The Birth of the 20th Century: On Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1914 (Harvard, 2003)

When I was in graduate school in Duke University’s Literature Program from 1987-1991, discussion and study of postmodernism was all the rage. It helped that the Program’s director, Fredric Jameson, was then in the process of composing his own magnum opus on the topic, Postmodernity, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This focus on postmodernism necessarily entailed study and discussion of modernism, modernization, and modernity as well. One of the books, actually originally published in 1983, that I remember a number of grabbing up and reading at the time was Stephen Kern’s, The Culture of Time and Space, essentially a study of the transformation of the experiences of time and space among Europeans and Americans (from the US) in the period from 1880 to 1918, traced through developments in science, technology, philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts. Recently I returned to Kern’s book in order to regain my bearings in this period, which is a critical one for the book project I’ve resumed on writers of immanence in the River Plate region of South America (Uruguay and Argentina, especially Buenos Aires and Montevideo) in the first half of the 20th century. Unlike many works that circulated in the heyday of the postmodernism debate of the late 80s, I suspect, Kern’s book has aged well. Kern, a historian now at Ohio State University, tells a compelling, readable, and originally and lucidly organized history of a sea change in conceptions of time and space that affected the material and cultural environment as well as everyday consciousness.

Kern organizes his book into two main parts, one devoted to time and one devoted to space. Sandwiched between them, as a transition, is a chapter on speed. The book concludes with two chapters examining first, the July Crisis of 1914 that led to the outbreak of World War I and then the Great War itself from the vantage point of these transformations in time and space. The “Time” part of the book is divided into four chapters: “The Nature of Time,” “The Past,” “The Present,” and “The Future.” The “Space” part of the book is likewise divided into four chapters: “The Nature of Space,” “Form,” “Distance,” and “Direction.” I’m a sucker for neat organizational schemas, though in my own hands they frequently suggest an premature schematization of my materials and thinking, particularly an inadequate attention to the details of those materials that might disrupt the schema. But this isn’t the case, I found, in Kern’s book, where the well thought, informed plan usefully places a great range of heterogeneous materials under a set of illuminating lenses, while helping Kern to avoid repeating discussions of his central concepts.

Within this framework, Kern convincingly shows how inventions in technology (from the telephone and wireless telegraph to the bicycle, automobile, and airplane) and the arts (from modernist narrative to cubist painting and futurist sculpture), as well as discussions in science (biology, and the birth of quantum physics), philosophy (primarily Nietzsche, Bergson, and William James) and the social sciences (especially Freudian psychology, but also anthropology and sociology) at once registered and intensified a transformation in the experiences of time and space. Cinema, as both technological invention and budding art form plays a central role in Kern’s story.

Kern main argument is that, with respect to both time and space, this was a period in which hierarchized notions of time and space as fixed, absolute and, essentially passive backdrops to human activity gradually gave way to more leveled understandings of time and space as relative, heterogeneous, and actively shaping and shapable forces in human life. But Kern’s argument is appropriately nuanced, taking due account of countervailing tendencies of art, thought, and feeling with respect to time and space as well.

Umberto Boccioni, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" (1913)

Moreover, Kern, in his Introduction, convincingly sets forth the rationale for giving privilege to these categories and materials, while recognizing that many of these same materials might play a different role in a story told from the vantage point, say, of class struggle, or the history of colonialism and imperialism. The absence of methodological dogma is refreshing.

I’m not sure how original his thesis will appear to be to specialists of any of the fields of human endeavor surveyed by Kern. Certainly, in literary studies, his treatments of Proust, Joyce, Conrad, Stein, and others offer fairly well-established arguments about the techniques and novelties of these writers. I suspect that historians of art, technology, science, and philosophy might feel the same way. But what is original and useful in Kern’s book – and what is marvelously aided by the structure of the work – is his fluid interdisciplinary approach, which brings developments in all these areas together into a single story (or intertwining set of stories) and so gives a thick, rich portrait of the overall feel of life in the era.

Robert Delaunay, "Eiffel Tower" (1910-1911)

And his final two chapters, on the July Crisis and World War I, provide both a gripping narrative and an original perspective on these extensively studied events.

