creative writing will not finally be helped, nor ultimately will an idea of literature of the sort creative writing needs to maintain a coherent identity even likely itself survive, as long as the latter continues in most cases simply as a "major" attached to, and dependent on, the English department. The problem here cannot be construed as primarily administrative; additional autonomy, especially on the graduate level, to define goals or set standards without accompanying curricular control would be no solution to what is finally more than an academic problem. In my opinion, creative writing programs need increasingly to be fashioned not merely as literature’s branch of applied knowledge but as the very center of debate about, inquiry into, and, yes, instruction in literature itself.

This would mean that everyone who shares the ideals to which Fenza appeals, as well as everyone who understands, as does Radavich, the rules of engagement that obtain in the new corporate university (whether they approve of them or not) would need to begin anticipating the day when the study of literature as it has been known in the post-World War II era has undeniably become a relic of that era. Although the process whereby literature ceases to be seen as a legitimate academic subject in its own right is already well advanced, attempts are still made by those who speak for the disciplinary establishment (the MLA, for example) to deny that college literature courses no longer focus on "the literary" in any constructive way, indeed that the very concept has been discarded when not actively reviled. Such denials are somewhat peculiar, since no one, either among those thus spoken for or among those whose criticisms elicit such responses in the first place, believes they are offered with any sincerity, much less believes them to be true. In any case, the need to keep hiding behind Literature will almost certainly be short-lived, mostly because the constituency for a curriculum based on the serious study of literary art has never been very large, and should the literature curriculum finally give way to a curriculum explicitly labeled "cultural studies," whatever minimal outrage that could be mustered on behalf of literary study will already have been spent.

Could creative writing survive the final collapse of the structural supports propping up the study of literature in American universities? In my view, there is very little reason to believe that it could, at least not if it simply continues to assume its present form. As Fenza’s own brief history of creative writing in the academy demonstrates, the rise of creative writing closely parallels the rise of literary study itself—that is, literary study as the study of literature for its own sake, rather than as a source of philological or other purely historical inquiry. Unfortunately, creative writing came to have the same relationship to the "real" literature curriculum that literary study had once had to philology: such courses were regarded by the literature scholar as less serious, less important to the mission of the university, and were at best tolerated as courses that might help recruit students into the English department, where they would still be required to take the more rigorous courses that defined literary study as an academic discipline (and that were taught by these scholars, of course).

Creative writing’s status as literary study’s wayward cousin may have involved more than a little condescension and even outright ill-will, but it could be said that their uneasy coexistence nevertheless benefited both—literary study through the enhanced enrollment just mentioned, and creative writing through an association with the discipline entrusted with the professing of literature, which until recently did manage to project an aura of seriousness in whose reflected glow creative writing programs could shine sufficiently that they were on the whole not regarded as either purely vocational (as essentially an extension of arts-and-crafts) or as opportunities for students merely to satisfy personal vanity or indulge in aimless subjectivity.

This aura has palpably faded. Although literature professors continue to take themselves seriously indeed (it is hard to imagine a species of literary scholarship more humorless than what goes by that name today), the public image of the English faculty has been tarnished beyond restoration. For a while the abandonment of interest in literature as it was traditionally studied met with some resistance and statements of concern. Now the English department is more likely to be considered as a national joke, an object of ridicule and derision. To persist in an already unequal partnership under these circumstances is likely only to inflict collateral damage on the reputation of creative writing and ultimately sacrifice whatever chance remains to salvage the good name of literature itself. It is clear that the literature curriculum, which for the past half century has been seen as essentially identical with the very mission of the English department, is no longer in the hands of people who regard its integrity as something to be protected. But without such a curriculum in some form, creative writing programs would hardly be tenable, deprived as they would be of the context and the history without which "creative writing" becomes a fundamentally empty concept.

What specifically, then, could be done to avert such an outcome? If nothing else, creative writing faculty members should forcefully oppose the belittlement of literature in English departments—and, in fact, if anecdotal evidence can be trusted, there is actually reason to believe this is to some extent taking place. While relations between creative writing professors and "regular" literature faculty have never been particularly congenial, it seems fair to say that at present the conceptual and procedural differences between the two have never been more pronounced. The former still believe in the relevance of literature, the latter do not. The former still consider the identifiably "literary" qualities of the writing they teach to be their true subject, and the latter do not. Perhaps simply by holding on to these beliefs, creative writing faculty and students can lead by example in making a case for the serious consideration of literary art within the university.

But unfortunately this would not be a truly decisive victory. If simply allowing literary art itself to flourish is the object, it is difficult to see why maintaining its presence in the university alone would be considered any kind of victory at all. Unless we have come to the point of conceding that literature cannot flourish outside the university—that in order for it to survive in modern American culture it had to be transformed into Literature, presided over by a self-selected caste of academic masters—why would it be thought important that literature even in a diminished state had managed to hold on to a neglected piece of ground inside the walls of academe? The initial advocates of including literary study in the college curriculum were able to carry the day by arguing that literature deserved its place in the curriculum because of its own inherent value to those who thus encountered it; that literary study could also enhance the appeal and credibility of academe might be a secondary benefit, but the elevation of the academic over the literary, an allegiance to the academic per se, was certainly not part of the original vision.

Because creative writing programs almost necessarily continue to maintain an allegiance to literature, creative writing can potentially serve as the agent charged with preserving its integrity within the academy and in the process ensure its own survival as a discipline devoted to developing and promoting contemporary prose, poetry, and drama. However, to accomplish these related goals would require ambitions more expansive that those expressed by Fenza and less purely utilitarian than those informing Radavich’s account. Yet, the justification for broadening the horizons within which we may view the proper boundaries of creative writing is provided by both writers, who might after all be said to share a common understanding of the potential of creative writing when its goals are conceived more comprehensively. Fenza maintains that "the study of literature is simply incomplete without creative writing, just as the study of creative writing is incomplete without the scholarship and appreciation of the great literature of the past. The literature of the past can seem remote and irrelevant without the controversies of contemporary letters to animate it, just as contemporary letters can be shallow and vain without a knowledge of the older legacies of literature." Radavich, for his part, believes that "[a]ny creative writing course worth its enrollment needs to teach reading, critical thinking, and awareness of historical context, as well as the particulars of form and evocative expression." Both are surely right, and perhaps both would further come to agree that rather than creative writing continuing to seek a modus vivendi with literary study as administered by an English department that at the very least has proven itself inherently mercurial, it would be more productive to incorporate within creative writing a curriculum of literary study of its own—to in effect take from English some of the kinds of literature courses that were once at the very core of its identity.

Such a move might seem implausible, the necessity for it not yet obvious or the moment for it not yet ripe. Under existing circumstances, a takeover of the literature curriculum would probably have to be a hostile one, although the possibility that the most "progressive" English departments are already indifferent enough to literature and its future that the battle would not be that intense should not be quickly dismissed. However, in proposing a new Department of Creative Writing and Literary Criticism I am not so much suggesting that such an entity should immediately be created, or even that my version of it ought to prevail, as that the concept itself is not at all outlandish, is in fact quite sensible and eminently practical, and that if it were to be put into practice, perhaps with just a few of the more adventurous colleges and some more enlightened faculty leading the way, it would prove to be a coherent, potentially satisfying solution to the problem I have endeavored here to identify. In the remainder of this essay, I would like to explain further what this department might look like and what it might accomplish in terms of the more immediate goal of upholding a legitimate role in the academic curriculum for the serious study of literature, but also toward the ultimately even more important goal of reimagining the nature of that role, as well as the contributions of creative writing and of the literature course in defining it.

The first step in making a department that joins creative writing with any kind of formal literary study at all possible would probably have to be an initial willingness to put aside the bad feelings that have developed as a result of the fifty-year-old cold war between the two. Few could deny that literature professors, on the whole, tend to have a patronizing attitude toward creative writing, while creative writers, students and faculty, justifiably resent the ill-disguised sneers and frequently enough express their own hostility toward and outright contempt for the courses offered by the literature professors. (Fenza describes this conflict rather diplomatically: "scholars, literary theorists, and writers are not compatible in their endeavors or temperaments, and they, necessarily, will be compelled to criticize one another to protect and promote what they believe to be crucial to the enjoyment of literature and its future.") I myself recall how impatient many of my fellow creative writing students were with the literature courses we were required to take in the graduate creative writing program I attended, and later, when I was working toward a Ph. D in literary study, I heard equally harsh and intolerant things said by both graduate students and literature faculty about the alleged shortcomings of creative writing.

The current partition between creative writing and literary study is, in my view, entirely artificial, a product of academic politics and of the historical contingencies that brought both subjects into academe in the first place. Perhaps the differing expectations and assumptions of the would-be literary scholar and the apprentice poet or novelist reflect real differences in temperament that have always obtained between the critical and creative sensibilities, but surely these differences do not have to prevent the critic and the creative writer from finding common cause by acknowledging the differences but also acknowledging that these differences could actually enrich a departmental curriculum the ultimate goal of which was to offer students a meaningful opportunity to consider both the aesthetic and the exegetic possibilities of serious writing in all of its forms. Arguably in such a department the former should retain pride of place, since it is the special status of literary writing that justifies singling it out to begin with, and this status is conferred precisely because of the perceived aesthetic qualities distinguishing literature from other kinds of writing. In agreeing, in effect, that creative writing would be the curricular core of this department, the literary critics in its ranks would be abjuring the view that criticism is a singular activity bearing only an incidental relation to the literary texts it considers and would avow that critics and writers are engaged in mutually reinforcing activities.

Creative writers, on the other hand, would also have to grant that the practice of criticism, of bringing works of literature under careful but respectful analysis and of making critical judgments, is not a distraction from or threat to the purity of literature. They would be correct, in fact, if they were to go further and affirm that literature only benefits from engaged and conscientious criticism, that without this accompanying critical element literary art risks becoming perceived as excessively subjective, essentially personal in its appeal and ultimately regarded by some, perhaps, as not genuinely worthy of the attention of serious-minded people. The cause of literature (not to mention the future of creative writing in the academy, which could not be sustained shorn of all association with the idea of literature, at least as a goal to be pursued), is not served by either an attitude of condescension toward the "mere" exercise of imagination or by resentment toward the alleged impositions of literary criticism, and an academic department that attempted to integrate the creative and the critical would have to repudiate this kind of useless conflict.

