发件人："Marcus Nie" <nieduluo@gmail.com>
日期：2014-8-12 PM11:42
主题：Re: Weekly-Book-List-August-15
收件人："Bingqiang XIE" <xiebingqiang@gmail.com>
抄送：
Who's Your (Lit Crit) Daddy?
Mark Shaver for The Chronicle Review
By Daniel Born
In the 1980s, the tidal wave of Continental theory swept over many English departments, leaving the discipline of literary study divided and to this day unsure about its role in the university and the culture at large.
Those of us finishing our doctorates had certain choices to make and allegiances to declare. My own decision, at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, to take multiple courses with the crusty old guard of the New York Intellectuals, among them Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, branded me as traditional. But it was also a calculated career choice; I knew that if Howe directed my dissertation, it would increase the likelihood of my landing a tenure-track job. That calculation turned out to be correct.
More fundamentally, though, I needed to ask myself what kind of critic I wanted to be. In a certain sense, that meant what kind of prose I wanted to write. I had read Howe's essay on Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles some years earlier, and it had been transformative. To this day, I see more clearly how Tess (and who among us does not fall in love with Tess?) labored and suffered in that frozen turnip field as a migrant farmworker, her mind as numb as her bleeding hands. I wanted to write like Hardy and Howe; I wanted to move readers, not just inform them. So when I told Howe how I felt, he was properly flattered and took me on as his advisee.
Yet Howe, in spite of his professional stature, was deeply threatened in the years when I was his student. That became abundantly clear on the day of my oral examination, 25 years ago. I was making a last pit stop before the three-hour tour through Victorian and Edwardian fiction, 20th-century American novelists, and Renaissance tragedy (my "major" field and two "minor" ones). Howe was leading the platoon of five professors who would begin grilling me in about five minutes.
Suddenly I really had to take a piss.
Into the men's room I went. Behold, a man stood at the urinal to my left. In a time-honored male ritual, I surveyed him with suave peripheral stealth, making sure he was no Port Authority predator seeking my wallet or worse. To my surprise, the elfin creature was none other than the God of Critical Theory himself, Jacques Derrida. He was diminutive in stature, but I immediately compared his French-tailored suit with my khakis and rumpled shirt.
A visiting professor at the Graduate Center that spring, he was in his phase of writing about friendship, just before his decade-long turn to theology and the unnameability of the divine. I had heard him lecture to a packed auditorium earlier that semester on the subject of friendship. Many in the audience hoped this would illuminate his thinking about his colleague Paul de Man, whose wartime writing for a Nazi newspaper had been outed by a diligent graduate student in 1987, four years after de Man's death. Derrida had made it known that he thought journalists focusing on this transgression had behaved like an irresponsible pack of louts. Less clear was what he thought about de Man.
Derrida's tailored suit is still on my mind. I can see the silvery gleam of its fabric, and the way he turned his head to glance at me, his white mane swirling like a cloud. I was having what a fellow graduate student used to call a "studential" moment—more or less what Pip experiences nonstop inGreat Expectations: a confluence of shame, guilt, and inadequacy. Derrida was at ease; I was not. We both looked at the wall. He hummed a tune under his breath. I debated whether to say anything and decided that if I didn't, I would regret it. We were washing hands at adjacent sinks when I found the courage to say, "What coincidence is this? This has to be a good omen, meeting you like this for the first time, because I am on my way to my oral exams."
"Young man," he said, with a wide smile, shaking my hand, "I am sure you will do very well."
Derrida was right. Howe threw me several fat pitches about Orwell as a critic of Dickens and Gissing, and I was able to swat back a few replies that didn't put much of a strain on anyone in the room. It dawned on me that these people genuinely wanted me to succeed.
In the course of the exam, though, Howe took the opportunity to opine on his increasingly marginal position in American letters; he did this by way of declaring Orwell's greatness as a writer. Howe alluded to recent critics who disdainfully referred to "literary journalism." Had Derrida come through the door at that moment, I doubt if Howe would have said hello. He sounded tired and bitter. Those of us at the table realized that he wasn't defending just Orwell's legacy—he was defending his own. None of us, of course, knew that he had only four more years to live.
Ihave had many years to reflect on that day's events, when I was confronted rather directly with the question of "Who's my daddy?" Somehow, serendipitously, I got the blessing of both Howe and Derrida, and things turned out OK. I don't think Howe had much to worry about; his legacy as a writer and critic and, yes, maybe even as a journalist will stand the test of time.
Derrida is gone now, too, and scholars are still arguing about his contribution. What I know about both writers is that, in spite of their radically different vocabularies, they cared deeply about the texts they read, and they interrogated those texts closely. They shared a commitment to reading history and reading historically.
Howe never lost sight of his earliest commitment to a just socialist order. Even though he moved away from Trotsky to a more mellow democratic socialism, he was still a man of the left. Derrida's commitments were never quite as plain, but maybe more interesting to me was his turn toward theology at the end of his career, when he confronted the fundamental questions of God, human existence, and justice. How do we handle loss? Those matters, for me, have always defined the greatest works of literature. In grappling with those questions, I want to follow the masters who taught me how to read. That has to stand as the ultimate allegiance.
On that day of the exam, there was a lone woman in the room, to whom I owe much of my self-fashioning. Wondering "Who's my daddy?" naturally invites the question of who plays mom. True to her name, Felicia Bonaparte taught with magisterial authority. To one of her classes she offered some of the best advice I have ever heard: "If you listen to other critics and imitate them too completely, you'll never hear your own voice."
I repeat her advice to my students: Pay attention to the critics who deserve it. Pledge your allegiance. But don't ever let them speak for you.
Daniel Born is a lecturer in Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. He is the author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel(University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
http://chronicle.com/article/Who-s-Your-Lit-Crit/148187/
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Bingqiang XIE <xiebingqiang@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://chronicle.com/article/Weekly-Book-List-August-15/148327/
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