A Legacy of Teaching: for Michael Sprinker

Michael Bernard-Donals A Legacy of Teaching: for Michael Sprinker At the start of the spring semester of 1986, 1 walked into a seminar room at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and sat down at a table that was already crowded with other graduate students in literature, students who at the time seemed much older and were certainly smarter than I. At the head of the table was a pile of books and a spiral-bound Mead notebook. The books, I noticed, had titles on their spines in English, French, and German, and this made me wonder whether I'd wandered into the wrong room. Pro-seminar in Critical Theory? I chedced my notes to be sure and found that I was in the right place and that this was the right dass. A man walked into the classroom and sat down behind the books, made a few offhanded remarks to some of the young men who were sitting along the classroom's back wall, and opened the notebook. After the room quieted a bit, Midiael Sprinker looked down at the notebook and started to read his dosely written notes. We were off. What followed were weeks of exhilarating and high-flying discussions of aesthetics, historical materialist theory, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the prose of William James; Louis Althusser's rise and fall as a political theorist and philosopher; imagined arguments between Aristotle, his interpreters from the University of Chicago, and a group from Yale led by Paul de Man who seemed to be doing for literary theory what the early soviets did for Marxism in post-revolutionary Russia; and real arguments among seminar partidpants who were unconvinced that Marxism was a sdence or that Sprinker knew what he was talking about. (On this last score, Michael always had the upper hand.) I think I caught about half of what was going on in that seminar, and I came home each evening with my head and right hand aching: I could barely keep the ideas straight, and I never stopped writing during the three-hour seminar. And I recall more than once thinking I ought simply to quit right then and there, because those four guys sitting at the back of the dassroom seemed not only to catch it all, but were also willing to ask Michael pointed questions, to call him out, to engage in the Hegelian and Kantian and Marxian high-wire act that was choreographed so perfectly by Michael and seemed so perilously dose to crashing down. HOw could I possibly do the same? But those students—Jeff Williams, Jim Paxson, Dean Casale, Ivo Kamps—brought out the best in Michael, and I wondered when I'd manage to understand this difficult material well enough to catch it adeptly and toss it back the way they did during those evenings in the spring of 1986. I persevered, made it through that first difficult year of graduate school, and found that I was entranced by theory. Not just theory, but Michael's understanding of theory: it wasn't a tool, a stick to beat literature with, 128 the minnesota review but was itself a language, a conceptual understanding of the materiality of the world and of texts and the relations of individuals, and while it didn't unlock the "meaning" of these texts or the world of things and beings, it made the question of "meaning" more meaningful, more problematic, and helped me and other seminar partidpants see that language was a force that had profound ethical and political implications. In short, Michael's great revelation was that theory was to language and being what sdence was to physical phenomena and objects, and that historical materialism more than any other theoretical lens treated language and its material circumstances sdentifically (that is to say, rigorously in its understanding of context and structure, and through the formation of hypothesis and through the testing of those hypotheses). While I didn't sit at the back of the dassroom, a year later I was one of those older students—maybe not as smart as Jeff, Dean, Jim and Ivo—who seemed to get it...