A Guide to Receiving Ralph Cohen

An ardent Judge, who Zealous in his Trust,With Warmth gives Sentence, yet is always Just;Whose Own Example strengthens all his Laws,And Is himself that great Sublime he draws.

—Pope, An Essay on Criticism

In transforming the genres of literary history and literary theory, Ralph Cohen has reconstituted literary study and, in so doing, realigned the disciplines and reconceived the aims of the humanities. The interrelated, collaborative procedures for achieving such an accomplishment can be traced in Cohen's discovery of David Hume's aesthetics, his transactional teaching, his scholarly displacement of literary criticism by the art of discrimination, his dialectical reading of the Augustan mode, his innovative production of New Literary History, his institutional reorganization of knowledge as exemplified in the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change, and, last but not least, in his generative essays, scattered like constellation disorders, literary instars across our cultural horizon.

All of these deliberate forms of action are accessible, and yet their significance and their interrelations have been grasped but partially by the wide network of students, colleagues, and scholars who have called Ralph Cohen friend. I am not implying that Cohen's work has gone unacknowledged by the profession of letters, far from it; the distinctions—both national and international—in recognition of his thinking and scholarly eminence are manifold and widely known, his esteem epitomized fittingly by elective membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. Nor do I suggest that his achievements have been accomplished single-handedly; that would not only be a misrepresentation of his procedures, it would be a misreading of his character.

Yet as apparent as it is that Ralph Cohen's performances are collaborative in nature, the collective nature of his papers is less evident. My essay explores that nature, its origins, some of its characteristic interrelations and aims, and the procedure for achieving those aims. Rather than accept Rita Felski and Herbert Tucker's generous invitation for a tribute "in honor of Ralph's retirement," I hope they will accept in its place a literary tribute in honor of Ralph's continuity and change, change and continuity.¹ As such, my contribution also becomes a tribute to the readers Cohen has artfully challenged and informed. It assumes the form of a checklist to Cohen's Lichtenberg figures that have exfoliated alongside the journal's course in a theoretical intercourse somewhat like a double helix. At large now, they constitute compelling and renewable challenges to our global age.

Ralph Cohen's editorial writings that exist in his book publications and in New Literary History are aimed at featuring the work of others. Some of this work has been translated into other languages, including Chinese. But his essays appear to be poorly known, in part because, unlike many a scholar of his stature, Cohen has never collected his essays, and that is not an arbitrary fact, nor does it betoken a failure of industry. For him to do so would be contrary to their nature and to his wishes. They await collection—by others—but it would be a mistake for another editor to collect them before his readers have the opportunity to discover them, for themselves, in the context of their particular sites and the very specific historical occasions of their placement. For as decisive forms of intervention in collections—anthologies, bulletins, working papers, indices, journals, and so forth—they are charged with wisdom and with electrifying insights, necessitating new directions in the study of historical change.

Whereas New Literary History and the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change at the University of Virginia have functioned as centers for communal inquiry among a national and international community of scholars, the vast body of Ralph Cohen's writings are embedded in decentered, fragmentary theoretical essays. Only occasionally has the editor contributed essays to quarterlies, a withholding to which Wolfgang Iser pays credit when he notes: "The journal represents a new form of writing insofar as it is Ralph Cohen's book, in which he self-effacingly hardly ever participates."² Cohen contributions are always...