Those Who are About to Theorize (We Salute You)

As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had landed there and now returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories in the cafés and inns, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished.

—Tom Brokaw (1998, xxvi-xxvii)

H. Aram Veeser says he toyed with The Greatest Generation as a working title for The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism: Scholars Discuss Intellectual Origins and Turning Points, his book of interviews with representative members of three important clusters of scholars and intellectuals who brought literary theory to the shores of the U.S. University. Tom Brokaw's actual book with this title The Greatest Generation (1998) begins with an anecdote about the anchorman travelling to France in 1984 to make a television special documenting the 40^th anniversary of D-Day. The Brokaw book assumes a constitutive posture of self-discovery through self-accusation—personal, generational, overdue—that I'd like to consider in the context of Veeser's project of thinking theory generationally, a feeling that newer generations are failing the past, as if standing accused at some kind of awkward generational retirement party. The idea of the Greatest Generation is also a kind of mythology about a Good War, as Studs Terkel called it, a worldview sharpened by a Bad War, the Vietnam War. Imagine a puncturing meme: Okay, Boomer, isn't the Golden Age of Theory another monomyth perpetrated by your privileged demographic bubble?

Veeser makes the Greatest Generation analogy numerous times in the collection. And, to be fair, the interviewees, who received their PhDs between 1959 and 1991, don't love the comparison. But, I like it, in an ironic way, in a Generation X way, generation being destiny, after all. (It's telling that Gen X'er Heather Love gets a deflationary last word that situates the elegiac undertones of Veeser's collection in "broader anxieties about the nature of academic careers" [237].) Think of the story boards. The dying army captain blowing up a bridge in France, commanding the young private to earn that sacrifice. That same soldier, aged forward, telling Brokaw the story. Actually, he can't share his feelings, only the cinematic apparatus does that work. Or, the negative image, the Boomer saint on a volcano, in a role played by an actor who blew up another bridge on the River Kwai, chastising the last theory hire: you were supposed to be the bring balance to the department… not leave us in confusion! If not a metalanguage, at least you said you'd give us a Lingua Franca subscription!

So many wars, as Bruno Latour put it, already a generation ago: Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorists. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destructions? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of critical spirit? Has it not run out of steam?

(Latour 2004, 225)

How can we teach the conflicts, as Gerald Graff wisely advised it once upon a time, if the disciplinary history of all these skirmishes are starting to get a bit too hazy? Many of them happened so long ago, in galaxies far away, before any of us got to grad school. Many have the convoluted, protean character of an institutional will to power broken on wheels inside wheels of diminishing authority and power. Theory is over; it's all about New Historicism now, one of my undergraduate professors told me that, when I was applying to graduate school in 1992. When the glory days happen...