Rants & Raves: Letter to the Editors

Page 2 Critical theory has had atendency to isolate itselffrom broader audiences. This is in part by design and in part by accident. The sheerdifficulty ofthe style and content ofmuch ofthe writing, which assumes a wide understanding of the histories ofliterature and philosophy and related disciplines, may limit access for the occasional reader. The other—and more cynical—reason for the isolationism is that critical theorists do not want to be understood by a broader audience. The argument here might be that the publicly accessible circulation of theory would serve to decrease its power—a power that is generated in large part through inaccessibility. This situation puts ABR in a challenging position. While ARR's mission statement notes our commitment to reviewing "neglected" works ofliterary and cultural criticism, we are also committed to publicly accessible reviews. We want people to be encouraged to read the books we are reviewing, and we aim to facilitate the understanding of key terms and themes of contemporary criticism. With this in mind, we are launching this issue's cosmopolitanism Focus. Over the last twenty-five years, critical theorists have introduced into our vernacularmany powerful "-isms" and "theories." From postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lacanian theory and queer theory, the critical landscape has been populated by terms which signify empowering critical matrices. Issues of ABR with Focuses on some of the key terms of critical.theory can alleviate the alienating effect these terms can have on readers. Our aim is to publish Focuses that engage the key terms and issues of critical theory in ways that will be meaningful to both scholarly and creative audiences. Not only will these publicly accessible reviews and discussions of key critical concepts enrich writerly and readerly processes, they will also serve to build a stronger bridge between the critical and creative worlds. Finally, it is particularly fitting in the context of the aforementioned that we welcome on board our newest Contributing Editor, Michael Bérubé, who is well-known for his work on public access and the humanities. Welcome to ABR, Michael! Jeffrey R. Di Leo Publisher and Editor Victoria, Texas Rants & Raves letter to the editors BILL PORTER RESPONDS TO ALAN MICHAEL PARKER (JAN/FEB 2007) Professor Parker and his contributors deserve my apologies for my "bad math," an unwise characterization of half of the book as "imaginary Holocaust survivors." My later remarks were more properly aimed at the "hideously afflicted" imaginary poets, who may indeed have taken up something closer to halfofthe book, for whom a single imaginary Holocaust survivor (of my own imagining, I might have added) might have stood as an especially wretched proxy—but I failed to make this clear, and I contributed mightily to Professor Parker's perception that I was greasing the skids for a charge ofthe appropriation ofsuffering. For these mistakes I offer Professor Parker and his colleagues my apology. Now, having carelessly nourished a misunderstanding, I'll try to clear it up. When writing about TheImaginaryPoets, I often worriedthatI'dgive overallofthe spaceI'dbeen allowed merely to adumbrating its peculiar stage dressing. Twenty-two real poets invent twenty-two imaginary poets, write theirpoems forthem, then write essays about them; andthe editor tells us all about it beforehand. It was this last element ofthe design that fascinated me and, as I argued, posed a serious problem for the contributors : how to write, what to write, and why to write poetry at all without "even the shelter of a real hoax." It can't be fairthat ProfessorParkeraccuses me and my gaze ofmissing the "poetics" here, for, as I tookmyself to be arguing, it's his own intruding machinery that distracts us from and utterly overshadows the poetics. I selected a small handful ofpoems for special attention because they had, in my view, escaped that machinery with exemplary grace. (And perhaps my thoughts concerning these displayed, alas, less than a solitaryjot of literary learning. I confess that I have never taken Professor Parker's undergraduate poetry class.) So I did not mean to complain that anyone had misappropriated anyone's pain. I tried to argue, rather, that imagining another handful of sufferers maimed by war and dislocation was just too leadenly obvious, since in The Imaginary...