As someone with both a graduate degree in creative writing and a doctoral degree in literary study, who has taught both creative writing classes and conventional literature courses, I believe I have acquired a perspective by which to judge whether a department that did attempt to integrate mastery of craft and critical analysis would have a plausible chance of succeeding in its goal. An immediate requirement my proposal would need to meet, of course, is simple clarity about how such a department might be structured. While I don’t think a detailed listing of possible courses would be very useful in the context of the present essay, it is appropriate to explain in general terms how a balancing of ends and means could bring a necessary coherence to the department’s curriculum, no matter what specific courses get included at any one time. If "mastery of craft" is to be truly integrated with the exercise of critical intelligence, then "craft" must be at the core of instruction in both creative writing and literary analysis. That is, the goal of instruction in the latter should be, at least in part, to acquaint students with the skills they would need to become practicing literary critics. (At the same time, one would not want to foreclose entirely the possibility that some students, particularly undergraduates, might benefit from classes of either type in personal, unquantifiable ways separate from their ultimate vocational benefits.)

Among these skills I do not include those currently associated with academic "scholarship." Most of what is now called literary scholarship cannot really be considered criticism in any historically cogent sense of the term, although it has in practice certainly all but occupied the territory once claimed by independent literary criticism. As a result, while creative writing instruction tends to be, at its best, dynamic and interactive, literary instruction under the domination of the scholarly paradigm encourages passivity, even in the case of those students who acquire the skills required to become literary scholars, since the mastery of these skills is almost never itself the focus of most courses. Direct engagement with the texts at hand, especially in the form of sustained, dispassionate analysis, is inevitably discouraged in these circumstances, as such an approach must succumb to the scholarly imperative to produce "new knowledge"—and this imperative is most obviously met by subjecting literary texts to various kinds of "theoretical" reflections rather than producing interpretations, no matter how rigorous, based on close reading.

This is why New Criticism, for example, which did emphasize the centrality of close reading in the study of literature, was destined to be discarded as criticism came to be superseded by scholarship. Despite the myriad methodological objections its opponents have raised against it, its fatal flaw within the academic context was that its profoundest dedication was to literature rather than the academy. I do not suggest that the brand of literary criticism purveyed by a department of Creative Writing and Literary Criticism must be something like that advanced by the New Critics (especially as accompanied by the overarching claims of what Curtis White, in a recent essay that otherwise attempts a limited rehabilitation of New Criticism, calls "New Critical metaphysics"), but for this department to avoid the cycling and recycling of intellectual fashion that has caused the English department to drift gradually into irrelevance, it would need to encourage critical approaches that seek to elucidate and evaluate works of literature because of the intrinsic value of the effort rather than as a means to other ends, ends that usually amount to the reinforcement of the values most strongly held by the academy.

The best way to avoid pledging fealty to academic values would be to adopt a curriculum that resists being fixed in place, refuses to be established, however fleetingly, as an authoritative expression of what is "essential" to the study and practice of writing. Such a curriculum might offer survey courses of literature according to period or genre or ethnic/national identity, but only because those teaching the courses believed them to be useful for anyone wishing to write about literature in an informed way. Creative writing workshops in their current form might continue to be offered as a demonstrably effective method of instruction, but perhaps other courses could experiment with alternative methods of, say, integrating writing instruction with critical reading, or even could substitute individual mentoring for the traditional classroom. While certain minimal requirements for obtaining a degree, whether undergraduate or graduate, from this department would have to be devised, these requirements would ideally be as flexible as possible while also embodying the core principle that all courses contribute to the education of writers and critics. (Although it would also be desirable that any particular course be potentially useful or interesting to non-majors, or graduate students from other departments.) The ultimate decision about the kind of course offered, and about the scope and approach of the course, in other words, ought to be made by individual instructors, who would be implicitly considered the appropriate authority about both the subject at hand and its role in furthering the department’s underlying objectives.

Such a department as this would most likely attract—should seek to attract—those students whose interest in creative writing extends to a wider interest in the nature of literature as a whole, as well as those whose interest in literature prompts them to recognize that its vitality in the present, and its potential to remain a valid mode of expression, are at least as important as its accomplishments in the past or its convenience as a subject of critical discourse. It might no longer attract students for whom either creative writing or the study of literature is largely an exercise in self-indulgence—students who romanticize or idealize the writer’s role, who balk at the real work required to write serious prose, poetry, or drama, who ultimately view writing not as a craft to be learned, nor even as a calling to be followed where it leads, but as an appealing, although temporary, diversion. In my experience, as both student and professor, such students are common enough around both creative writing programs and English departments, and while they may help to foster a kind of bohemian atmosphere some of us find otherwise appealing (and help fill the classes that keep each of these entities in business), the more focused, frankly more pragmatically organized department envisioned here would probably not easily accommodate the looser allegiance of this sort of student to the literary values it would seek to advance.

This department additionally might prove less attractive to the kind of student who now majors in English as undergraduate preparation for later study in professional schools such as law or business. It could certainly still be possible to acquire from Creative Writing and Literary Criticism the enhanced writing and analysis skills the pre-professional student presumably would be seeking, but its emphasis on more directly cultivating a commitment to a literary vocation is not likely to seem as serviceable as the broadly distributed array of courses offered currently by most departments of English.

Perhaps it is odd to advocate an academic curriculum that probably will interest fewer students than would an approach that announced less strictly delineated goals; however, I believe that the decline of English into its present desuetude was I part caused by its capacity to be—or to try to be—everything to everyone, to the point that it now has essentially no identity at all. A discipline that made clear its loyalty to the cause of literature would have the virtue not only of validating the importance of that cause but of insulating itself from the most hazardous winds of academic fashion, which, unfortunately, have tended to swirl at their fiercest in and around the English department.

Certainly one could anticipate objections to a proposal such as this, although the most strenuous would not come, I would guess, from the literature professors whose approaches to literary scholarship are currently dominant—those caught up in this era’s intellectual haut couture. They have no special partiality for the disciplinary structure as it is currently configured, and would no doubt be just as content to do their work out of Anthropology, or History, or Communication, or a new and autonomous department of Cultural Studies. The remaining unrepentant humanists in the American academy are more likely to find this proposal unacceptable, a solution at least as discouraging as the problem it seeks to solve. However, as even they increasingly admit (through, for example, the titles of recent books such as Literature Lost and The Rise and Fall of English), the humanists’ ranks continue to dwindle, especially in the elite universities, and a good case could be made (I have attempted to do so in "Inventing Literature," American Book Review, November/December 2000) that their own collective efforts to assimilate literature to the norms of academe was an initial step on the path leading to the very morass of conflicting assumptions they now decry. In the end, the humanist scholars of literature cannot disclaim the process by which it becomes subordinated in the academy to a non-literary agenda; they can only insist that the agenda should properly be theirs.

Yet given the picture that emerges from the survey of the academic landscape provided by Fenza and Radavich (on which I have attempted to enlarge), it may turn out that creative writing programs will de facto be required to incorporate some elements of traditional literary study simply in order to accomplish their goals as these are currently defined. An English department that no longer reliably offers a literary education in any even nominally useful form will not be the at least indirect ally it has been—albeit somewhat inconstantly—during the period of creative writing’s ascendancy. At best creative writing could come to seem merely an ornament, the last tenuous connection to an era when its concern for the artistic possibilities of literature still formed part of the department’s ostensible identity; at worst it could be perceived as wholly irrelevant to the ambitions of whatever kind of hybrid discipline English becomes and cast adrift anyway, left with no obvious alternative affiliation and no functional curriculum of its own. In any case, merely maintaining the status quo, as Fenza more or less wishes to do, could prove to be inadequate to the task of preserving creative writing in the academy, and while professionalizing the creative writing degree according to more conventional academic models, as Radavich would prefer, might protect it from institutional disregard, it would do almost nothing to elevate—indeed could only diminish—the status of literature.

Thus, the most compelling objection to any proposal to consolidate creative writing and literary study in the name of greater efficiency, or more effective integration into the university curriculum (or even just to better insulate both from the destructive consequences of the ongoing transformation of English into something other than a humanistic discipline) might be the one that could (should?) have been made to the curricular establishment of literature and of writing instruction when supporters of each were still seeking academic respectability: not that they came unaccompanied by academically acceptable methods of pedagogy and research sufficient to make them plausibly successful additions to the university, but that the very attempt to develop such methods could only lead to the elevation of the methods themselves—and the inevitable disputes over their saliency—to the status of paramount object of disciplinary attention. By all laws of academic logic, the diminution of literature was all but inevitable, and it is entirely reasonable to question whether any kind of continued association with academe is in the best interest of those who wish to ensure a relevant future for serious imaginative and critical writing.

There is no reason to assume that the efforts made over the course of the last century to include both literature and creative writing in the university curriculum were at all carried out in bad faith. Although professional aggrandizement and academic politics inevitably played some role, the relocation of the literary world’s center of gravity to the university was by and large a well-intentioned attempt to enhance the status and prestige of literary writing. But at best the endeavor has produced unintended and self-defeating consequences, and at worst it has ultimately failed outright. English has essentially reverted to the approach one associated with philology—using literature for its convenience as a means of investigating historical and cultural matters—and in whatever direction this discipline moves under the auspices of the corporatized university, it is unlikely to veer so sharply as to once again invest its resources in the creation and support of an academic literary culture. Under the circumstances, simply to hope that the university becomes a more comfortable place for those inclined to take literature seriously on its own terms would be foolish indeed.

Among the harmful consequences of in effect granting custody of literature to the academy, moreover, has been the all but total disappearance of literary criticism in anything other than its most theory-laden mode, published in the most inaccessible and little-read scholarly journals. Although the proliferation of creative writing programs over the past forty years has been accompanied by an equally impressive increase in numbers of "little magazines" offering new poetry and fiction, by and large these journals have restricted themselves to publishing creative writing and have not performed the useful function they might of contesting the domination of academic criticism by also including intelligent, text-based criticism relevant to a non-specialized literary audience and consistent with their ultimate goal of finding such an audience for contemporary writing. Nor have newspapers, book reviews, or other outlets for literary journalism stepped in to fill a void opened up by the usurpation of the independent critic’s role by the literature professor. When not in fact penned by professors putting the occasional public face on their activities, the essays and reviews appearing in these venues, with notable exceptions, are usually glib and superficial, more often than not no more than plot summaries and idle gossip laced with "attitude," or "edge." (Unfortunately, "literary" websites on the Internet have so far proven to be particularly inclined toward this style of facile chatter; whether serious writing of any kind can ever truly find a home in the cyberworld is perhaps still an open question, but there seems little in the technology itself that would make it an especially felicitous medium, experiments in "hypertext" notwithstanding, for either fiction and poetry or literary criticism of any sustained kind, all of which are irretrievably committed to the material arrangements of the written word.)

