The Poverty of Criticism

Criticism, argues Paul Bové, has the potential to free us from cynicism and melancholy. But today, far too few critics utilize this potential. And he should know better than most. Since 1989, he has served as editor of boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, one of the premier humanities journals in the world.¹ The journal raised some academic eyebrows twenty-years ago when, in an effort to exert greater control over the type of criticism it published, it ceased reviewing for publication unsolicited submissions.²

Arguably, Love's Shadow (2021), Bové's most recent book, is a de facto defense of editors completely closing the submissions doors of their journals to cynical and melancholy criticism. For him, critics who recognize the powers of both imagination in poetry and the essay form put criticism on the right conceptual and historical path. Additionally, Bové's anatomy of criticism here provides enough material to make the case that an increase in the practice of this type of criticism could become a regenerative alternative within the humanities to forms of criticism more consonant with the values of the neoliberal academy—which, by extension, affords journal editors a great opportunity to participate in the rebirth of the humanities.

Of the latter type of criticism, Bové argues that it is the product of academics "[d]eeply invested in official culture and profiting from the academic schema" (100). These two terms, "official culture" and "academic schema" carry a special power in Love's Shadow as they signify the primary targets of his critique. They are critics who neglect "[b]asic literary and aesthetic history," which leads them to adopt "an allegoric politics [that] rests on lies and misrepresentations, on the intellectual laziness of categorical thinking, and on the indulgence of achieving authority in the nominalist act of convincing all that indeed all is ruin" (100). As a consequence, "[c]ritical intellectual work and life degenerate into postcriticism movements that essentially give up to the ordinariness of machined culture, bowing acceptably in resignation to defeat—and celebrating that resignation as a new way, which means no more than a new way to keep doing work adapted easily for the official culture" (100).

One of the major contemporary critics guilty of this "degenerate" form of criticism is Rita Felski, who at least since the publication of The Limits of Critique (2015), has been regarded by many as symptomatic of the cooptation of criticism by the neoliberal academy. Whereas just about every other critic discussed in Love's Shadow receives detailed, if not deep analysis by Bové, Felski and postcritique are not even indexed in the volume. Nevertheless, of Felski, writes Bové, "We do not need to do complex analysis to see how the official culture or schematic of neoliberalism rewards intellectual support and makes an obvious charade of promised progress" (392n36). Why? For Bové, the awarding of a $4.2 million dollar grant to her postcritique research is all the evidence that is needed. While Bové is not advocating one and only type of criticism, he is saying for there "to be criticism, there are things it must be—chief among which is exile from and hostility to the normal and the schematic market practices of selling a new norm, a new professional rhetoric in the form of a new and improved category set" (205). Here "academic marketing" is exemplified in "Rita Felski's advocacy of doing things with literature" (205).

Still, Bové is not claiming that we must entirely avoid becoming embodied by the official culture and its academic schematic. Rather, we must not "settl[e] into predicable rhetorics and patterns of speech" (100)—a comment that ironically echoes some of the terms in which Felski's project is often cast.³ "We all embody to some degree the official culture in its academic schematic," argues Bové,

but we need not solidify the melancholic, nostalgic, or messianic antagonism to life, love, and imagination. I point to allegoresis and its associations with messianism, melancholy, and so on as a well-established high schema that enables complex and rewarding work, thereby doing precisely the...