The Specter of Rebirth

I was in graduate school in the first half of the 1970s. It was an exciting time, as 1970 marks the year when The Structuralist Controversary first appeared in an affordable paperback edition. It told the story of the first big American theory conference from 1966, as H. Aram Veeser discusses in his wonderful introduction to his provocative new book The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism. As the earlier book's title underscores, theory then means structuralism, particularly French structuralism and its immediate aftermath.

In college from 1966-70, I had been exposed to lots of philosophy and theology, given that it was a Jesuit school. Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, even touches of Heidegger, not to mention the history of philosophy and the theological adaptations of major philosophical movements—all had been passed before my eyes. Structuralism, however, at first felt more like learning a new kind of math, a new science, of language to be sure, but not like historical linguistics or philology. Instead, these strange formulas were being applied to sentences to reveal otherwise invisible patterns superseding grammar and phonetics to affect meaning but without fixed meanings being attached to the formulas, even as they had definite functions to perform.

This all felt to me like the two semesters I learned the basic concepts of modern science, capped by six weeks on quantum mechanics. It was like Yeats and his magic scrawls in the sand at the end of "Ego Dominus Tuus" when he summons his favorite Daemon to help him read them so he can put them to his uses, such as winning his beloved's withheld love or granting him wisdom for the long haul of life after life. Yes, I marveled at quantum physics and reincarnation, the eternal recurrence of the same fateful contingencies, with equal astonishment. How to live more creatively in words has always been my aspiration.

In the early to mid-1970s, I thus was a perfect candidate as a graduate student to campaign for instituting theory into the curriculum, starting with other interested students and two faculty members a theory reading group, even as for me I still had to major in one literary historical area (modern British literature) and minor in two related such areas (British Romanticism and Victorian Literature). This worked out to my advantage, since I knew some things in Brit. Lit. from about 1750-1950.

This also made it a cinch that I would write my third book Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (1988) soon enough in my career. I was being taught his curriculum, as performed in his 1967 literature anthology, The Experience of Literature, even as most graduate teachers incorporated European fiction regularly and eagerly, as he always did. Later, when I returned to teach permanently at this university, I learned that most of my colleagues were products of Columbia and Harvard, where a Trillingesque perspective on modernity and literary history prevailed until the eighties.

I was always both excited and suspicious about theory. Paul Ricoeur was my perfect guide, with his open-ended dialectic of suspicion and restoration, as he called it in Freud and Philosophy, the book I used to shape my dissertation on Yeats's Autobiographies and hermeneutics, into my first book in 1981: Tragic Knowledge. I tended to see theory in America as an attempt to turn critical practices into recognized expressions of creative imagination, a continuation of the by-now exhausted modernism in what I learned to call postmodernist forms. William V. Spanos, thanks to my best friend from college days, Paul A. Bove, Spanos' graduate student, became the guide to postmodernism and American culture, through his journal boundary 2, which he and the Canadian novelist Robert Kroetsch launched in Fall 1972. Seven years before Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979) and later adumbrations, but eight years after Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (1964), I had become a postmodernist culture critic, and while still in graduate school, editing with Paul Bove and William Spanos the proceedings of a 1978 conference sponsored by boundary 2 entitled The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary...