Memories of Ralph Cohen, Generic and Otherwise

I remember the first time I met Ralph Cohen. It was 1972, the first week of my first semester in graduate school. During registration, a friendly student further along in the University of Virginia program had suggested—no, insisted—that I sign up for a course with Cohen. I can't remember the name of the seminar. Something with "theory" in the title, I think, but, at the time, the course didn't look very promising to me. Nonetheless, I enrolled, and, lo and behold, there I was in the course that week, in the first class of the term.

We all sat nervously around the seminar table, as Ralph entered. Wiry and intense, armed with his characteristic scowl, Ralph took his place at the head of the table and stared intently in my general direction. Then, in a tone resembling a growl, which seemed to issue from somewhere deep inside the man, he forced a question through the side of his mouth. "Is there a use of language that is unique to literature?" he asked. "Is there such a thing as literary language?"

Dead silence. "What kind of question is that?" I thought. "What's going on here?" I knew the answer was "yes." After all, this was why I had come to graduate school—to study the literary language of writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, to revel in language that no one in my family could possibly understand, much less read or write. Literary language was what I was all about. Even so, I wasn't going to answer this question, which seemed so simple and shiny, like a steel trap. So, we all just sat there, waiting to be told, waiting for enlightenment, waiting for the man to speak.

And speak he did—although I admit that I remember less what Ralph said, as he demolished my fantasy that I belonged to some literary elite, than how he said it. Grunts and little explosions of language; brief, explanatory phrases punctuated by the fist halting just before it struck the table; snarls of words pooling from his curled lip—all overseen by the intensity of his eagle eyes peering, it seemed, into the soul of my newfound stupidity. In the time that class lasted—what was it? two hours? a week?—I lost all the certainty that had brought me to graduate school and every remnant of my tenuous hold on what I had so foolishly believed literary language to be. What I was left with was the greatest gift any teacher ever bestowed: new questions and the conviction that to answer them I would have to learn how to learn all over again.

It requires an act of imagination now to recover just how exotic—and unnecessary—any kind of literary theory seemed in 1972. The famous conference that brought Jacques Derrida to Baltimore had occurred four years earlier, but the impact of Derrida's lecture had yet to register in most U.S. graduate programs, where mastering the canons of British and American literature was still the graduate student's primary task. Most of the graduate students at UVa seemed happy to accept that assignment, and they set about choosing a field with little thought about "literary language" or any other matters that might trouble that well-worn route. This consensus was broken primarily by a few, decidedly cliquish, older students who knew that theory was the future of the discipline, that history was the future of theory, and that Ralph Cohen was the man. In equal parts intrigued and alarmed, I gravitated to this group. I discovered that Cohen had founded a journal called New Literary History in 1969; I started reading NLH and even subscribed to it; I took more classes from Ralph; and I gradually made his unanswerable questions my own.

When one looks back now at the first several years of New Literary History, it's startling to see just how prescient Cohen's choices of topics were. In those early years, we find issues devoted not only to the topic of my initial seminar ("The Language...