The Culture of Time and Space does not require a Ph.D. or advanced training to be profitably read. His clear prose and, again, intelligent form of organization both of chapters and within chapters, makes the book both easy to read and informative. Kern focuses on Europe and the United States, but the facts of colonialism and imperialism in the period (of which he takes account) make the book relevant for readers with an interest in Latin America or Africa as well. It’s one of those books that perhaps has been lost in the shuffle of academic fashions, but should very much still be essential reading for anyone with an interest, whether general or specific, in this period. Any such reader will find in Kern’s work a superbly informative picture of the birth of the twentieth century.

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Welcome to the Blogosphere, Yago Colás!

Sheesh, I feel a little naive. It turns out that there are many, many people trying to do with their blogs what I am trying to do with this one. I had no idea that there is such a dense and varied province of the blogosphere devoted to literary culture. This morning I randomly visited one such site Changing Lives Through Literature, and discovered a list of other reading and literature blogs. A quick hop through this little thicket of links took me to two different top ten literary blog lists (here and here)! I haven't looked at any of these closely yet, but I feel at once abashed and inspired simply by their (in some cases longstanding) existence. I'm eager to explore them to see what they're about, to identify affinities and differences, and, if necessary, to steal ideas. In all, I'm encouraged that there does indeed seem to be a thriving culture of reading, thinking, and writing shared by people mostly (as far as I can tell) working outside the conventions and venues of the American academy. (Now, does anybody read this stuff?)

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Reading in the World (On Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism)

Edward Said initially wrote the first three chapters of this book as lectures sponsored by Columbia University and the Columbia University press on aspects of American culture. In October and November, 2002, Said expanded these three lectures, altered their emphasis, and added a fourth lecture, all of which he delivered to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University. In revising the lectures for publication as a book, Said subsequently added a fifth chapter, also originally a lecture, entitled “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” These five chapters – “Humanism’s Sphere,” “The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice,” “The Return to Philology,” “Introduction to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,” and “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals” – comprised the book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, which was published by Columbia University Press on May 15, 2004. Said died on September 25, 2003 and so did not live to see the publication of the last work he completed.

In the past couple of weeks I've been looking for some guideposts among the work of various literary critics, past and present. In part I've been looking for something like an image of what it is exactly that I do. In part I've been looking for some inspiring models whose examples I could adapt to my own idiosyncrasies and purposes. The other day, at the Webster University library, I picked up a copy of an earlier work by Said (from 1983) called The World, The Text, The Critic and this reminded me that I had his more recent work sitting on our bookshelf. So with the somewhat attention deprived frame of mind that has seized me of late, I picked up Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Surprisingly, given this frame of mind, it held my attention and I finished it over the course of a few sittings.

Indeed, the first thing to say is that it is a testament to the relevance of Said's reflections and to his engaging, accessible style of writing that the book so absorbed me. I don't want to offer a lengthy summary of the entire work, so much as use a passage that struck me as particularly intelligent and moving as an occasion to summarize Said's description of reading (offered in Chapter Three: "The Return to Philology"). Suffice it, by way of summary of the whole, to say that Said offers an impassioned argument, firmly set in the realities of globalization and the post 9/11 war on terror, for the urgent importance of humanism and, within that, of a particular kind of humanist work centered on the act of reading. He left me with a tentative sense that perhaps this is what I do, if insufficient in certain respects by comparison with Said's model and example, and want to do more of: humanism and democratic criticism.

My book is all dog eared and marked up because there was so much in it that I agreed with. But here is a passage, for starters, that more than any other spoke to my current feeling of predicament. Said riffs off David Harlan's The Degradation of American History, citing with approval that author's "diagnosis of the currently depressed state of academic writing":

"the influence of antifoundationalism, discourse analysis, automatized and tokenized relativism, and professionalism, among other orthodoxies, has denatured and defanged the historian's mission. Much the same applies, I believe, in humanistic literary practice, where a new dogmatism has separated some literary professionals not only from the public sphere but from other professionals who don't use the same jargon."

