Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1999/02/03/the_deconstruction_of_duke_english.php
Wednesday, February 3, 1999
'We are hot and everyone knows that,' gushed Professor Frank Lentricchia of the Duke University English Department in 1987. 'I don't think anyone else in the country can boast of the line-up of home run hitters that we've now got here.'
Three years earlier, Duke had lured Lentricchia from Rice University in the hope that Lentricchia's appointment would be a springboard to intellectual prominence. Anxious to improve its rank among national research universities, Duke embarked on an ambitious plan to transform its English Department from 'a sleepy backwater that had nothing distinctive about it' (in UNC English Professor James Thompson's words) into the intellectual powerhouse that would achieve world-class status.
At Lentricchica's suggestion, Duke snatched Milton expert Stanley Fish from his perch as English Department Chair at Johns Hopkins to head its own department. Lentricchia also recommended Fredric Jameson, the Marxist critic and literary theorist, to direct the Literature Program. Jameson was hired away from
UC-Santa Cruz.
Fish, aided by a $200 million university endowment campaign, proceeded to recruit literary criticism's biggest stars and stars-to-be; among them were neo-pragmatist Barbara Hernstein-Smith, who was about to become president of the Modern Language Association; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was to pioneer 'queer theory,' now widespread in literary criticism; and, for a brief time, African-American studies trailblazer Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Fish hired English scholars like star athletes: 'It's analogous to what's happening in the NBA,' he told The Chronicle of Higher Education. 'You no longer have the firm assumption that a star will play his whole career with one team.' Fish's dream team brought home the hardware: the Duke English Department bounded up the National Research Council rankings, from 27th in the nation to fifth. U.S. News and World Report rated the department first in the country in the area of gender and literature. Graduate student applications increased four hundred percent between 1985 and 1991.
'We were struck by the chorus of testimony we heard from faculty outside the department that English has become a kind of engine or life-pump for the humanities at Duke, a supplier of intellectual energy and stimulation for the university at large,' asserted a 1992 external review committee. 'It is not easy to produce changes of this sort.'
Last May, a new review committee arrived to inspect the department, this time finding 'the Duke English Department in a seriously weakened condition.' American Literature Editor Cathy Davidson left the department to become a vice provost. Lee and Annabel Patterson fled to Yale. Sedgwick went to the City University of New York. Queer theorists Michael Moon and Jonathan Goldberg also accepted positions elsewhere. Americanist Jane Tompkins, who had recently spent most of her time as a cook at a local health food restaurant, left for the University of Illinois at Chicago with her husband Fish, who now serves as UIC's Dean of the Arts and Sciences. Lentricchia remains at Duke, though he left the English Department and publicly renounced the entire field of literary criticism in the academic news journal Lingua Franca.
The Department's 'meteoric rise has given way to a relatively rapid descent,' the reviewers reported. 'This is not to say that the department lacks excellent faculty; but the current department, except by virtue of its afterglow, cannot reasonably be considered top-ranked.' Still, Fish insists that his endeavor was a remarkable achievement: 'If something endures for twelve or thirteen years in the academic profession,' he told Lingua Franca, 'if, as Yeats would say, the center holds for that long, then that is what should be marveled at, not that there is a loss of personnel now.'
While it was intact, Duke English was on the cutting edge of literary theory. 'We are the mainstream,' remarked Hernstein-Smith. 'What we are doing here is what most of the best colleges do, or aspire to do.' The department was a center of poststructuralist criticism, an effort to move beyond the actual words of the text. The denconstructionist ethic dictates that a text possesses no inherent meaning independent of its social context. Objectivity, the theory goes, is an empty pretense. 'There is no knowledge, no standard, no choice that is objective,' says Hernstein-Smith. 'Even Homer is a product of a specific culture, and it is possible to imagine cultures in which Homer would not be very interesting.'
Jameson, the Marxist critic, sees all literature as revealing elements of class conflict. Sedgwick, the queer theorist, finds repressed homoerotic desire in writing, Tompkins, a feminist critic, finds evidence of gender oppression.
'I believe that what is now called literary criticism is a form of Xeroxing,' Lentricchica, in his critique of literary theory, would later write. 'Tell me your theory and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read. Texts are not read; they are preread. All of literature is x and nothing but x, and literary study is the naming (exposure) of x. For x, read imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. All of literary history is said to be a display of x, because human history is nothing but the structure of x.'