Finally even those, like myself, who think that radical solution such as the one I have proposed would be necessary to sustain a place for literature in the academy, confront a difficult choice. To the extent that maintaining a presence for it in the university curriculum helps to provide literature with a certain cultural standing or promises to educate new readers—perhaps even to attract new readers who might otherwise be lost—then working to secure that presence seems worthwhile, even obligatory. But to the extent that this would continue to encourage a perception that literature is primarily a subject of academic study it can actually limit the attention paid to contemporary writing, not least because this perception inhibits the development of the opportunities for critical scrutiny and debate all writing that aspires to the status of literature requires (and deserves). Certainly at its present level of popularity on most campuses, creative writing would be safe in something like its current incarnation for the immediate future, but in the absence of literary criticism that can in any way live up to its ample inheritance, or of pedagogical practices that take advantage of criticism’s insights to help create a suitable audience for literary writing, who can say that what both D. W. Fenza and David Radavich really fear the most—the trivialization of literature, through the imposition of either unsuitable professional or corporate standards—won’t eventually come to pass?

Meanwhile it is not entirely unwarranted to feel that such trivialization is already well under way, especially in the curriculum and the professional discourse of traditional literary study. Likewise, it is not unreasonably alarmist to fear that creative writing programs, where regard for the work undertaken by literature still prevails, will inevitably suffer from a continued dependence, however informal, on what remains of the English department. Perhaps if nothing else, a revival of nonacademic criticism could help revitalize a literary culture outside the university thoroughly enough to enable writers and critics to separate themselves—psychologically, if not at first literally—from the now tangled groves of academe. Indeed, the most important task that literary criticism could perform right now might be to encourage and justify this separation by reminding us all that the literary and the academic are not synonymous and by redefining "creative writing" as an ongoing artistic project of abiding cultural importance, a collective project that takes inspiration where it can from what has come before but that otherwise, through the achievements of those presently working at it, provides the measure of what we understand "literature" to be. No additional seal of approval from academe would be required.

The Organized Effects of the Program (On McGurl's The Program Era)

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy--and a times great brilliance--by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers" is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the "tremendous energy" and frequent "brilliance" that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that a "vast" number of energetic and brilliant writers have been "students and teachers" in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing "program" to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor is to say that, on the whole, the "program era" has produced "a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing" to say that, however "multifaceted" it might be," this body of work is "rich" all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by "the program," even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly "rich." I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced "excellence" of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program--to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before--there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing "improved" American literature as we get—it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in "literary ambitions" this inevitably entailed, and to encourage "habits of self-conscious attention to craft." Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs—the "workshop" method—is shown in particular to have resulted in the "excellence" of the system, although the focus on "craft" has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the "literary fiction" that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman's critique (London Review of Books) of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise makes some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl's book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to "a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems," unavoidably considered and addressed those problems, and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement. Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she's not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman's indictment (Los Angeles Review of Books), he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the "complex" problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman's reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren't germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn't much different from many other academic studies of postwar or "contemporary" fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as "systems novel" or "radical innocence" or "dirty realism" as candidates. ("Black humor," "metafiction," "minimalism," and, indeed, "postmodern" began as such terms.) McGurl proposes "program fiction." As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl's analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, "contemporary literature" is by definition undefined. The literary "fields" predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can't help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates—the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author's affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of "program era" as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn't quite fit McGurl's notion of "technomodernism," his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

"Program fiction" becomes in McGurl's analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally "program era" doesn't suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of "the program" and those "aesthetic problems" swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) "Creative writing" did not entirely replace "fiction" and "poetry" as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way—number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of  a program's graduates, etc.—poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to "write what you know" or the impulse to find one's "voice" or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims he makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction, and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete.

A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing—particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the "little" magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history—past, present, and future—needs scrutiny as well.

Performing Literature

Although Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature is clearly intended to be read primarily by graduate students or instructors just beginning their teaching careers, one can also read the book, against the grain of the author’s own rhetorical goals, perhaps, as a guide for the academic outlander to the curious practices of that disciplinary subculture responsible for what still passes as literary study. Those who retain an image of the English professor as a high-minded if pedantic guardian of the treasures of Literature will find provided here what amounts to the finishing touches on the recast image the profession has been working on for over 30 years. Just as high-minded but in a more earnest, socially-conscious way, even more firmly attached to scholastic attitudes and the conventions of academic discourse, the self-appointed curators of this recast image have nevertheless worked very hard to dissociate literary study from its former aspirations to establish works of literature as a kind of secular scripture, an authoritative source of time-tested wisdom and a superior sensibility. Unfortunately, in the process they also have succeeded, as Showalter’s book finally demonstrates, in dissociating it from literature as well.

The story of how “literature itself” came to be the focus of study in the English departments of American universities has been admirably told in Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Over the course of the 20th century the role of literature in academic study was transformed from being a source of philological analysis to being a “subject” in its own right, a source of distinctive knowledge to be pursued for its own value. But as Graff’s account shows, this change in status took place amidst great disagreement over ultimate purposes, even among those proposing it, and in many ways the metamorphosis was never really completed, as no real accord was ever reached about how the literature curriculum ought to be organized, how best to teach it, or even finally how to define “literature” in such a way that its disciplinary principles could be well understood and its boundaries well identified. As a result, American literary study has been characterized mostly by its instability, as one new wave of revolutionary thinking about the way it ought to be done has followed upon another, the only certainty being that the approach you now believe to be truly conclusive ten years from now will be moribund.

It has happened to the New Humanism, Marxism, the New Criticism, the Chicago School, Myth Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism (as happened also to the Old Historicism), multiculturalism in each of its variants, to the ideas of Freud, Sartre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Eco, Eagleton, Lacan, Jameson, Bloom, Fanon, Tompkins, Sedgwick, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, hooks, Burke, Auerbach, Kermode, de Man, Hartman, and Lentricchia. Not all of these movements, critics, and theories have been discredited or entirely discarded, of course, but none of the systems or elaborate critical structures erected in their names could still plausibly be considered the definitive method of literary study and criticism, the one method making all others, past and future, superfluous. To the extent that academic literary study has come to be perceived by the public, as well as by other academics, as frivolous, intellectually capricious at best, it is a consequence of this instability of approach built in at the very origins of the discipline’s historical identity, rather than any of the specific excesses that have been attributed to current practices and particular scholars.

The present lack of obvious purpose in the English department, more pronounced than during the height of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s but no less a sign of the disorder inherent in the discipline from the start, is fully reflected in Showalter’s attempt in Teaching Literature to survey all of the options available to the college literature instructor. Ironically enough, Showalter’s obvious, even admirable, effort to include references to numerous possible approaches to the teaching of literature, and thus not to “privilege” any one approach in particular, only reveals more plainly the degree to which the organized study of literature in American universities finally neither involves nor requires any particular regard for literature at all, not even the sort of unstated “resentment” Harold Bloom ascribes to the contemporary literary academy. The clear implication of Showalter’s account of what teaching literature is good for, in fact, is that if the whole endeavor is good for anyone, it is the teacher him/herself, whose well-being and sense of professional accomplishment are the incessant focus of Teaching Literature.

The book’s concern to raise the level of the college English instructor’s self-esteem is sounded in its very first chapter, “The Anxiety of Teaching,” in which Showalter anatomizes the various causes of such anxiety and explicitly offers her succeeding chapters as the sort of informed advice that can alleviate them if sincerely considered. Some of her advice is perfectly sound, to be sure—as is the more general contention that teaching induces its own distinctive kinds of anxieties—and that which touches on such unavoidable, perhaps more quotidian issues of class preparation and grading could of course be useful to those readers unable to acquire such information through more immediate means. Showalter is entirely correct in maintaining that much of the ordinary work of college teaching is systematically ignored in English graduate study, and is not much discussed by a younger instructor’s potential mentors among the faculty either, and thus any pedagogical guide that addresses this problem is undoubtedly to be welcomed. But this worthy intention is altogether undercut in a book that otherwise encourages its readers to view literature as essentially an adjunct to the act of teaching itself, as the platform from which the literature professor performs the salutary (and self-assigned) service only he/she (for reasons however vague and indefinite) is able to render.

“Performance,” as a matter of fact, is an important concept in Teaching Literature, as it would almost have to be in a depiction of the work of the literature professor that emphasizes so minimally an appreciation of the intrinsic merits of the subject purportedly being professed. Performance doesn’t necessarily involve simply the theatricality with which the professor chooses to present works of literature (Showalter explicitly disdains what she identifies as “teacher-centered” methods of instruction), but extends as well to the transformation of the classroom, indeed, of the literature course itself, into a kind of performance art whereby literature becomes the inspiration for the instructor’s own ingenuity in attracting students’ interest, but otherwise fades into the background as the more pressing requirements of the classroom drama necessarily take precedence. For example, Showalter describes her own method of imposing suitable order and form on courses in the novel, by which she gives such courses their own narrative structure, complete with “Beginnings,” Middles,” and “Endings.” Further:

In my fiction classes, I try to incorporate elements of narrative into the teaching process, and also make students aware of how these elements operate to define experience as a story. I compare lecturing to narration in the novel, demonstrate ways to vary and violate it, and encourage students to think of how it might be done. (Once to show how you could rupture or break the narrative frame of the classroom, I had a graduate student interrupt the lecture by loudly announcing he had a pizza to deliver to a student. Readers will recognize the homage to Fast Times at Ridgmont High. But every semester provides its own spontaneous frame-breakers, from a squirrel running around the auditorium to fire drills to students streaking.)