And here is the passage that described so well my own current feelings:

"The alternatives seem now to be quite impoverishing: either become a technocratic deconstructionist, discourse analyst, new historicist, and so on, or retreat into a nostalgic celebration of some past state of glory associated with what is sentimentally evoked as humanism. What is missing altogether is some intellectual, as opposed to a merely technical, component to humanistic practice that might restore it to a place of relevance in our time. This is what I am trying to do here, that is, to escape the impoverishing dichotomy." (p. 70)

Said's proposed response to this dichotomy is reading. But of course, he has a very specific, if venerable in several traditions, idea of just what reading means. Said introduces this dichotomy and his idea of reading in the chapter called "The Return to Philology." In his preliminary remarks, he offers a quick sketch of the history of philology in both the Western and Arabic-Islamic traditions that, along the way, quickly touches on Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744), a work that, "launches an interpretive revolution based upon a kind of philological heroism whose results are to reveal, as [19th century German philologist and philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche was to put it a century and a half later, that the truth concerning human history is 'a mobile army of metaphors and metonyms' whose meaning is to be unceasingly decoded by acts of reading and interpretation grounded in the shapes of words as bearers of reality, a reality hidden, misleading, resistant, and difficult. The science of reading, in other words, is paramount for humanistic knowledge." (p. 58) He continues then, drawing upon 19th century American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of language as "fossil poetry", to assert that

"A true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself." (p. 59)

Having established these historical underpinnings of the practice of philology, Said goes on to elaborate his own definition of that practice, given the state of the world, and of the humanities, today. Reading, Said says, meaning philology, "involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial motions that I shall call reception and resistance." What does he mean by these two terms?

Reception

Said's first definition of "reception" is

"submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects (since this is how they are initially encountered); moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context." (p. 61)

Said glosses this further by saying that

"the act of reading is the act therefore of first putting oneself in the position of the author, for whom writing is a series of decisions and choices expressed in words. It need hardly be said that no author is completely sovereign or above the time, place, and circumstances of his or her life, so that these too, must be understood if one is to put oneself in the author's position sympathetically." (p. 62)

I really love this and feel that it puts words to a practice I have been trying to carry out without exactly knowing it or calling it that. In part, this is because I've been trying to write in my recent criticism about works that I have loved and this love perhaps naturally entails at the very least a sympathy, if not love, for the author. With this invocation of sympathy (and the remarks that follow, see just below) Said insists on the importance of affect in rigorous reading, a dimension that seems largely overlooked, if not implicitly or even explicitly prohibited by the conventions of contemporary academic criticism. This emphasis on affect, too, coincides with an animating drive of my recent work. I'm reminded of the emphasis that one of Said's own graduate instructors, the critic R. P. Blackmur (who had no more than a high school degree), placed on affect when he wrote that criticism is an act of love and so the properly the province of the amateur (a word derived from the Latin word for love).

The method for doing so entails, in the first place, reading and rereading. Here Said quotes from the Austrian philologist, linguist, and literary critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960): "work from the surface to the 'inward life-center' of the work of art: first observing details about the superficial appearance of the particular work (and the 'ideas' expressed by a poet are, also, only one of the superficial traits in a work of art); then, grouping these details and seeking to integrate them into a creative principle which may have been present in the soul of the artist; and, finally, making the return trip to all the other groups of observations in order to find whether the 'inward form' one has tentatively constructed gives an account of the whole. The scholar will surely be able to state, after three or four of these 'fro voyages,' whether he has found the life-giving center, the sun of the solar system." (pp. 64-65, quoted from Spitzer's essay "Linguistics and Literary History," in the collection Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 19. The experience of having found this "life-giving center" occurs "when, in the act of reading, one is 'struck by a detail, followed by a conviction that this detail is connected basically with the work of art'" (p. 65).

