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David Gorman Avoiding Criticism (on H. Aram Veeser, ed., Confessions ofthe Critics [New York: Routledge, 1996]) Marianne Hirsch had her first period when she and her family lived in Vienna; Marjorie Garber and her lesbian partner have a place on Nantucket, where they frequent auctions; Gayatri Spivak's mother gets annoyed at her daughter's relentlessly metaphysical way of expressing herself; Candace Lang, meanwhile, has very mixed feelings about both her parents, and had her first graduate seminar with Derrida; Diane Freedman suffers from depression, which runs in her family; Bruce Robbins's paternal grandfather (whose name was Rabinowitz) was not only a small-time gangster of some description, but a Socialist; Jane Tompkins's father died right in the middle of one semester; also, she is a vegetarian, and can sometimes be obnoxious about it. Do we need to know any of this? And, after reading Confessions of the Critics, can we say that we have learned anything pertinent to what literary critics and theorists aim to learn? As we will see, these are silly questions for those working in the mode on display in Confessions ofthe Critics, from which all the above factoids are taken. The volume editor, Aram Veeser, is known for his two previous collections, The New Historicism (1989) and The New Historicism Reader (1993). Rarely has someone seemed tobe so much in the right place at the right time, since these anthologies have become the standard citations for the most influential movement in recent literary criticism. Contemplating this new compilation of Veeser's from arm's length, one strongly suspects that he hopes to repeat the trick: catching a critical movement in its first formation and crystallizing it in a collection of writings. Whether he has managed to pull this off again here is too early to decide. But let us say that what in this volume is variously labelled Confessional Criticism, Personal Criticism, or the New Belletrism (among other things) does indeed represent an emerging tendency in the spectrum of current criticism, closely parallel to what was going on with the New Historicism, say a decade ago. Even granting this, however, one major difference jumps out immediately . The New Historicism, whatever its strengths or weaknesses, was motivated by issues involving substantive matters—such as the traditionally unquestioned privilege of text over context and literature over nonliterature, or the political position of critics and their 218 the minnesota review discourse, or the constructed nature of categories previously assumed to be given by nature. Personal or Confessional Criticism, by contrast , is about styIe—and not much else, as we will see. Certainly Confessional Criticism is not about literature, to judge by the material in Veeser's collection. Nor is it about literary theory of any sort familiar to most critics: there are few discussions of critical principles, presuppositions, or methodology in the two dozen items in this anthology, and those that do occur (Gerald Graff's "SelfInterview " being a good example, and perhaps the most interesting) are confined to the first ten or so items. Most, in any case, feature the kind of personal observations or revelations canvassed above. In addition to tidbits like these, the theme of bursting into tears is pervasive (where is the academic Tom Hanks to yell, "There's no crying in criticism"?), though references to bodily functions are mercifully rare. I mention this because Jane Tompkins's announced intent to visit the bathroom in her 1987 essay "Me and My Shadow" is generally accepted as marking the birth of "Per. Crit." (or "Con. Crit."). Her status as inaugurator of the genre is confirmed in Confessions of the Critics by the placement of her contribution, "Let's Get Lost," at the conclusion of the volume in which, although she spares us any peeing, she does mention farting (270). Her audience expects no less. It mightbe objected that these bits of icky personal business make up only a very small proportion of the material included in the volume . However, such items of self-revelation, whether embarrassing or trivial (often both), are clearly the point of most of these essays, the bulk of which typically amount to so much build-up to what comes...

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