 Something like this mirroring device seems to be what Showalter has in mind when claiming that “the most effective members of our profession are those whose literary theory is consistent with their teaching theory and practice.” In other words, one’s “theory” of the significance literature bears ought not merely to inform one’s scholarly work, or the choice of text to assign and study in the classroom (both of which already go a long way toward creating a distinct context in which the ultimate significance of literature is to be understood), but also ought to provide the mold into which one’s very classroom practice is to be poured. At first this highly artificial approach seems somewhat at variance with Showalter’s further statement in the same discussion of “Personae: The Teaching Self” that “although a persona can protect you against the intimacy and threat of self-revelation in the classroom, it can also prevent you from achieving the real exchange of ideas that makes teaching memorable” as well as from revealing the literature instructor’s “true self.” But finally these seemingly contradictory impulses—toward pedagogical contrivance and toward authentic self-expression—are bound together, part of the same goal of using the literature classroom for what Teaching Literature really affirms as the most compelling rationale for the activity named in its title: the valorization of the good intentions of the literature professor, provided the appropriate assurances of concern for the welfare of students can be made with credible conviction at the same time.

To those who believe that the tarnishing of the image of literary study is due mainly to the hyperpoliticization of literary scholarship over the past 15 years, I would argue instead that literature’s observable loss of luster comes as much from this more general evolution of literary study into the vehicle for the professor’s own self-aggrandizement, the current dominance of politically-minded scholarship being its most prominent manifestation for now. What the future developments of this tendency might bring about is anybody’s guess, but in my view that it certainly will mutate into some other method of the moment is beyond question. Whether the study of literature for its own sake, free of the enshrouding accumulations of which the self-projection advocated in Showalter’s book is only the most recent, will find its way back to the curriculum of the English department—or any other academic discipline that might arise in wake of its ultimate demise due to its lack of utility to the corporate university—is equally open to speculation, but if the history of literary study over the past century is any kind of reliable touchstone, such a renewal of purpose could only prove temporary.

Ultimately Teaching Literature inadvertently demonstrates that literature functions poorly as a subject of academic inquiry, not because it lends itself to no plausible method of focusing this sort of inquiry but because it lends itself to so many possible methods. That works of literature themselves invite readings that find their own particular centers of interpretive gravity, angles of approach that are almost infinitely variable and determined by the individual reader’s own presumptions, is so obviously true that it seems in retrospect somewhat peculiar that such an unavoidable consequence of academic literary study would have been ignored by those who persevered in the struggle to install literary study as a recognized academic discipline. Alongside so many other disciplines with true discipline—that have a single center of gravity, or at the very least do not encourage a proliferation of interpretation for its own sake—literary study was always fated to appear to circle around its purported subject without ever conveying the impression that its essential work helped to get us closer to an informed understanding of the subject—or even that it has anything that could be called essential work to do. Even the initial dispensation prevailing in literary study, whereby works of literature were considered primarily for their claims to possessing literary qualities (judged to be good things to have) and the ultimate justification of which was to clarify our ideas about the very category of the literary, produced “knowledge” of frankly dubious value all too easily dismissed by an academy that esteems instead processes more objective and results more exact that literary critics-even when transformed into “scholars”-are generally able to provide.

Literary scholars have not failed at conforming to this model through want of trying, however. Various attempts to make literary study and scholarship more “scientific,” either in spirit or in fact, have been made, from the more doctrinaire applications of New Criticism to the virtual conversion of literary scholarship into a branch of social science found in the move to cultural studies to the data mining that characterizes “digital humanities.” And while on the one hand this is just the predictable consequence of trying to bring academic “rigor” to the study of literature, on the other the more extreme of these approaches (including the extreme laissez-faire approach encouraged by Elaine Showalter) manifests an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the inherent and more immediate benefits that works of literature have to offer, benefits that presumably draw most readers to them to begin with—namely aesthetic delight, the pleasures of a compelling reading experience, particularly those pleasures that can be the result of meeting the challenges posed by complex or innovative works, of actually expanding one’s capacity to enjoy satisfying reading experiences. It is precisely that imaginative writing that does elicit this kind of response most readers would identify as “literature,” and such a pragmatic definition of the term is probably as useful a way to distinguish what these imaginative works have in common as can be devised.

This may seem markedly similar to the definition Showalter endorses, literature as “what gets taught.” But actually it here I am in the starkest disagreement with Showalter’s own theory. It is a measure of how far the assimilation of literature to the academy has gone—some might say how thoroughly trivialized it has become—that apparently for many people it is unexceptional to so readily conflate works of literature (what gets read) with their place in the classroom, their potential for being taught. Furthermore, while this close association of the literary and the academic might seem to lead to a perception of literary study as largely an elite activity (as at an earlier period it probably was so perceived), Showalter explicitly renounces elitism by welcoming to the literature syllabus any fiction, poetry, or drama, “whether by Wordsworth or Maya Angelou. . .Jane Austen or Stephen King. . . .” (She also approves of film, television, and other “cultural materials,” although considers their use to be separate from “teaching literature” proper.) Ultimately, Showalter’s come one, come all attitude to determining the borders of literary study only confirms the effective purgation of all meaning from the very concept of literature among the current coterie of literature scholars and teachers.

Yet I for one finally cannot muster any great enthusiasm for the idea of reclaiming literary study on behalf of something similar to the more focused, literature-centric conception I have myself advanced. To believe that works of literature are valuable first and foremost for those qualities that sharpen the individual reader’s critical faculties and enhance that reader’s aesthetic sensibilities is not to conclude that these are values that can easily be conveyed through formal classroom study. In fact, to believe that what literature is good for is to provoke this kind of encounter between one reader and the latent if still unexplored possibilities of the imagination and of human language, a fundamentally subjective and personal achievement on the reader’s part, is probably to conclude that the study of literature in a classroom setting can only be a distraction from fostering such an encounter. Indeed, the perhaps inevitable result of bringing literature to the classroom at all is exactly the indulgent, aimless fragmentation depicted in Teaching Literature.

The best way out of the dilemma paradoxically created by academic critics hoping to elevate the status of literature in American culture would be for a new generation of literary critics to bypass the academy altogether and seek out some fresh and more reliable direction by which to guide readers to their own recognition of literature’s abiding merits, which as ought surely to be evident by now, most productively occurs only outside the college classroom

Literary Periods

There are some writers who are, and likely always will be, inextricably linked to the “period” with which their work is associated, and in many cases helped to define. Surely Wordsworth and Keats will always be “Romantic” poets, while Faulkner and Woolf will remain modernists, as the term “modern” has been fully appropriated to describe the historical era beginning just before World War I and ending with the coming of World War II (the 1920s in particular representing the truest efflorescence of modernism). Anyone who has taken a college literature course knows that the English department (and literary study more broadly) organizes itself using these sorts of historical designations, but this way of understanding literary history has become so pervasive that probably few readers regard it as an especially “academic” assumption.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Modernism

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it:

Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure.

Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.”

Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.”

Frost develops her argument that a chief characteristic of modern fiction is its distinctive preoccupation with redefining pleasure through a series of chapter-length interpretations of the work of a multifarious group of modern writers. In the first, “James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity,” she considers the motif of aroma (especially perfume) as it is manifested—quite often, it turns out—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The second chapter analogizes the particular kind of difficulty embodied in the work of Gertrude Stein to the ambiguous “pleasure” provided by tickling. A chapter on D.H. Lawrence unsurprisingly focuses on Lawrence’s troubling ideas about the proper degree of pain and pleasure required for a “healthy” female sexuality, while the subsequent chapter on Aldous Huxley highlights the critique of modern forms of narcoticizing pleasure in Brave New World. Chapter 5 discusses two less iconic modern writers, Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and concentrates on the problematic relationship to pleasure, often explicitly joined to pain, experienced by the two writers’ protagonists. It is the chapter in this book that comes closest to suggesting that the “problem with pleasure” among modern writers is a masochistic one, after all. A final chapter takes up the career of the now somewhat forgotten Anita Loos, specifically her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that Loos’s attempt to give a rather more populist spin to the difficulty valorized by modernism actually prefigured the more playful attitude to the pleasure and seriousness exemplified in postmodernism.

On the whole, The Problem With Pleasure makes a convincing case that modernism was, at least in part, a response to the rise of mass entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a kind of entertainment that seemed to many modern writers to offer only “cheap” pleasures. Writers like Joyce and Stein (or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner) were certainly well aware that many readers would find their work unorthodox and intimidating, but hoped that these readers would rise to the challenge and put aside their expectation of immediate gratification to find a more lasting satisfaction in the willing struggle with their books for the sake of breakthroughs to a kind of higher awareness—both of their own capacities as readers and of the capacity of literature to offer profounder pleasures. Frost’s readings are insightful and should be accessible even to general readers uninterested by the practices and protocols of academic criticism. Although Frost in her introductory chapter situates her book in the context of prevailing scholarly approaches to modernism (mostly focused on the influence of class and gender), she commendably avoids dismissing modernism for its various retrograde assumptions. While also pointing out where such assumptions are clearly evident—Lawrence’s attitude toward women, for example—Frost takes seriously the collective effort to redefine pleasure and generally affirms modern fiction’s success in turning “difficulty” into a virtue.

The strongest chapters in the book are those on Joyce and Stein. Both present fresh and persuasive readings of these core modernists (something that is by now not easy to do). Almost no one before has looked so closely at scent as a motif in Ulysses, although certainly it is a novel saturated in sensory detail, as well as one that emphasizes its characters’ experiences of pleasure. As Frost herself notes, Joyce is “far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists.” Her discussion focuses on the way in which the scent of perfume, especially for Leopold Bloom, works as a correlative of the more complex understanding of pleasure required to read a novel like Ulysses successfully. Bloom’s preference is for perfumes that mingle the fragrant and the faintly disgusting, the pleasant and the “base,” that produce pleasure partly through unpleasure. For example,

[t]he perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a…complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, ‘Spanish Skin,’ is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s ‘animalic’ tendencies…. Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents, musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human.

As she does here, Frost connects Joyce’s use of the odor motif to the more general portrayal of sensual pleasure in the novel, especially erotic pleasure: “Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult….” By examining the interactions of pleasure and unpleasure in the novel’s depiction of these particular “somatic pleasures,” Frost provides us with the kind of “active, analytical reading” modernist fiction requires, but also demonstrates that such a reading practice makes possible a “cognitive pleasure” that is indeed enjoyable.