Said is quick to point out that there is no guarantee of rightness, no proof that the method has worked, but "only a deep subjective sense for which no substitute, no guidebook or authoritative source is possible. One must make the decision oneself and take responsibility for it." (65). For, Said continues to riff off Spitzer's description, "the process of reading begins and ends in the reader, and what enables the reading is an irreducibly personal act of commitment to reading and interpreting, the gesture of reception that includes opening oneself to the text and, just as importantly, being willing to make informed statements about its meaning and what that meaning might attach itself to." (p. 66) (I want to just note here that Said sees "the avoidance of this process of taking final comradely responsibility for one's reading" as a "crippling limitation in those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings that end [as they began] in undecidability and uncertainty. To reveal the wavering and vacillation in all writing is useful up to a point, just as it may here and there be useful to show, with Foucault, that knowledge in the end serves power. But both alternatives defer for too long a declaration that the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment that changes and enhances one's knowledge for purposes other than reductiveness, cynicism, or fruitless standing aside." [p. 66])

Now, even with so rigorous and attentive a process as Said describes, the reception part of reading may appear to be not only highly subjective, but exclusively so. Here Said observes that, admittedly "ideally," "what keeps the humanist honest is" a "sense of common enterprise shared with others, an undertaking with its own built-in constraints and disciplines." (p. 68) After describing in moderate detail how this works in the Islamic philological tradition, Said asserts that Spitzer, no less than Emerson, understood and accepted the importance of "something like conventions, semantic frameworks, and social or even political communities operating as partial constraints on what would otherwise be an out-of-control subjective frenzy . . ." (p. 69)

With this account of reading as reception, and the emergence of a horizon of community, Said comes to the "impoverishing" dichotomies (which I quoted above) limiting the formation of such a humanistic community and the practice of reading as reception in the American literary academy. Having set forward his aim to escape this dichotomy, Said introduces the second facet of reading: resistance.

Before getting into that section, I want to confess that I felt wary on encountering this term, resistance, at this particular point in the text. My wariness stems from two sources, as far as I can tell. First, my own critical work has shifted its emphasis from what I (but perhaps not Said) would call a "resistant" mode through the mid 1990s to a "receptive" mode since that time. I'm oversimplifying, but in the main I shifted emphases because the style of resistant criticism I was practicing struck me as esoteric and so wildly implausible, utterly incapable of supporting the claims that it made for its own (or literature's) efficacy in the world. I think, now, and in view of Said's account of resistance below, that the problem was not with the concerns that work intended to address, but with the narrow and limiting argumentative and stylstic conventions through which it sought to address those concerns. Second, I don't like the way in which resistance comes to define itself, negatively, by what it opposes, implying, among other things, that if what it opposes were to vanish so would whatever drove the human activities of resistance. So, to the degree that I've concerned myself with resistance, it has been to try to assert the importance of exploring resistance as a sometimes inevitable by-product of affirmation; affirmation of one's own desire, one's own connections to the world and visions of what the world could be, and one's own capacity to act. But upon reading Said's section on resistance, it seems to me that his idea of the practice can easily accommodate a kind of "preface" that strongly asserts the affirmations in the name and service of which one has been driven to resist. Indeed, such affirmations may be found all over the place in Said's book.

Resistance

Said insists that reading cannot stop with reception ("close reading, hermeneutic induction," "troping the general language further in one's own critical language with a full recognition that the work of art in question remains at a necessary final remove, unreconciled and in a state of integral wholeness that one has tried to comprehend or impose" [p. 71]. Rather the humanist should also "offer alternatives now silenced or unavailable through the channels of communication controlled by a tiny number of news organizations" in the face of "an assault on thought itself, to say nothing of democracy, equality, and the environment, by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well as imperialist ambition" (p. 71).

Said argues that working as a reader also entails responsibility for one's own writing. Specifically, a responsibility to "overturn and dismantle" "alienating," "prepackaged and reified representations of the world that usurp consciousness and preempt democratic critique" (p. 71). He stresses the importance of time to this process, noting the ways in which "deadlines, the obligations to an importunate and exigent employers, and the pressures to produce on a regular basis" may conspire to abet these alienating representations. So he's thankful for the space a university job has given him to pursue his reading in good time. I can't help but wish that Said had said something here about how this very position is under attack today on a variety of fronts: whether it is the excessive demands placed on faculty (especially untenured faculty) to administer a larely aimless institutional bureaucracy or the subcontracting of various university missions to overworked, underpaid adjunct faculty desperate to do something remotely related to the interests they have spent so many years cultivating in graduate school. He is certainly right that the University is the last place in America that affords time for thought, but the very spirit of democratic criticism he calls for inspires me to want to point out the very (and increasingly) limited nature of that place.

