The Lessons of the Editor

I

As someone whose career was indelibly shaped by working as an editorial assistant for New Literary History and whose association with Ralph Cohen has been among the most illuminating influences of my career, I would like to recount those experiences and to speculate about the historical significance that Ralph Cohen's NLH has attained. I was Ralph Cohen's student in a University of Virginia graduate course, "From Classic to Romantic," during the spring of 1975, a class that aimed to demonstrate for first- and second-year students the evolution of British poetry from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. We learned just how subtly nuanced these changes were by discovering the difference between innovation and variation within genre, a much more complex history than anything we might have gleaned from reading M. H. Abrams. I was as much at sea as most of my compeers, probably more, and even endured the distinction of having the poem I wrote in imitation of a romantic lyric read aloud as an object model of what not to do. What Professor Cohen didn't know was that my lyric imitated a neoromantic poem (my models were Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara), but try explaining that while your ears burn.

I persevered and read so much English poetry of the long eighteenth century that my curiosity about the subject over the next thirty-four years seems to have been fully gratified. My redemption came at our open-book final, where I must have done all right because Ralph stopped me in the hallway soon afterward and asked me to join the staff of New Literary History starting that summer, a work-study position for which I qualified. I knew, in a general way, what NLH was. We all did, those of us who managed to peer into Ralph's Wilson Hall office, where we beheld a nightmare vision of a scholar's library, with books piled twenty and thirty high—everywhere. Most of my fellow grad students in the mid-1970s had, like me, only a foggy idea of what this prestigious journal had been up to since it was founded in 1969, but we did know that it brought considerable luster to the department. A few had actually started to read it, but for those MA students without an undergraduate course in Literary Criticism (which was most of us), NLH seemed like a report from a warfront far from home. More user-friendly was Critical Inquiry, then in its inaugural season, but no one mistook that new journal for the great international adventure that NLH represented.

I eagerly accepted the job, though my other teachers might have wondered at the aptness of Ralph's choice. My work was not especially neat, nor had I yet evinced much curiosity about the changes soon to sweep the profession regarding the place of literary theory. I had done okay in E. D. Hirsch's "Theory and Practice" course but discovered nothing that truly seized my attention there. An older fellow from Italy talked volubly about Marxism, while a young woman from Ann Arbor told us of her undergraduate translation of a theorist "you might not have heard much about yet, by the name of Michel Foucault, but you will soon." I wrote a paper on Lionel Trilling and, although I knew that such criticism was no longer much admired, his essays exemplified the combination of cultural, moral, and literary analysis that thrilled me. (Recall that this was just a couple of years past Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity.) I remember once telling Ralph who my heroes were: Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell. He smiled indulgently and observed drily that these men of letters were, in a word, passé. Instead, as a student of American literature, I ought to be reading, in 1975, the pragmatist philosophers, especially the language theories of G. H. Mead.

The chance to work on NLH was an opportunity not to be missed. So knowing that I wasn't that careful a proofreader nor that proficient a student of theory, I signed up and was soon partnered with...