Regardless of each scholar's particular theory, the poststructuralists share the conviction that the author's words, even the author's intent, is infinitely less important than his social context and, especially, the response the text elicits from the reader. 'The text is a dead entity up until the point that a human mind interacts with it,' Lentricchia told Duke Magazine in 1988. Therefore, all standards of literary worth are the transitory products of social conditioning: 'history is the crucible in which standards emerge and become sociologically and politically established,' says Fish; no independent standard for judging the comparative worth of texts exists. Thus, Tompkins' English classes included novels by Louis L'Amour; Professor Janice Radway's work, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture, is a study of romance novels. 'My objection is not that literary study has been politicized,' Lentricchia wrote last year, 'but that it proceeds in happy indifference to, often in unconscionable innocence of, the protocols of literary competence.'
When the actual text of a work is subordinated to the interpretation of that text, the critic's role becomes more important than the author's. Indeed, in Fish's 'reader-response theory,' the critic, not the author, gives the text meaning. In his book, Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish writes, 'No longer is the critic the humble servant of texts whose glories exist independently of anything he might do; it is what he does, within the constraints embedded in the literary institution, that brings texts into being and makes them available for analysis and appreciation.'
By making the critic's own interpretation so central to the literary enterprise, it is unsurprising that Duke English was befallen with a clash of titan egos. Professor Thomas Pfau complains to Lingua Franca that Sedgwick attempted to thwart the work of a search committee because none of the candidates were ideologically agreeable: 'She actually suggested that we scuttle the whole search. And people considered that an act of sabotage.'
Sedgwick explains her reason for leaving the department thus: 'I have stuff I want to do with the next few years, and it's not grappling with people whom I don't respect... I was just very disturbed by what seemed to be an increasing amount of anti-intellectualism and lack of support and respect for theory in general, for queer thought.' Moon, another queer theorist, explains that 'The homophobia that I experienced and saw other people experience was certainly a factor in my decision to leave.' The Duke scholars seemed consumed by their respective theories, and the one theoretical feature they held in common was egomania.
As literary critics for whom all of literature was contained in the critic's mind, the Duke theorists' criticism was highly self-reverential. Indeed, it has been argued that 'if you can follow the permutations of Sedgwick's identity, an understanding of queer theory is within your grasp.' A 1987 article by Sedgwick, 'A Poem is Being Written,' recounts her memories of childhood spankings and other autobiographical information.
Criticism produced by the Duke School included appeals to the self and other individuals. Derrida or Foucault were taken as markers of truth. Fish opens Is There a Text in this Class? by saying, 'What interests me about many of the essays collected here is that I could not write them today.' In the era of the New Criticism, Stanley Fish's personal reflections would be highly irrelevant to the study of literature; to the poststructuralists they are literature. The critic's personality authorizes his work.
Self-referential criticism grew. In 1994, Adam Begley dubbed the Duke theorists the 'Moi critics' for the amount of memoirs and confessions that they produced. Among the works the Moi critics produced were Davidson's 1993 book, 36 Views of Mount Fuji, Tompkins' A Life in School (1994), and Lentricchia's The Edge of Night: A Confession, published in the same year. With epic tomes on their own personalities, the Moi critics seemed to be intent on achieving individual fame.
The star system that emerged in literary theory is perhaps epitomized by a photograph of Lentricchia published in The New York Times Magazine.
Taken from a book jacket, the photo has Lentricchia in an open-collared shirt and blue jeans, leaning against a graffiti-covered wall, looking much like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. A May 1992 profile of Fish in the same publication calls Fish 'the epitome of the academic as showman, a new breed of superstar as much concerned with professional notoriety as with the humdrum details of scholarship.'
Thus, perhaps ironically, poststructuralism, which assailed the sovereign subject as the foundation of objective knowledge, led to an intellectualism centered on individual personalities. It is worth noting, moreover, that, even in its heyday, Duke English could not maintain a unified curriculum.
'There is no curriculum; we each teach what we want to teach' was the most frequent complaint of professors as reported in the 1992 review. The course bulletin was 'a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings' that lacked 'broad foundational courses' and collective planning by the faculty. Duke English, thus, was plagued by hyperspecialization that denied its students a broad foundation in the humanities.
Duke English denied the existence of any objective truth or academic standards. The historical mission of liberal education, of course, has been the quest for truth. Without any possibility of a common purpose or mission, only reliance on individual preferences and prejudices, the Duke English Department could not remain unified.