Said then turns to language, the language in which we might cast the report we formulate of our reading. He nicely dispenses with the specious argument that justifies esoteric jargon on the grounds that it, in and of itself, somehow resists or eludes the ideological underpinnings of the prepackaged style of "plain speech." Moreover, he points out, the "risks of specialized jargons for the humanities . . . are obvious: they simply substitute one prepackaged idiom for another" (p. 72). "There are," he argues, "too many available models of intelligible language all around us whose basic graspability and efficiency goes the whole range from difficult to comparatively simple" so that he sees

"no need to employ preposterously outré and repellent idioms as a way of showing independence and originality. Humanism should be a form of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious illumination. Expertise as a distancing device has gotten out of control, especially in some academic forms of expression, to the extent that they have become antidemocratic and even anti-intellectual" (pp. 72-3)

He's wary of the "short, telegraphic forms" of thought and communication that predominate in the mediasphere and maintains that "humanistic resistance . . . needs to occur in longer forms, longer essays, longer periods of reflection" (p. 73).

Here again, I agree with some reservations. In the first place, it seems possible to me that humanistic resistance can take shorter forms (the aphorism as practiced, say, by Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia, by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, or by Walter Benjamin in various works, come to mind). Of course, we aren't all Adorno, Nietzsche, or Benjamin. But I see no reason to equate vapidity with brevity, or, for that matter, rich humanist criticsm with length. My second reservation has to do with access to media. The opportunities to publish the sort of thing Said seems to have in mind have been narrowing in American society for some time now (except perhaps for people like Said). The commercial publishing market has little interest in the sort of humanist criticism, especially in the literary field, he describes (if it's output is to be taken as an indicator) and the academic publishing market has been economically restricted in a drastic fashion and, where it does publish, seems mostly to publish the sort of thing that Said decries. I don't want to overstate this: trade presses have certainly published serious humanist criticism in recent years and literary critics like myself might pay heed to what those critics who are getting published are doing differently than we are. Lastly, I wonder, as I've stated here already in a different entry, whether blogging can provide a democratizing access to an audience for a humanistic critical practice of the sort Said advocates. Though even as I assert that wonder, that hope, I'm aware that I fear this entry is too long for a blog. (In this vein, I'm still trying to get my hands on an article by one Gerard Goggin, on Said and blogging!)

Moving on from language and form, Said goes on to describe how the resistant facet of reading entails the elaboration of ever widening frameworks: of the writer in his or her time and place, likewise of the text, and finally of the reader's situation in a complex, overlapping network of institutional and social locations and historical processes. This necessarily entails the humanist migrating in his or her writing across such spheres of human

endeavor as literature, philosophy, history, economics, policy and current events. "This," he says, "is what resistance is: the ability to differentiate between what is directly given and what may be withheld, whether because one's own circumstances as a humanistic specialist may confine one to a limited space beyond which one can't venture or because one is indoctrinated to recognize only what one has been educated to see or because only policy experts are presumed to be entitled to speak about the economy, health services, or foreign and military policies, issues of urgent concern to the humanist as a citizen. Does one accept the prevailing horizons and confinements, or does one try as a humanist to challenge them" (pp. 75-6)

Said describes this movement as the source of relevance for the humanities in America today. To learn and to teach others to read well is, Said argues, an

"estimable task in itself, of course, but one that by its own inventive energies also necessarily takes one further and further from even the most highly cherished inward reception. Yes, we need to keep coming back to the words and structures in the books we read, but, just as these words were themselves taken by the poet from the world andevoked from out of silence in the forceful ways without which no creation is possible, readers must also extend tehir readings out into the various worlds each of us resides in" (p. 76).