Where the difficulties of Ulysses come from both its formal and stylistic variety, the difficulty posed by Gertrude Stein’s work is fundamentally stylistic, produced by the complex effects (of diction, grammar, and syntax) she achieves through her enigmatic orderings of otherwise simple language. Frost proposes that this complexity could be usefully regarded by perplexed readers as a kind of verbal tickling, intended to both provoke and amuse, to “tease” the reader with writing that withholds clarity but also can make the lack of clarity itself oddly satisfying:

Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Frost examines these lines from Tender Buttons, for example:

Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful

Frost then remarks:

As this passage illustrates…Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The ‘rubbed purr’ fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended, they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

Stein’s work even more directly and insistently than Joyce’s (except in Finnegans Wake) tries to induce the reader to redefine difficulty and indeterminacy as pleasurable in themselves when they enhance our awareness of the satisfactions reading well can provide. The attentive reader will, of course, note the “infantile” and “erotic” qualities of Stein’s writing (no doubt they are closely related), but these more recognizable pleasures can only be accessed through those “analytical reading practices” that often make modern literature seem to involve more work than pleasure.

The remaining chapters in The Problem With Pleasure, while not without interest and generally informative about the writers surveyed, are ultimately less convincing. Including writers like Lawrence and Huxley provides additional perspective on the historical circumstances that motivated modern writers’ suspicion of the cheap pleasures to be found in popular culture (in a period when what we now identify as “popular culture” was gaining ascendance), but they are much less representative of the formal and stylistic experimentation that is typical of modernist fiction, and that gained it its reputation as being “difficult” in the first place. The book’s subtitle asks us to consider “modernism and its discontents,” and while both Lawrence and Huxley were certainly discontent with many features of modernity, their discontent did not so much extend to the formal assumptions of fiction itself, a kind of discontent that did indeed inspire most of the writers associated with modernism as a literary movement. If anything, the books of Hamilton and Rhys are even less representative of formal and verbal complexity, however much they reflect the conflicted views of pleasure Frost shows to be more widespread in modern fiction as a whole. The chapter on Anita Loos is an entertaining survey of Loos’s career as a writer of silent film titles and her elevation of title-writing to a more “literary” status; but finally the way in which this experience informs Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is of only modest interest, since it seems unlikely that the novel will survive as an important work of modern fiction.

This variability of focus is arguably not a lapse in judgment on Frost’s part but instead an almost inevitable consequence of the sort of book The Power of Pleasure represents. A work of academic criticism by an academic critic, it exists first of all to find its place in its “field” of professional literary scholarship. While Frost’s book is accessible enough to appeal to non-academic, non-specialist readers, its ultimate value to them is weakened by its more diffuse discussions of writers only loosely related to each other as chronologically “modern.” Ultimately Frost’s most important insight, that the signature “difficulty” of modernist fiction was not a rejection of readerly pleasure but an attempt to redefine and thus enrich it, could surely have been conveyed very effectively in an essay devoted to Joyce and Stein, an essay that would both be credible as a contribution to the scholarly commentary on modern fiction and enlightening to general readers about the motives of writers who otherwise might be perceived as willfully obscure. However, the requirements of academic publishing, as part of the academic system that dispenses recognition and rewards, prescribe instead a “study” that can be extended to book length (the “academic monograph”) as evidence of achievement and seriousness of purpose.

The value of literary criticism ought to be determined by how well it enhances our comprehension and appreciation of works of literature, and ultimately of literature itself. By this measure, early academic critics remain valuable for the rigor and breadth of knowledge they added to the critical repertoire. By now, however, academic criticism has, perhaps inevitably, shifted its ambition from explicating literature to reinforcing its own conventions. It would be a shame if this book’s adherence to these conventions caused readers to avoid it, since it does offer fresh and useful ways of approaching the most important literary phenomenon of the 20th century.

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Conte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Conte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Conte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Conte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Conte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Conte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Conte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Conte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Conte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Conte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Conte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Conte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Lies trilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Conte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Conte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Conte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Conte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy--and a times great brilliance--by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers" is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the "tremendous energy" and frequent "brilliance" that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that a "vast" number of energetic and brilliant writers have been "students and teachers" in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing "program" to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor is to say that, on the whole, the "program era" has produced "a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing" to say that, however "multifaceted" it might be," this body of work is "rich" all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by "the program," even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly "rich." I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced "excellence" of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program--to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before--there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing "improved" American literature as we get—it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in "literary ambitions" this inevitably entailed, and to encourage "habits of self-conscious attention to craft." Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs—the "workshop" method—is shown in particular to have resulted in the "excellence" of the system, although the focus on "craft" has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the "literary fiction" that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman's critique (London Review of Books) of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise makes some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl's book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to "a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems," unavoidably considered and addressed those problems, and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement. Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she's not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman's indictment (Los Angeles Review of Books), he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the "complex" problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman's reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren't germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn't much different from many other academic studies of postwar or "contemporary" fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as "systems novel" or "radical innocence" or "dirty realism" as candidates. ("Black humor," "metafiction," "minimalism," and, indeed, "postmodern" began as such terms.) McGurl proposes "program fiction." As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl's analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, "contemporary literature" is by definition undefined. The literary "fields" predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can't help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates—the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author's affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of "program era" as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn't quite fit McGurl's notion of "technomodernism," his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

"Program fiction" becomes in McGurl's analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally "program era" doesn't suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of "the program" and those "aesthetic problems" swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) "Creative writing" did not entirely replace "fiction" and "poetry" as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way—number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of  a program's graduates, etc.—poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to "write what you know" or the impulse to find one's "voice" or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims he makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction, and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete.

A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing—particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the "little" magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history—past, present, and future—needs scrutiny as well.

Performing Literature

Although Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature is clearly intended to be read primarily by graduate students or instructors just beginning their teaching careers, one can also read the book, against the grain of the author’s own rhetorical goals, perhaps, as a guide for the academic outlander to the curious practices of that disciplinary subculture responsible for what still passes as literary study. Those who retain an image of the English professor as a high-minded if pedantic guardian of the treasures of Literature will find provided here what amounts to the finishing touches on the recast image the profession has been working on for over 30 years. Just as high-minded but in a more earnest, socially-conscious way, even more firmly attached to scholastic attitudes and the conventions of academic discourse, the self-appointed curators of this recast image have nevertheless worked very hard to dissociate literary study from its former aspirations to establish works of literature as a kind of secular scripture, an authoritative source of time-tested wisdom and a superior sensibility. Unfortunately, in the process they also have succeeded, as Showalter’s book finally demonstrates, in dissociating it from literature as well.

The story of how “literature itself” came to be the focus of study in the English departments of American universities has been admirably told in Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Over the course of the 20th century the role of literature in academic study was transformed from being a source of philological analysis to being a “subject” in its own right, a source of distinctive knowledge to be pursued for its own value. But as Graff’s account shows, this change in status took place amidst great disagreement over ultimate purposes, even among those proposing it, and in many ways the metamorphosis was never really completed, as no real accord was ever reached about how the literature curriculum ought to be organized, how best to teach it, or even finally how to define “literature” in such a way that its disciplinary principles could be well understood and its boundaries well identified. As a result, American literary study has been characterized mostly by its instability, as one new wave of revolutionary thinking about the way it ought to be done has followed upon another, the only certainty being that the approach you now believe to be truly conclusive ten years from now will be moribund.

It has happened to the New Humanism, Marxism, the New Criticism, the Chicago School, Myth Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism (as happened also to the Old Historicism), multiculturalism in each of its variants, to the ideas of Freud, Sartre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Eco, Eagleton, Lacan, Jameson, Bloom, Fanon, Tompkins, Sedgwick, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, hooks, Burke, Auerbach, Kermode, de Man, Hartman, and Lentricchia. Not all of these movements, critics, and theories have been discredited or entirely discarded, of course, but none of the systems or elaborate critical structures erected in their names could still plausibly be considered the definitive method of literary study and criticism, the one method making all others, past and future, superfluous. To the extent that academic literary study has come to be perceived by the public, as well as by other academics, as frivolous, intellectually capricious at best, it is a consequence of this instability of approach built in at the very origins of the discipline’s historical identity, rather than any of the specific excesses that have been attributed to current practices and particular scholars.

The present lack of obvious purpose in the English department, more pronounced than during the height of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s but no less a sign of the disorder inherent in the discipline from the start, is fully reflected in Showalter’s attempt in Teaching Literature to survey all of the options available to the college literature instructor. Ironically enough, Showalter’s obvious, even admirable, effort to include references to numerous possible approaches to the teaching of literature, and thus not to “privilege” any one approach in particular, only reveals more plainly the degree to which the organized study of literature in American universities finally neither involves nor requires any particular regard for literature at all, not even the sort of unstated “resentment” Harold Bloom ascribes to the contemporary literary academy. The clear implication of Showalter’s account of what teaching literature is good for, in fact, is that if the whole endeavor is good for anyone, it is the teacher him/herself, whose well-being and sense of professional accomplishment are the incessant focus of Teaching Literature.

The book’s concern to raise the level of the college English instructor’s self-esteem is sounded in its very first chapter, “The Anxiety of Teaching,” in which Showalter anatomizes the various causes of such anxiety and explicitly offers her succeeding chapters as the sort of informed advice that can alleviate them if sincerely considered. Some of her advice is perfectly sound, to be sure—as is the more general contention that teaching induces its own distinctive kinds of anxieties—and that which touches on such unavoidable, perhaps more quotidian issues of class preparation and grading could of course be useful to those readers unable to acquire such information through more immediate means. Showalter is entirely correct in maintaining that much of the ordinary work of college teaching is systematically ignored in English graduate study, and is not much discussed by a younger instructor’s potential mentors among the faculty either, and thus any pedagogical guide that addresses this problem is undoubtedly to be welcomed. But this worthy intention is altogether undercut in a book that otherwise encourages its readers to view literature as essentially an adjunct to the act of teaching itself, as the platform from which the literature professor performs the salutary (and self-assigned) service only he/she (for reasons however vague and indefinite) is able to render.

