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  • Canons and Contexts in Context
  • Michael Bérubé (bio)
Canons and Contexts, Paul Lauter. Oxford University Press, 1991.

When it appeared in 1991, Paul Lauter’s Canons and Contexts was not a breakthrough book. It could, of course, be read as a companion to Lauter’s recently published Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990), a breakthrough text by any measure, but on its own, it was not an introduction to the next big thing. At the time, the most exciting events in academic publishing were happening in a wholly new section of the bookstore, where the buzz was all about Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and the late Thomas Yingling’s Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies (1990). In 1991–92, I was a young assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Paris is Burning (1991) had finally arrived at our one “art” theater, our campus was hosting the second annual graduate student conference on lesbian, bisexual, and gay studies (“Making It Perfectly Queer,” with Butler as the keynote speaker), and Lisa Duggan was the visiting postdoc of Illinois’s Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Suddenly, the world seemed a much more gay and lively place than it had even a few short years earlier; bliss was it in that queer theory dawn to be alive, but to be a young assistant professor in the humanities was very heaven. Canons and Contexts, by contrast, was something of an exercise in consolidation: bringing together 14 of Lauter’s essays written over the course of two decades, it appeared in the midst of queer theory’s anni mirabiles as a document of earlier disciplinary struggles, providing a record of the first fledgling attempts on the part of scholars in American studies to diversify the literary canon [End Page 457] and challenge the hegemony of what Nina Baym famously called the “consensus criticism of the consensus” (9).

Lauter’s essays addressed the institutions of criticism: not just the content of the literary canon, but the apparatus of canonicity—from anthologies to curricula to critical conventions—that had produced such a restricted field of inquiry for students and scholars of American literature. The opening essay, originally written for the centennial issue of PMLA, surveyed “Society and the Profession, 1958–83,” and charted a personal history of the MLA from the tweedy and genteel environs of Lauter’s doctoral studies at Yale through his early 1960s days of working for Quakers and teaching in Freedom Schools, organizing the MLA’s Radical Caucus and speaking out first against the war in Vietnam and then against the retrenchments of the 1970s. Underlying that narrative of the Profession’s Progress (to evoke the Hogarthian rather than the Whiggish sense of the term) was a monitory thesis:

I want to consider the wider impact of the two social and economic phenomena that have molded my life: first, the political movements for equality of the 1960s and early 1970s, and, second, the economic expansion of that period and the subsequent stagnation of the last decade. I argue that our profession, like other primarily cultural institutions, has been especially sensitive to these forces and that they have pushed us in opposite directions: toward openness and variety, on the one hand, and toward rigidity and self-absorption, on the other. This contradictory motion helps to explain the high degree of drift, tension, anxiety, even animosity that so many of my colleagues find in our profession, yet its continuing pull on us.

(4)

It should be hard to read these words without a sense of shock: since they were written, yet another quarter-century has elapsed, and we are now (as I write) as distant from 1983 as Lauter was from 1958. But somehow, this professional self-description seems just right: we have managed to remain open, various, rigid, and self-absorbed for quite some time now. And when we read, only a few pages later, of “a marketplace conception of education, with students as consumers and deans as...

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