Democracy in Theory

The term "democracy" has seen a solid upsurge in the titles of literary critical work over the last 20 years. According to the PMLA Bibliography, there were 26 articles or books with "democracy" in the title from 1960 to 1969; 61 from 1970 to 1979; 203 from 1980 to 1989; and 554 from 1990 to 1999. In the first four years on record in this new century, we are already at 345. Literary critics have a developing interest in the idea of democracy that began to expand dramatically in the mid-1980s, corresponding with the growing importance of multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, and canon expansion. The bigger and more diverse our literary neighborhood, the more interested we have become in using literature to understand democracy: its accomplishments, formations, possibilities, and failures in US history.

Back in the 1980s, as this coalition of projects was gaining momentum, a world-changing optimism fueled our work. Most of us conducting work critical of US democratic status quos believed that our teaching and research were part of a project of fundamental change in US culture: ultimately it was an affirmative project aimed at the community of our democratic future. Our optimism may have been tempered by the "culture wars," but even then, what seemed a little intimidating was still exhilarating—"racism's/conservatism's/homophobia's/patriarchy's (fill in your term) last gasp," we would say knowingly to each other. The Olin Foundation and its support for conservative strategizing was just beginning to hit the academic radar, and I do not think any of us could really guess at the sea change it would help produce over the next generation. The culture wars faded in the 1990s, but so did our optimism about the influence our work could have on the world we live in. Many factors probably contributed to this deceleration of hope, a partial list of which might include: Desert Storm; ad-nauseum post-mortems on deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and affirmative action; the backlash against gays in the military; the boom in tech stocks, the dismantling of welfare support, and the failure of universal health-care; the Sokal hoax; the Clinton impeachment hearings; the buildup in military defense and prisons; the crash in tech stocks and, with it, the slump of our TIAA-CREF accounts. Still (some good news), as my title search suggests, the notion of expanded community and self-governing agency continues to fuel enthusiasm for the subject of democracy that shows up in so much of our scholarship and continues to shape our pedagogy.

I cannot help wondering how much longer this will continue. Our scholarly and pedagogical commitments have a more vexed relation to our daily life now. These days, democratic community seems most frequently described in terms like "nuclear option"—a phrase that resonates with a range of political frustrations in contemporary US democracy. Our contemporary moment is far less hospitable professionally and politically than the one in which this project began flowering. I have been wondering if the current difficulties—the threat of students filing lawsuits against professors who "victimize" them by disagreeing with their politics, or the broader lack of support for humanities critique that shows up in university budgeting and dwindling grant support, or the hostility of increasingly powerful fundamentalist Christian interest groups to academia in general, and the breakdown of political civility in US political culture more generally—might lead many to abandon their investigations into what literature can tell us about the contingent relations of democracy and community in the US past, and turn to the study of something less controversial, something less vexed, something, well, easier.

Despite these disincentives—maybe because of them—now may be the best time for literary historians and cultural critics to pursue the question of what democracy can promise or deliver for political and social community in the US, or, to put it a little differently, about the terms by which community has delivered for democracy. This may be a project less animated by our sense that we will get to help deliver into being a world unified by tolerance and instead more driven by a...