Literary Disestablishmentarianism

When I read Stephen Slemon's call for the "Why Do I Have To Write Like That" panel (ACCUTE Conference 2007), I was struck by its plaintive cry for the freedom to write outside of the lines. I received the call a few days after I had sent to press the Canadian Theatre Review issue I edited, an issue that included contributions from academics and artists, most of whom are non-academics. Many of these writers write very far outside the lines of what we in the academy understand and teach as "good critical writing," and my experience as editor was a fraught one, which led me to (and through) a crisis of faith and, in turn, to the following response to Slemon's call.

While we can bemoan the current state of critical writing in our discipline, we are not without models for different kinds of writing. Indeed, outside-of-the-establishment critical writers—those writers not trained or disciplined to conform to the particulars of what we currently understand as "good critical writing" within the academy—are already, and necessarily, writing differently than "we" do. Those "tortured analytical documents" (Slemon) that we teach and ourselves produce are the badges that assert our identities as experts; they are the thing that differentiates us from the other writers out there. Thus, when Slemon asks, "What is ventured in the attempt to revolutionize critical commentary in the discipline? What is not ventured?" I must emphatically respond that to write differently might mean writing like a non-academic, and to venture into this territory will require that we reconsider our investment in the academic/non-academic split when it comes to critical writing.

The experience of editing the fourteen essays in the ctr issue forced me to contend with my own biases about what constitutes good critical writing. In particular, I found that I had to do some soul-searching upon realizing (when I felt an instinctive and visceral resistance to the non-conventional critical writing of some of the essays) that I like formal academic writing, and—more damning than that given the context of this forum—that I had, over fifteen years (off and on) of being a post-secondary student and a few years of teaching introductory English at the University of Alberta, come to believe in it.

For me, a piece of good critical writing begins with a thesis paragraph (sometimes prefaced with an anecdote or some other personal touch—which, let's be honest, generally gets truncated and sanitized during the vetting process), systematically followed by a series of well-organized paragraphs, each elaborating a main idea, which one can reliably find in a well-crafted topic sentence somewhere close to the beginning of said paragraph. There is little rambling and almost no ranting. Anything beside the point is stored discretely in the footnotes (though—sadly, again—these are generally considered disposable when the final word count creeps above the limit). Nothing is misspelled (unless self-consciously so, in which case the misspelled word is coded as linguistic intervention through the assiduous placement of dashes, hyphens, quotation marks, and/or parentheses); it goes without saying that there are no distracting errors in grammar or punctuation. Good critical writing, I believed, was rigorous and impersonal (save the prefatory anecdote, of course).

Now, while I still believe that one can rarely go wrong with a solid thesis statement, after editing a number of insightful, creative, and certainly unconventional essays for the ctr issue, I'll confess that I've become less of a revival-tent believer and more of a Christmas-and-Easter parishioner at the Church of Good Critical Writing.

ctr is the ideal forum for the kind of dialogue I was hoping to create for a collection of essays on spoken word performance, the topic of this issue. It is a crossover journal that publishes a range of critical writing including articles and essays, personal narratives and performance histories, interviews, reviews, dialogues, panels, and other non-traditional critical writing and invites submissions for every issue from academics and artists, many of whom are not academics...