Carrying this work out, finally, requires of every humanist critic a willingness to "be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else's society or the society of each other." He cites as exemplary, in this regard, the lives and works of certain great Jewish thinkers described in Isaac Deutscher's The Non-Jewish Jew; thinkers (Spinoza, Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself -- and there are probably countless other, often anonymous, examples right up through the present day) who "were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them from community in the process." We can see in their example "the crystallized role of the American humanist, the non-humanist humanist as it were" (pp. 76-7).

He concludes the essay with this inspiring passage:

"Humanism . . . is a technique of trouble . . . [its] task is constitutively an unending one, and it should not aspire to conclusion of the sort that has the corollary and, in my estimate deleterious, effect of securing one an identity to be fought over, defended, and argued. . . . In the post-Cold War world, the politics of identity and partition . . . have brought more trouble and suffering than they are worth, nowhere more than when they ar associated with precisely those things, such as the humanities, traditions, arts, and values, that identity allegedly defends and safeguards, constituting in the process territories and selves that seem to require killing rather than living" (p. 78).

I can't resist concluding this summary reflection on the book with a little anecdote that serves to draw attention to a fine, if tiny, example of the sort of work Said wants us to practice.

I first heard of the work when a visiting lecturer made reference to the third chapter of the book, "The Return to Philology," in particular to Said's reference there to the parameters of reading and humanistic study in the Islamic tradition. Among the elements required of a scholar in this tradition, according to Said, is "a component of personal commitment and extraordinary efforts, called "ijtihad" in Arabic." Said goes on to explain, parenthetically, that ijtihad derives from the same root as jihad, and notes that the latter "does not mainly mean holy war but rather a primarily spiritual exercise on behalf of the truth." (68-69) I'd never heard that before, but it made great sense to me and stayed with me.

But I realize now that already in that little passage, parenthetical no less, Said was providing a highly compressed, but no less effective for its brevity, example of the kind of reading, the kind of philology, the kind of democratic criticism, the kind of humanism that he was advocating throughout the book: attending to the specificity of words, with all the historical sediment they bear, and sharply asserting an informed, complicating interpretation of those words that directly confronts the ignorant understandings, which, harnessed to economic and military power, cause so much suffering in our world today.

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On a visit to the Public Library

I just got back from the University City Public Library. I found it to be a more complex experience than what I’d expected, perhaps than what it might be for many people, for the other patrons sharing the space with me on this rainy, cool Sunday in April.

The other day, I was in the adjunct faculty office at Webster University during my office hours when I noticed a sign that the bookshelves were to be cleared. There around a dozen of us adjunct faculty members in English and Philosophy at Webster who share this office. I’ve met two of them, seen one other, and see one regularly since we have the same office hours. There are three desks separated by dividers, a phone, one computer, a couple of windows, a bathroom, and several large bookcases.

Books, the note informed me, that had not been moved to the shelves marked “keep” were going to be given away at the end of April. We should feel free to take things we are interested in before then. I perused the shelf of books still awaiting a final determination of their fate; the ones that had not yet been rescued (or condemned) to be kept. Lots of introductory textbooks on composition and different kinds of technical writing, a few random anthologies of literature, some surveys and histories of Western philosophy. Most of these are fat books. There squeezed in among these I noticed a slim orange sliver of sunset of a spine, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, with the title Passionate Attention: An Introduction to Literary Study.

It’s a book written by one Richard L. McGuire (Ph.D, Rice University, 1968), professor of English at MacMurray College in Illinois, and published by Norton in 1973. The upper right corner of the front cover bears in small print the original selling price: $1.75. The book is 83 pages long, including 2 ½ pages of notes. There is no bibliography and no index. I’m reminded of something Claire and I have noticed and remarked upon at times watching old Hollywood classics: that the opening and closing credits take all of about a minute and a half to go through and that this contrasts so sharply with the seemingly endless trail of credits that follow a contemporary Hollywood film. I very much doubt that Norton, or any other publisher, let alone a university press, would publish an 83 page book today. I might be wrong about whether they would or wouldn’t, but I’m certain that they don’t. Books written by literature professors today – I take the first one that springs to mind off our shelves here at home, a comparatively well-received volume – look more like this: 375 pp., a 5 page index, a 15 page list of Works Cited, 47 pages of notes.