“Performance,” as a matter of fact, is an important concept in Teaching Literature, as it would almost have to be in a depiction of the work of the literature professor that emphasizes so minimally an appreciation of the intrinsic merits of the subject purportedly being professed. Performance doesn’t necessarily involve simply the theatricality with which the professor chooses to present works of literature (Showalter explicitly disdains what she identifies as “teacher-centered” methods of instruction), but extends as well to the transformation of the classroom, indeed, of the literature course itself, into a kind of performance art whereby literature becomes the inspiration for the instructor’s own ingenuity in attracting students’ interest, but otherwise fades into the background as the more pressing requirements of the classroom drama necessarily take precedence. For example, Showalter describes her own method of imposing suitable order and form on courses in the novel, by which she gives such courses their own narrative structure, complete with “Beginnings,” Middles,” and “Endings.” Further:

In my fiction classes, I try to incorporate elements of narrative into the teaching process, and also make students aware of how these elements operate to define experience as a story. I compare lecturing to narration in the novel, demonstrate ways to vary and violate it, and encourage students to think of how it might be done. (Once to show how you could rupture or break the narrative frame of the classroom, I had a graduate student interrupt the lecture by loudly announcing he had a pizza to deliver to a student. Readers will recognize the homage to Fast Times at Ridgmont High. But every semester provides its own spontaneous frame-breakers, from a squirrel running around the auditorium to fire drills to students streaking.)

 Something like this mirroring device seems to be what Showalter has in mind when claiming that “the most effective members of our profession are those whose literary theory is consistent with their teaching theory and practice.” In other words, one’s “theory” of the significance literature bears ought not merely to inform one’s scholarly work, or the choice of text to assign and study in the classroom (both of which already go a long way toward creating a distinct context in which the ultimate significance of literature is to be understood), but also ought to provide the mold into which one’s very classroom practice is to be poured. At first this highly artificial approach seems somewhat at variance with Showalter’s further statement in the same discussion of “Personae: The Teaching Self” that “although a persona can protect you against the intimacy and threat of self-revelation in the classroom, it can also prevent you from achieving the real exchange of ideas that makes teaching memorable” as well as from revealing the literature instructor’s “true self.” But finally these seemingly contradictory impulses—toward pedagogical contrivance and toward authentic self-expression—are bound together, part of the same goal of using the literature classroom for what Teaching Literature really affirms as the most compelling rationale for the activity named in its title: the valorization of the good intentions of the literature professor, provided the appropriate assurances of concern for the welfare of students can be made with credible conviction at the same time.

To those who believe that the tarnishing of the image of literary study is due mainly to the hyperpoliticization of literary scholarship over the past 15 years, I would argue instead that literature’s observable loss of luster comes as much from this more general evolution of literary study into the vehicle for the professor’s own self-aggrandizement, the current dominance of politically-minded scholarship being its most prominent manifestation for now. What the future developments of this tendency might bring about is anybody’s guess, but in my view that it certainly will mutate into some other method of the moment is beyond question. Whether the study of literature for its own sake, free of the enshrouding accumulations of which the self-projection advocated in Showalter’s book is only the most recent, will find its way back to the curriculum of the English department—or any other academic discipline that might arise in wake of its ultimate demise due to its lack of utility to the corporate university—is equally open to speculation, but if the history of literary study over the past century is any kind of reliable touchstone, such a renewal of purpose could only prove temporary.

Ultimately Teaching Literature inadvertently demonstrates that literature functions poorly as a subject of academic inquiry, not because it lends itself to no plausible method of focusing this sort of inquiry but because it lends itself to so many possible methods. That works of literature themselves invite readings that find their own particular centers of interpretive gravity, angles of approach that are almost infinitely variable and determined by the individual reader’s own presumptions, is so obviously true that it seems in retrospect somewhat peculiar that such an unavoidable consequence of academic literary study would have been ignored by those who persevered in the struggle to install literary study as a recognized academic discipline. Alongside so many other disciplines with true discipline—that have a single center of gravity, or at the very least do not encourage a proliferation of interpretation for its own sake—literary study was always fated to appear to circle around its purported subject without ever conveying the impression that its essential work helped to get us closer to an informed understanding of the subject—or even that it has anything that could be called essential work to do. Even the initial dispensation prevailing in literary study, whereby works of literature were considered primarily for their claims to possessing literary qualities (judged to be good things to have) and the ultimate justification of which was to clarify our ideas about the very category of the literary, produced “knowledge” of frankly dubious value all too easily dismissed by an academy that esteems instead processes more objective and results more exact that literary critics-even when transformed into “scholars”-are generally able to provide.

Literary scholars have not failed at conforming to this model through want of trying, however. Various attempts to make literary study and scholarship more “scientific,” either in spirit or in fact, have been made, from the more doctrinaire applications of New Criticism to the virtual conversion of literary scholarship into a branch of social science found in the move to cultural studies to the data mining that characterizes “digital humanities.” And while on the one hand this is just the predictable consequence of trying to bring academic “rigor” to the study of literature, on the other the more extreme of these approaches (including the extreme laissez-faire approach encouraged by Elaine Showalter) manifests an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the inherent and more immediate benefits that works of literature have to offer, benefits that presumably draw most readers to them to begin with—namely aesthetic delight, the pleasures of a compelling reading experience, particularly those pleasures that can be the result of meeting the challenges posed by complex or innovative works, of actually expanding one’s capacity to enjoy satisfying reading experiences. It is precisely that imaginative writing that does elicit this kind of response most readers would identify as “literature,” and such a pragmatic definition of the term is probably as useful a way to distinguish what these imaginative works have in common as can be devised.

This may seem markedly similar to the definition Showalter endorses, literature as “what gets taught.” But actually it here I am in the starkest disagreement with Showalter’s own theory. It is a measure of how far the assimilation of literature to the academy has gone—some might say how thoroughly trivialized it has become—that apparently for many people it is unexceptional to so readily conflate works of literature (what gets read) with their place in the classroom, their potential for being taught. Furthermore, while this close association of the literary and the academic might seem to lead to a perception of literary study as largely an elite activity (as at an earlier period it probably was so perceived), Showalter explicitly renounces elitism by welcoming to the literature syllabus any fiction, poetry, or drama, “whether by Wordsworth or Maya Angelou. . .Jane Austen or Stephen King. . . .” (She also approves of film, television, and other “cultural materials,” although considers their use to be separate from “teaching literature” proper.) Ultimately, Showalter’s come one, come all attitude to determining the borders of literary study only confirms the effective purgation of all meaning from the very concept of literature among the current coterie of literature scholars and teachers.

Yet I for one finally cannot muster any great enthusiasm for the idea of reclaiming literary study on behalf of something similar to the more focused, literature-centric conception I have myself advanced. To believe that works of literature are valuable first and foremost for those qualities that sharpen the individual reader’s critical faculties and enhance that reader’s aesthetic sensibilities is not to conclude that these are values that can easily be conveyed through formal classroom study. In fact, to believe that what literature is good for is to provoke this kind of encounter between one reader and the latent if still unexplored possibilities of the imagination and of human language, a fundamentally subjective and personal achievement on the reader’s part, is probably to conclude that the study of literature in a classroom setting can only be a distraction from fostering such an encounter. Indeed, the perhaps inevitable result of bringing literature to the classroom at all is exactly the indulgent, aimless fragmentation depicted in Teaching Literature.

The best way out of the dilemma paradoxically created by academic critics hoping to elevate the status of literature in American culture would be for a new generation of literary critics to bypass the academy altogether and seek out some fresh and more reliable direction by which to guide readers to their own recognition of literature’s abiding merits, which as ought surely to be evident by now, most productively occurs only outside the college classroom

Literary Periods

There are some writers who are, and likely always will be, inextricably linked to the “period” with which their work is associated, and in many cases helped to define. Surely Wordsworth and Keats will always be “Romantic” poets, while Faulkner and Woolf will remain modernists, as the term “modern” has been fully appropriated to describe the historical era beginning just before World War I and ending with the coming of World War II (the 1920s in particular representing the truest efflorescence of modernism). Anyone who has taken a college literature course knows that the English department (and literary study more broadly) organizes itself using these sorts of historical designations, but this way of understanding literary history has become so pervasive that probably few readers regard it as an especially “academic” assumption.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Modernism

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it:

Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure.

Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.”

Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.”

Frost develops her argument that a chief characteristic of modern fiction is its distinctive preoccupation with redefining pleasure through a series of chapter-length interpretations of the work of a multifarious group of modern writers. In the first, “James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity,” she considers the motif of aroma (especially perfume) as it is manifested—quite often, it turns out—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The second chapter analogizes the particular kind of difficulty embodied in the work of Gertrude Stein to the ambiguous “pleasure” provided by tickling. A chapter on D.H. Lawrence unsurprisingly focuses on Lawrence’s troubling ideas about the proper degree of pain and pleasure required for a “healthy” female sexuality, while the subsequent chapter on Aldous Huxley highlights the critique of modern forms of narcoticizing pleasure in Brave New World. Chapter 5 discusses two less iconic modern writers, Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and concentrates on the problematic relationship to pleasure, often explicitly joined to pain, experienced by the two writers’ protagonists. It is the chapter in this book that comes closest to suggesting that the “problem with pleasure” among modern writers is a masochistic one, after all. A final chapter takes up the career of the now somewhat forgotten Anita Loos, specifically her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that Loos’s attempt to give a rather more populist spin to the difficulty valorized by modernism actually prefigured the more playful attitude to the pleasure and seriousness exemplified in postmodernism.

On the whole, The Problem With Pleasure makes a convincing case that modernism was, at least in part, a response to the rise of mass entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a kind of entertainment that seemed to many modern writers to offer only “cheap” pleasures. Writers like Joyce and Stein (or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner) were certainly well aware that many readers would find their work unorthodox and intimidating, but hoped that these readers would rise to the challenge and put aside their expectation of immediate gratification to find a more lasting satisfaction in the willing struggle with their books for the sake of breakthroughs to a kind of higher awareness—both of their own capacities as readers and of the capacity of literature to offer profounder pleasures. Frost’s readings are insightful and should be accessible even to general readers uninterested by the practices and protocols of academic criticism. Although Frost in her introductory chapter situates her book in the context of prevailing scholarly approaches to modernism (mostly focused on the influence of class and gender), she commendably avoids dismissing modernism for its various retrograde assumptions. While also pointing out where such assumptions are clearly evident—Lawrence’s attitude toward women, for example—Frost takes seriously the collective effort to redefine pleasure and generally affirms modern fiction’s success in turning “difficulty” into a virtue.

