Star Gazing

Ann Pellegrini Star Gazing A hasty review of our tale so far: throughout the 1990s commentators inside the academy and out made much of the rise of the personal voice in literary studies. They tended to explain this autobiographical turn in terms of trends in literary theory post-1968 with its much-trumpeted death of the author. What's more, in an interesting twist on the maxim that nature abhors a vacuum, it turns out that the gaping hole left in the author's wake was being filled in, and quickly, by literary and cultural studies scholars themselves. Thus, after the demise of the author-subject who knows and can pronounce her authenticity arises the critic-star who knows she doesn't have an authenticity to speak of and who thus speaks, as it were, whereof she cannot know. We might call this the professionalization of the persona. Nor was this transformation everywhere bemoaned. In the introduction to the 1996 anthology Confessions of the Critics, for example , H. Aram Veeser suggests that these self-stagers/confessional critics/autobiographical tricksters are trading in an authenticity whose impossibility has been admitted to the stage alongside them, raising this paradox to a point of value and possibility. In the main, however, critical assessments of the personalization of literary criticism and the starsystem it supposedly signs have been far less sanguine. With the possibility of objective knowledge— Truth—everywhere held in suspicion, so this line of argument goes, there is now nothing left but the personal authority—the charisma— of the critic turned star. And in all this, literary studies is going the way of the wider culture, where spectacle daily vanquishes depth and entertainment trumps enlightenment. Instead of holding the line against the erosion of Enlightenment values, scholars are merrily cashing in on the new fashion for the personal. And they are doing so in ways that dangerously detach fame from merit, split professions off from persons, and recast high theory as high entertainment . Consequently, the winking professions of subjectivity so celebrated by Veeser can serve only to constitute and shore up the personalized , professional authority of the speaker at the expense of now-discredited forms of shared, publicly authorized knowledges. (For some of us, of course, such discrediting of shared, publicly authorized knowledges could not come soon enough—and still hasn't.) One of the most influential such criticisms of the culture of academic celebrity was advanced by David R. Shumway in "The Star System in Literary Studies" (1997). Shumway's arguments were 210 the minnesota review themselves lent added credibility by virtue of their publication in the pages of the PMLA, the "in-house" and juried journal of the Modern Language Association. Shumway worries that transformations in the culture of literary studies are endangering more than the reputation of the individual critic gone Hollywood. Rather, celebrification undermines the legitimacy of literary studies in general in the eyes of "the culture at large" (98). And he links literary studies' potential loss in public reputation to another kind of lost reputation. Here is Shumway inveighing against the scandal of the personal, "The discipline has more knowledge about the sexual tastes of Eve Sedgwick than the National Enquirer provides about those of most celebrities" (96). This is a great line, but a poor analogy. The very terms of Shumway's argument—"star system" and "culture at large"—are overblown, even overly optimistic; they take for granted a public interest in the conversations (civil or otherwise) internal to literary and, I'd add, cultural studies. The analogy between academic celebrity and the Hollywood star system thus overshoots, actually helping to manufacture the very hype Shumway and others go on to moralize against. As Jeffrey Williams suggests in this issue, the academic star system , if that is even the term for it, is more of an m/ra-academic affair. "Academo-stars" (Williams' term) hardly have the name recognition and cultural capital enjoyed by Hollywood's celestial fixtures. Let's face it: even the man Shumway calls the "most starlike of . . . stars" (95), Derrida, is no Leonardo DiCaprio—not that this trifling difference prevents Shumway from suggesting that the self-promotion of academic stars actually exceeds...