Re-mediating Ralph

The phone rings. I pick it up and say "hello." The voice at the other end of the line does not repeat the greeting or give a name. Instead, I hear "history and genre," and I smile. For students of Ralph Cohen in the early 1970s, this was a more telling way of identifying each other than the names we brought to UVa. Yes, it was a way of making light of Ralph's sublime performances in the classroom—his voice undulating from a whisper into a growl—but it was also a way of acknowledging that we had caught his high seriousness. When we repeated "history and genre," we knew that we were not just kidding around. Call it a formula, a mantra, a password, or even a binary code, that phrase was a way of greeting not only each other but our own futures. And here I am in that future repeating it once more—in fact, twice. As I fill this screen, the same phrase echoes in the other window I have open: the syllabus for a doctoral seminar I am about to coteach with Mary Poovey. Every part of this course will be new to both of us in form and in content—we're planning some sessions as "labs," others with "Bookglutton," and one for "acting out in public"—every part, that is, except for the first three words.

I can imagine writing this essay as Ralph Cohen himself might write it: begin with a clinically spare statement of my subject's assumptions and assertions and then take the next step for him. In so many of Ralph's essays that step assumed the form of a question the subject should have asked but did not. At times, those questions highlighted a logical flaw, as in Ralph's now infamous dismantling of Jacques Derrida's claim to have identified "The Law of Genre."¹ At other times, the questions were less concerned with exposing error than with extending the argument. In his essay on "Generating Literary Histories," for example, Ralph's challenge to the New Historicists—"What precisely do they take 'history' to be?"—opened the door to both a wide-ranging discussion of "theory" and to a larger company of critics.² Having already engaged in that single essay Derrida, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., T. S. Eliot, Louis Montrose, and Stephen Greenblatt, Ralph then took in—and on—Gerald Graff, Rosalind Krauss, Jane Tompkins, Clifford Geertz, Hayden White, René Wellek, and Hélène Cixous.

To re-mediate Ralph, per my title, will entail my trying to take him in—a lifelong task so far—in the very particular sense here that he took on Cixous in that essay. While all of the others were introduced to their own shortcomings, Ralph invited her in to perform another function: mixed into his own "inquiry," her literary autobiography was intended to "reveal" the "opportunities we have before us" (51). He repositioned her writing to mediate the relationship between the present and the future—between then current (1993) efforts to generate literary history and what it might and should become. That's my goal here: re-mediating Ralph is not a matter of updating Ralph—this is not an exercise in his shelf life, but in extending the shelf life of our discipline. It's our future that needs updating.

The problem, as Marshall McLuhan put it, is that "we march backwards into [that] future," looking "at the present through a rear-view mirror."³ Although he never spelled it out, the example that McLuhan experienced daily as a practicing professor of literature was the fate of English departments in the late twentieth century. Those departments first emerged in Britain in the early nineteenth century in the context of an abrupt and startling proliferation of print—the take off that transformed British society into what we now call a print culture. The function of this new organizational grouping was to facilitate that transformation: English departments mediated society's relationship with the newly mature technology that now saturated it.⁴ Anthologies, the canon, the aesthetics of taste, interpretative close...