This is not about one is good and the other is bad, not in some ostensibly objective sense of those words. But it is about the poignant longing that the little volume by the-it-turns-out-late Professor McGuire has stirred in me. It’s that longing that took me to the University City Public Library today, that longing that has finally overcome the paralysis and fear that was keeping me from starting this blog, and that longing that I want to try to describe and, perhaps even, promote.

I think that the 70 or so pages of scholarly back-matter in the contemporary academic work, perhaps like the long list of credits in a contemporary Hollywood film, indicate how complex and technically sophisticated such productions have become; how armed they are. I’m thinking of the Spanish word armado, which means not only armed as in bearing weapons, but also assembled, composed. It makes me think of an elaborate construction, designed for unassailability and, perhaps unwittingly, impenetrability. By contrast, Professor McGuire’s slim work struck me as a vulnerable, tender little thing, somehow at once ambitious in its scope and modest in its pretensions. Its 2 and a half pages of footnotes advance no argument, defend no position: they just let you know where to look if you want to find the book from which he has quoted here and there in the course of his little book.

I want to talk in more detail about the book and its argument in another blog entry. Here I only want to indicate that the book, according to the back cover (and I agree with the description): “reminds the reader of the value of his own humanity, experience, and judgment and demonstrates the value, too, of other ways in which human beings have read literature.” In so doing, “it points a sane path between the authoritarian ‘this is the only meaning the work can have’ and the solipsistic ‘it means anything any reader wants it to.” On the one hand, reminder a reader of the value of his own humanity, experience and judgment seems like rather a tall order; on the other hand nothing could be simpler.

Reading through this book and even just weighing it my hand and mind against so much contemporary scholarship, as I say, awakened in me a longing for a writing about literature and culture that could be so simple, so direct, so confident and ambitious and so humble, modest, and tolerant at the same time. The book says, in nearly every way possible including its physical dimensions, “Anybody who can read and feel and think can begin to say something about this vast, living body of human work called “literature. Here is what I have to say about it. I think it’s pretty good, but I’m well-aware that what I’m doing is participating in and trying to facilitate a conversation in which I am just one – and not necessarily the most brilliant, erudite, profound, or eloquent one -- of many, many participants.”

I’d like to write about literature in this way. I’d like for there to be more room in the contemporary academy for writing about literature in this way. I write here, in this blog, hoping that if I’m somewhat despairing about the contemporary academic study of literature, then perhaps there is still a space and a hunger, a longing, for this sort of conversation out there in the world.

And so I went to the University City Public Library today in search of some titles that might nourish and stimulate and satisfy this longing. I went in with a list of a two or three, and came home with ten books (having left about four or five more on the shelf in embarrassment at what I guess felt like some immoderate desire). There were so many interesting books on the shelves there, so many that I'd never heard of and didn't know existed. I felt overwhelmed by a desire to read and read, and then to read more, to feel, to learn, to understand, and to share in writing. All this was in the space of 30 minutes at the Public Library of a relatively small town. What enormous richness and wealth I encountered! What a rhizome of possibilities!

I am a student again, but newly. Same as always, but different. Freshly washed, eager, hungry, opening.

I may be writing about some of these books in this blog. I’m not sure. It depends on what I find when I read (or reread) them. But I know that part of what they represent for me already (even in their currently unread or unreread state) is an older form of literary criticism (most were written in the 1950s and 1960s), one long out of fashion even before I started graduate school in the late 1980s.

I already know that some of what I find there will seem to me to be parochial or elitist, and may be easily associable with philosophical or political views I oppose, but I’m not too worried about that. It’s not entirely that I’m driven by some sort of nostalgia for a past situation of literary criticism, though perhaps I am a little bit. It’s more that I want to rescue something that I think was important in these works and in that time and to see if it can withstand the vital concerns of the present.

I’m interested to explore and perhaps try to resuscitate from these works the simple direct love of reading and of communicating one’s experience of reading, and the firm conviction that this is a valuable and important human activity for its capacity to challenge and enrich our understanding of ourselves and our world and to enlarge the avenues of connection between ourselves and our time and place and other selves and their times and places. I’ll let you know what I find.

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