The strongest chapters in the book are those on Joyce and Stein. Both present fresh and persuasive readings of these core modernists (something that is by now not easy to do). Almost no one before has looked so closely at scent as a motif in Ulysses, although certainly it is a novel saturated in sensory detail, as well as one that emphasizes its characters’ experiences of pleasure. As Frost herself notes, Joyce is “far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists.” Her discussion focuses on the way in which the scent of perfume, especially for Leopold Bloom, works as a correlative of the more complex understanding of pleasure required to read a novel like Ulysses successfully. Bloom’s preference is for perfumes that mingle the fragrant and the faintly disgusting, the pleasant and the “base,” that produce pleasure partly through unpleasure. For example,

[t]he perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a…complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, ‘Spanish Skin,’ is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s ‘animalic’ tendencies…. Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents, musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human.

As she does here, Frost connects Joyce’s use of the odor motif to the more general portrayal of sensual pleasure in the novel, especially erotic pleasure: “Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult….” By examining the interactions of pleasure and unpleasure in the novel’s depiction of these particular “somatic pleasures,” Frost provides us with the kind of “active, analytical reading” modernist fiction requires, but also demonstrates that such a reading practice makes possible a “cognitive pleasure” that is indeed enjoyable.

Where the difficulties of Ulysses come from both its formal and stylistic variety, the difficulty posed by Gertrude Stein’s work is fundamentally stylistic, produced by the complex effects (of diction, grammar, and syntax) she achieves through her enigmatic orderings of otherwise simple language. Frost proposes that this complexity could be usefully regarded by perplexed readers as a kind of verbal tickling, intended to both provoke and amuse, to “tease” the reader with writing that withholds clarity but also can make the lack of clarity itself oddly satisfying:

Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Frost examines these lines from Tender Buttons, for example:

Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful

Frost then remarks:

As this passage illustrates…Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The ‘rubbed purr’ fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended, they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

Stein’s work even more directly and insistently than Joyce’s (except in Finnegans Wake) tries to induce the reader to redefine difficulty and indeterminacy as pleasurable in themselves when they enhance our awareness of the satisfactions reading well can provide. The attentive reader will, of course, note the “infantile” and “erotic” qualities of Stein’s writing (no doubt they are closely related), but these more recognizable pleasures can only be accessed through those “analytical reading practices” that often make modern literature seem to involve more work than pleasure.

The remaining chapters in The Problem With Pleasure, while not without interest and generally informative about the writers surveyed, are ultimately less convincing. Including writers like Lawrence and Huxley provides additional perspective on the historical circumstances that motivated modern writers’ suspicion of the cheap pleasures to be found in popular culture (in a period when what we now identify as “popular culture” was gaining ascendance), but they are much less representative of the formal and stylistic experimentation that is typical of modernist fiction, and that gained it its reputation as being “difficult” in the first place. The book’s subtitle asks us to consider “modernism and its discontents,” and while both Lawrence and Huxley were certainly discontent with many features of modernity, their discontent did not so much extend to the formal assumptions of fiction itself, a kind of discontent that did indeed inspire most of the writers associated with modernism as a literary movement. If anything, the books of Hamilton and Rhys are even less representative of formal and verbal complexity, however much they reflect the conflicted views of pleasure Frost shows to be more widespread in modern fiction as a whole. The chapter on Anita Loos is an entertaining survey of Loos’s career as a writer of silent film titles and her elevation of title-writing to a more “literary” status; but finally the way in which this experience informs Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is of only modest interest, since it seems unlikely that the novel will survive as an important work of modern fiction.

This variability of focus is arguably not a lapse in judgment on Frost’s part but instead an almost inevitable consequence of the sort of book The Power of Pleasure represents. A work of academic criticism by an academic critic, it exists first of all to find its place in its “field” of professional literary scholarship. While Frost’s book is accessible enough to appeal to non-academic, non-specialist readers, its ultimate value to them is weakened by its more diffuse discussions of writers only loosely related to each other as chronologically “modern.” Ultimately Frost’s most important insight, that the signature “difficulty” of modernist fiction was not a rejection of readerly pleasure but an attempt to redefine and thus enrich it, could surely have been conveyed very effectively in an essay devoted to Joyce and Stein, an essay that would both be credible as a contribution to the scholarly commentary on modern fiction and enlightening to general readers about the motives of writers who otherwise might be perceived as willfully obscure. However, the requirements of academic publishing, as part of the academic system that dispenses recognition and rewards, prescribe instead a “study” that can be extended to book length (the “academic monograph”) as evidence of achievement and seriousness of purpose.

The value of literary criticism ought to be determined by how well it enhances our comprehension and appreciation of works of literature, and ultimately of literature itself. By this measure, early academic critics remain valuable for the rigor and breadth of knowledge they added to the critical repertoire. By now, however, academic criticism has, perhaps inevitably, shifted its ambition from explicating literature to reinforcing its own conventions. It would be a shame if this book’s adherence to these conventions caused readers to avoid it, since it does offer fresh and useful ways of approaching the most important literary phenomenon of the 20th century.

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Conte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Conte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Conte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Conte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Conte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Conte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Conte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Conte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Conte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Conte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Conte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Conte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Lies trilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Conte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Conte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Conte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Conte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Modernism

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it:

Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure.

Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.”

Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.”

Frost develops her argument that a chief characteristic of modern fiction is its distinctive preoccupation with redefining pleasure through a series of chapter-length interpretations of the work of a multifarious group of modern writers. In the first, “James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity,” she considers the motif of aroma (especially perfume) as it is manifested—quite often, it turns out—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The second chapter analogizes the particular kind of difficulty embodied in the work of Gertrude Stein to the ambiguous “pleasure” provided by tickling. A chapter on D.H. Lawrence unsurprisingly focuses on Lawrence’s troubling ideas about the proper degree of pain and pleasure required for a “healthy” female sexuality, while the subsequent chapter on Aldous Huxley highlights the critique of modern forms of narcoticizing pleasure in Brave New World. Chapter 5 discusses two less iconic modern writers, Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and concentrates on the problematic relationship to pleasure, often explicitly joined to pain, experienced by the two writers’ protagonists. It is the chapter in this book that comes closest to suggesting that the “problem with pleasure” among modern writers is a masochistic one, after all. A final chapter takes up the career of the now somewhat forgotten Anita Loos, specifically her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that Loos’s attempt to give a rather more populist spin to the difficulty valorized by modernism actually prefigured the more playful attitude to the pleasure and seriousness exemplified in postmodernism.

On the whole, The Problem With Pleasure makes a convincing case that modernism was, at least in part, a response to the rise of mass entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a kind of entertainment that seemed to many modern writers to offer only “cheap” pleasures. Writers like Joyce and Stein (or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner) were certainly well aware that many readers would find their work unorthodox and intimidating, but hoped that these readers would rise to the challenge and put aside their expectation of immediate gratification to find a more lasting satisfaction in the willing struggle with their books for the sake of breakthroughs to a kind of higher awareness—both of their own capacities as readers and of the capacity of literature to offer profounder pleasures. Frost’s readings are insightful and should be accessible even to general readers uninterested by the practices and protocols of academic criticism. Although Frost in her introductory chapter situates her book in the context of prevailing scholarly approaches to modernism (mostly focused on the influence of class and gender), she commendably avoids dismissing modernism for its various retrograde assumptions. While also pointing out where such assumptions are clearly evident—Lawrence’s attitude toward women, for example—Frost takes seriously the collective effort to redefine pleasure and generally affirms modern fiction’s success in turning “difficulty” into a virtue.

The strongest chapters in the book are those on Joyce and Stein. Both present fresh and persuasive readings of these core modernists (something that is by now not easy to do). Almost no one before has looked so closely at scent as a motif in Ulysses, although certainly it is a novel saturated in sensory detail, as well as one that emphasizes its characters’ experiences of pleasure. As Frost herself notes, Joyce is “far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists.” Her discussion focuses on the way in which the scent of perfume, especially for Leopold Bloom, works as a correlative of the more complex understanding of pleasure required to read a novel like Ulysses successfully. Bloom’s preference is for perfumes that mingle the fragrant and the faintly disgusting, the pleasant and the “base,” that produce pleasure partly through unpleasure. For example,

[t]he perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a…complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, ‘Spanish Skin,’ is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s ‘animalic’ tendencies…. Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents, musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human.

As she does here, Frost connects Joyce’s use of the odor motif to the more general portrayal of sensual pleasure in the novel, especially erotic pleasure: “Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult….” By examining the interactions of pleasure and unpleasure in the novel’s depiction of these particular “somatic pleasures,” Frost provides us with the kind of “active, analytical reading” modernist fiction requires, but also demonstrates that such a reading practice makes possible a “cognitive pleasure” that is indeed enjoyable.

Where the difficulties of Ulysses come from both its formal and stylistic variety, the difficulty posed by Gertrude Stein’s work is fundamentally stylistic, produced by the complex effects (of diction, grammar, and syntax) she achieves through her enigmatic orderings of otherwise simple language. Frost proposes that this complexity could be usefully regarded by perplexed readers as a kind of verbal tickling, intended to both provoke and amuse, to “tease” the reader with writing that withholds clarity but also can make the lack of clarity itself oddly satisfying:

Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Frost examines these lines from Tender Buttons, for example:

Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful

Frost then remarks:

As this passage illustrates…Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The ‘rubbed purr’ fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended, they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

Stein’s work even more directly and insistently than Joyce’s (except in Finnegans Wake) tries to induce the reader to redefine difficulty and indeterminacy as pleasurable in themselves when they enhance our awareness of the satisfactions reading well can provide. The attentive reader will, of course, note the “infantile” and “erotic” qualities of Stein’s writing (no doubt they are closely related), but these more recognizable pleasures can only be accessed through those “analytical reading practices” that often make modern literature seem to involve more work than pleasure.

