In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog
  • Alistair Heys
Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog. By Jerome J. McGann. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780979405761. Pp. 113. $12.95.

In McGann I see the Marxist critic rising against the American Dream. The American Dream is figured in Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog as lovingly quoted lines from McGann's favourite revolutionary period authors; though, alas, he feels the need to constantly undercut Romantic transcendence with the Marxist reality of the cold hillside.

The Marxian 'riddle' referred to in the title of McGann's pamphlet is from Groucho, not Karl, and the answer that instantly suggests itself is that outside modern critical practices people read for pleasure, but, once inside the academy, the ephebes of post-structuralist poetics read through a glass darkly. McGann's hypothesis is that canting critical terms remove students and professors alike from the unfallen immediacy that ordinary readers articulate when absorbed in a discussion of a favourite poem or novel – that is, one that has been read for the unbridled and therefore selfish sensuality of the text. The stultifying effect of contemporary critical jargon is confirmed when the reader comes across a section entitled 'Shop Talk (fragment of a lexicon)', in which the following words are listed: 'heteronormativity, hegemony, hybridity, rubricate, reify, liminal, paradigm, carnivalesque, valorization, alterity, parameterization, imbricate, commodification, essentialize'. I had to Google some of these academically corralled inkhorn terms because they seemed, even to my fading academic eyes, quite foreign. Another section dubbed 'Academiana' quotes (without naming the authors) a number of orotund critical flourishes. Just one example can here stand as wordily representative of McGann's chosen cento of rococo reticulations: 'the modernist critique of authenticity involves a negative movement of corrective rejection followed by a further different kind of negativity that recognizes the corrective rejection's inevitable eventual lapse into bad faith (or ideological delusion, or inauthenticity)'. McGann's rhetorical question is 'are the humanities inconsequent?'; his patacritical answer reveals a jargon-filled, super-specialised, gallimaufry of ejaculatory 'isms' that wilfully obscures the poetic antiquities that he sorrowfully notes a modish academy markets to the high-energy world of global capital.

McGann is naturally enough anxious with regard to being absorbed in the aforesaid headache of critical self-representations, of becoming too much a part of the post-this-and-that Romantic lesson being studied, and, as well, of uncritically repeating Wordsworth's something ever more about to be. In a consideration of the limits of auto-critique that is also a dialogue between two characters called J and JD, J says that, inside, 'I can take their measure', to which JD replies, 'but can you take your own?'. The question may be reformulated along the following lines: if, as Eric Hobsbawm claims, the Romantic era ended in 1850, then how can McGann's Romantic Ideology, a work modelled on The German Ideology of 1845, escape the self-representations of the Romantic era? How can a Marxist literary critic of the Romantic period redeem the American Dream, itself a Romantic illusion, by revealing to a narrow circle of other highly educated academics, their pen tips bristling with verbose inkhorn words, that the Romantic ideology is not just another illusion? Does not his narrow academic readership thwart this objective? We may as well measure the clinamatic swerve of McGann from Marx and Engels in The Romantic Ideology against the later McGann's belated attempt to reveal his own Romantic and Marxist ideology. The clinamen of materialist particulars in the void reveals that McGann is only too aware that post-structuralist jargon caters for the few and not the many, and, more [End Page 191] worryingly, kills off the ideological self, over-determined as it is in McGann's criticism by an unflagging belief in America as a brave new world, the land of the free from mind-forged manacles. McGann elliptically senses that the humanities would seem inconsequent because they are not actively involved in revolutionary transformations, but instead are lost in a hall of mirrors that reflect back post-structuralist grotesqueries infinitely.

In...

pdf

Share