snowmin: January 2005 Archives
I’ve been doing quite a bit of fun research over the last two weeks. It all began with checking out a couple of articles in MLA’s Profession 2004. In “Academic Disidentifcations,” In that article, Yung-Hsing Wu considers the degree to which the academy privileges the body of the academics over their chosen affiliations. So, for example, a Chinese American scholar is expected to have a professional relationship to Chinese-American literature. This kind of orthodoxy in a discipline which claims to have long ago rejected such restrictive racial orthodoxy is, according to Wu, the rule in trajectories of academic advancement and estimations of scholarly prestige. Though I’m still at the beginning of my academic career, I can see the truth in what he says.
Wu investigates the problematics of affiliation in Gish Jen’s sequel to Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, whose eponymous protagonist is ridiculed by her mother for choosing to convert to Judaism. For Helen Chang, Mona’s mother, filiation trumps affiliation. Wu compares Mona’s vexed attempts to construct a Jewish identity with academic affiliation, noting that essentialist notions of diversity can be complicated by unconventional ethnic affiliations and the perspective the latter provide regarding the former. Wu qualifies this possibility by noting that “eras[ing] difference reified and purified through its association with ethnicity, in order to retain the possibility of difference” is difficult because “affiliation guarantees no happy ending for ethnic subjects, be they characters in a novel or academics. As a number of critics have argued convincingly, the dynamic of academic affiliation, while it appears to bypass oedipal dynamics, turns out to be riddled through with all-too-familiar dysfunctions” (115).
Here, Wu provides a note about who some of these critics are: Jeffrey R. DiLeo, David Shumway, and Stephen Watt (the last of whom I met years and years ago). These three critics all write regarding the issues surrounding academic affiliation, and after reading part of DiLeo’s 2003 collection, Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, I went on a research spree obtaining articles such as Shumway’s 1997 “The Star System in Literary Studies” (PMLA 112.1: 85-100), Michael Bérubé’s 1998 The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, Terry Caesar's 1991 SAQ article, “On Teaching at a Second-Rate University,” and issues 52 through 54 of The Minnesota Review titled “Academostars.”
These several days of research have led me back to Leslie Fiedler, and his notation of the advent of Post-Modernism in “The New Mutants,” published in 1965. In that article, as many of my friends have heard me explain, Fielder identifies what we call as counterculture in terms of a rejection by young white men of the history and education in general, and of literature in particular. As is well known, Fiedler’s landmark essay “Cross the Border, Close the Gap” 1969 extols the virtues of postmodernism for aging critics such as Fiedler himself. There is a dramatic change of tone with regard to the Postmodernism which Fielder in 1965 identifies with countercultural mutant hordes and in 1969 Fiedler sees as a fountain of rejuvenation for critics such as himself.
In 1967, Fiedler found himself and his family arrested for hosting a pot-and-hashish party, the subject of his 1969 Being Busted (which was first brought to my attention by Rob Detmering, a graduate student in my postmodernism course). Certainly, Fiedler’s encounter with the law is symptomatic of a shift in his life, not to mention his critical position. My sense is the shift Fiedler undergoes is part of a larger trend in American academics at the time, the increasing importance of performance in place of persuasion.
Shumway argues “that performance has replaced persuasion as the standard by which scholarly practice is judged. Audiences no longer care where an essay takes them as long as they enjoy they enjoy the ride” (180). Shumway argues that performance both feeds and results from the academic star system. Stars are not expected to be right about something as much as they are expected to present their points of view. The history of the shift from a persuasion-biased system of academic reward to a performance-biased as articulated by Shumway, Jeffrey Williams, and Gerald Graff (among others) is the also the story of the shift from a system of patronage (aka “the old-boys’ network) to a more democratic system which depends on ascertaining value by identifying highly mobile stars who travel from conference to conference to address audiences of expert peers, a system of valuation which correspondingly deemphasizes teaching. In other words, the shift from a n old-boys’ network to a star system also corresponds to a shift from pedagogy to research in considerations of academic advancement.
My growing sense is that at the time he wrote “The New Mutants” in 1965, Fiedler’s reputation was only just experiencing the effects of his 1960 publication of Love and Death in the American Novel, a reputation that finds its initial controversy with his 1948 publication of “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” (Harris). Like much of the academy and many of his colleagues, Fiedler was still a faculty of the school of persuasion. The increasing diversity of students as a result of the G.I. Bill had by the mid-1960s forced the profession of literature to a crisis of legitimation which begat anxieties of reproduction among established members of the academy. The massive cultural upheaval Fiedler documents in “The New Mutants” disturbs Fiedler precisely to the extent that questions of literary history are no longer relevant to the current generation of young white men. Fiedler cannot yet see that the rejection of history will be followed by an embracing of the current, which takes form as the beginning of the institutionalization of academic celebrity.
Love and Death in the American Novel secures for Fielder exactly the kind of notoriety that can propel an academic critic from Montana State University to academic stardom. The period between 1948 and 1960, then, should be a good place to look for the signs of the shift from what Shumway identifies as “soundness” to “visibility” or, more the point, academic celebrity/notoriety. I’m guessing that between 1965 and 1969, Fiedler began to experience some of the benefits of celebrity, enough such that he can celebrate postmodernism in “Cross the Border, Close the Gap.”
Partial Bibliography
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago, U Chicago P, 1987.
Harris, Charles B. Introduction. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1997.
Shumway, David R. “The Star System Revisited.” The Minnesota Review. ns 52-4: 175-184.
Williams, Jeffrey J. “Name Recognition.” The Minnesota Review. ns 52-4: 185-208.