The remaining chapters in The Problem With Pleasure, while not without interest and generally informative about the writers surveyed, are ultimately less convincing. Including writers like Lawrence and Huxley provides additional perspective on the historical circumstances that motivated modern writers’ suspicion of the cheap pleasures to be found in popular culture (in a period when what we now identify as “popular culture” was gaining ascendance), but they are much less representative of the formal and stylistic experimentation that is typical of modernist fiction, and that gained it its reputation as being “difficult” in the first place. The book’s subtitle asks us to consider “modernism and its discontents,” and while both Lawrence and Huxley were certainly discontent with many features of modernity, their discontent did not so much extend to the formal assumptions of fiction itself, a kind of discontent that did indeed inspire most of the writers associated with modernism as a literary movement. If anything, the books of Hamilton and Rhys are even less representative of formal and verbal complexity, however much they reflect the conflicted views of pleasure Frost shows to be more widespread in modern fiction as a whole. The chapter on Anita Loos is an entertaining survey of Loos’s career as a writer of silent film titles and her elevation of title-writing to a more “literary” status; but finally the way in which this experience informs Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is of only modest interest, since it seems unlikely that the novel will survive as an important work of modern fiction.

This variability of focus is arguably not a lapse in judgment on Frost’s part but instead an almost inevitable consequence of the sort of book The Power of Pleasure represents. A work of academic criticism by an academic critic, it exists first of all to find its place in its “field” of professional literary scholarship. While Frost’s book is accessible enough to appeal to non-academic, non-specialist readers, its ultimate value to them is weakened by its more diffuse discussions of writers only loosely related to each other as chronologically “modern.” Ultimately Frost’s most important insight, that the signature “difficulty” of modernist fiction was not a rejection of readerly pleasure but an attempt to redefine and thus enrich it, could surely have been conveyed very effectively in an essay devoted to Joyce and Stein, an essay that would both be credible as a contribution to the scholarly commentary on modern fiction and enlightening to general readers about the motives of writers who otherwise might be perceived as willfully obscure. However, the requirements of academic publishing, as part of the academic system that dispenses recognition and rewards, prescribe instead a “study” that can be extended to book length (the “academic monograph”) as evidence of achievement and seriousness of purpose.

The value of literary criticism ought to be determined by how well it enhances our comprehension and appreciation of works of literature, and ultimately of literature itself. By this measure, early academic critics remain valuable for the rigor and breadth of knowledge they added to the critical repertoire. By now, however, academic criticism has, perhaps inevitably, shifted its ambition from explicating literature to reinforcing its own conventions. It would be a shame if this book’s adherence to these conventions caused readers to avoid it, since it does offer fresh and useful ways of approaching the most important literary phenomenon of the 20th century.

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Conte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Conte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Conte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Conte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Conte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Conte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Conte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Conte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Conte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Conte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Conte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Conte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Lies trilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Conte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Conte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Conte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Conte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it:

Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure.

Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.”

Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.”

Frost develops her argument that a chief characteristic of modern fiction is its distinctive preoccupation with redefining pleasure through a series of chapter-length interpretations of the work of a multifarious group of modern writers. In the first, “James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity,” she considers the motif of aroma (especially perfume) as it is manifested—quite often, it turns out—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The second chapter analogizes the particular kind of difficulty embodied in the work of Gertrude Stein to the ambiguous “pleasure” provided by tickling. A chapter on D.H. Lawrence unsurprisingly focuses on Lawrence’s troubling ideas about the proper degree of pain and pleasure required for a “healthy” female sexuality, while the subsequent chapter on Aldous Huxley highlights the critique of modern forms of narcoticizing pleasure in Brave New World. Chapter 5 discusses two less iconic modern writers, Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and concentrates on the problematic relationship to pleasure, often explicitly joined to pain, experienced by the two writers’ protagonists. It is the chapter in this book that comes closest to suggesting that the “problem with pleasure” among modern writers is a masochistic one, after all. A final chapter takes up the career of the now somewhat forgotten Anita Loos, specifically her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that Loos’s attempt to give a rather more populist spin to the difficulty valorized by modernism actually prefigured the more playful attitude to the pleasure and seriousness exemplified in postmodernism.

On the whole, The Problem With Pleasure makes a convincing case that modernism was, at least in part, a response to the rise of mass entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a kind of entertainment that seemed to many modern writers to offer only “cheap” pleasures. Writers like Joyce and Stein (or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner) were certainly well aware that many readers would find their work unorthodox and intimidating, but hoped that these readers would rise to the challenge and put aside their expectation of immediate gratification to find a more lasting satisfaction in the willing struggle with their books for the sake of breakthroughs to a kind of higher awareness—both of their own capacities as readers and of the capacity of literature to offer profounder pleasures. Frost’s readings are insightful and should be accessible even to general readers uninterested by the practices and protocols of academic criticism. Although Frost in her introductory chapter situates her book in the context of prevailing scholarly approaches to modernism (mostly focused on the influence of class and gender), she commendably avoids dismissing modernism for its various retrograde assumptions. While also pointing out where such assumptions are clearly evident—Lawrence’s attitude toward women, for example—Frost takes seriously the collective effort to redefine pleasure and generally affirms modern fiction’s success in turning “difficulty” into a virtue.

The strongest chapters in the book are those on Joyce and Stein. Both present fresh and persuasive readings of these core modernists (something that is by now not easy to do). Almost no one before has looked so closely at scent as a motif in Ulysses, although certainly it is a novel saturated in sensory detail, as well as one that emphasizes its characters’ experiences of pleasure. As Frost herself notes, Joyce is “far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists.” Her discussion focuses on the way in which the scent of perfume, especially for Leopold Bloom, works as a correlative of the more complex understanding of pleasure required to read a novel like Ulysses successfully. Bloom’s preference is for perfumes that mingle the fragrant and the faintly disgusting, the pleasant and the “base,” that produce pleasure partly through unpleasure. For example,

[t]he perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a…complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, ‘Spanish Skin,’ is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s ‘animalic’ tendencies…. Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents, musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human.

As she does here, Frost connects Joyce’s use of the odor motif to the more general portrayal of sensual pleasure in the novel, especially erotic pleasure: “Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult….” By examining the interactions of pleasure and unpleasure in the novel’s depiction of these particular “somatic pleasures,” Frost provides us with the kind of “active, analytical reading” modernist fiction requires, but also demonstrates that such a reading practice makes possible a “cognitive pleasure” that is indeed enjoyable.

Where the difficulties of Ulysses come from both its formal and stylistic variety, the difficulty posed by Gertrude Stein’s work is fundamentally stylistic, produced by the complex effects (of diction, grammar, and syntax) she achieves through her enigmatic orderings of otherwise simple language. Frost proposes that this complexity could be usefully regarded by perplexed readers as a kind of verbal tickling, intended to both provoke and amuse, to “tease” the reader with writing that withholds clarity but also can make the lack of clarity itself oddly satisfying:

Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Frost examines these lines from Tender Buttons, for example:

Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful

Frost then remarks:

As this passage illustrates…Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The ‘rubbed purr’ fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended, they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

Stein’s work even more directly and insistently than Joyce’s (except in Finnegans Wake) tries to induce the reader to redefine difficulty and indeterminacy as pleasurable in themselves when they enhance our awareness of the satisfactions reading well can provide. The attentive reader will, of course, note the “infantile” and “erotic” qualities of Stein’s writing (no doubt they are closely related), but these more recognizable pleasures can only be accessed through those “analytical reading practices” that often make modern literature seem to involve more work than pleasure.

The remaining chapters in The Problem With Pleasure, while not without interest and generally informative about the writers surveyed, are ultimately less convincing. Including writers like Lawrence and Huxley provides additional perspective on the historical circumstances that motivated modern writers’ suspicion of the cheap pleasures to be found in popular culture (in a period when what we now identify as “popular culture” was gaining ascendance), but they are much less representative of the formal and stylistic experimentation that is typical of modernist fiction, and that gained it its reputation as being “difficult” in the first place. The book’s subtitle asks us to consider “modernism and its discontents,” and while both Lawrence and Huxley were certainly discontent with many features of modernity, their discontent did not so much extend to the formal assumptions of fiction itself, a kind of discontent that did indeed inspire most of the writers associated with modernism as a literary movement. If anything, the books of Hamilton and Rhys are even less representative of formal and verbal complexity, however much they reflect the conflicted views of pleasure Frost shows to be more widespread in modern fiction as a whole. The chapter on Anita Loos is an entertaining survey of Loos’s career as a writer of silent film titles and her elevation of title-writing to a more “literary” status; but finally the way in which this experience informs Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is of only modest interest, since it seems unlikely that the novel will survive as an important work of modern fiction.

This variability of focus is arguably not a lapse in judgment on Frost’s part but instead an almost inevitable consequence of the sort of book The Power of Pleasure represents. A work of academic criticism by an academic critic, it exists first of all to find its place in its “field” of professional literary scholarship. While Frost’s book is accessible enough to appeal to non-academic, non-specialist readers, its ultimate value to them is weakened by its more diffuse discussions of writers only loosely related to each other as chronologically “modern.” Ultimately Frost’s most important insight, that the signature “difficulty” of modernist fiction was not a rejection of readerly pleasure but an attempt to redefine and thus enrich it, could surely have been conveyed very effectively in an essay devoted to Joyce and Stein, an essay that would both be credible as a contribution to the scholarly commentary on modern fiction and enlightening to general readers about the motives of writers who otherwise might be perceived as willfully obscure. However, the requirements of academic publishing, as part of the academic system that dispenses recognition and rewards, prescribe instead a “study” that can be extended to book length (the “academic monograph”) as evidence of achievement and seriousness of purpose.

The value of literary criticism ought to be determined by how well it enhances our comprehension and appreciation of works of literature, and ultimately of literature itself. By this measure, early academic critics remain valuable for the rigor and breadth of knowledge they added to the critical repertoire. By now, however, academic criticism has, perhaps inevitably, shifted its ambition from explicating literature to reinforcing its own conventions. It would be a shame if this book’s adherence to these conventions caused readers to avoid it, since it does offer fresh and useful ways of approaching the most important literary phenomenon of the 20th century.

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Conte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Conte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Conte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Conte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Conte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Conte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Conte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Conte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Conte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Conte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Conte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Conte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Lies trilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Conte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Conte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Conte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Conte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.