Abstract
There is perhaps nothing more disturbing about the academic novel than its patent anti-academicism. This chapter reads this theme against the backdrop of historic American anti-intellectualism discussed in Richard Hofstadter’s classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and the “intellectual dark web” that emerges in the 2010s, as well as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s call for a generative intellectualism in Generous Thinking (2019). The more pressing issue for the genre, however, is that it often pits creative writers against “theory,” the omnibus term referring to deconstruction, poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism—much of it suspiciously French. With discussions of Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993) and Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), this chapter details a schism between professionally trained creative writers and “theory,” how this schism plays out in the academic novel, how this schism confounds the academic novel’s relationship to the campus life that it lays claim to, and the resentment that suffuses the entire institution.
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Notes
- 1.
The Board’s rule states: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust [….], and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” (2021, 1). The Board’s rule singles out Holocaust denialism, “critical race theory,” and “the 1619 Project” as violations of this rule (2021, 1).
- 2.
Hofstadter writes, “I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon” (1963, 20). And later, responding to the charges of subversion among the intellectuals, Hofstadter writes that “it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing” (1963, 45).
- 3.
The collection of essays in Anti-Intellectual Representations of American Colleges and Universities, edited by Barbara Tobolowsky and Pauline Reynolds (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) expands from my focus to consider also narrative representations of anti-intellectualism in campus life with studies of television, video games, and film.
- 4.
This is an ongoing conversation that defies conventional citation but that nevertheless demands attribution: James Martell, my friend and colleague and office-neighbor, takes credit for this succinct formulation of the myriad projects of “theory.”
- 5.
See, for instance, a recent special issue of the journal boundary 2—volume 48, issue 1 published in February 2021. Paul Bové’s editorial note introducing the issue asks, “Behind this issue lies a question the editors hoped would provoke skillful writing: Does attention to language matter anymore?” (1). The issue rebukes criticism that has moved away from traditional literary methods associated with philology and especially criticism that has abandoned a clarity of writing. The issue’s closing article, Lindsay Walters’s “To Become What One is,” laments the displacement of criticism by “theory.” In essence, Waters exhorts readers “to leave the twentieth century behind us,” referring to post-structuralist criticism, associated with Jean François Lyotard and the disruption of the grand narratives, what he calls “an effort to escape Big Picture theorizing” (257)—occluding, evidently, major figures such as Fredric Jameson whose projects rest on totalization, part of his agenda to link culture and experience to broad, material systems of capital and social stratification. Setting aside Waters’s festschriftish self-aggrandizement and gossipy manner, he offers a sincere question that should always ground our thinking: what is criticism, what is scholarship for? But the essay’s reactionary repudiation of “theory” is surprising given its sources: boundary 2, established in 1972, its editorial board awash in academic celebrity, is well understood as the “theory” establishment and Waters himself was a major conduit of such work in his roles with the University of Minnesota Press’s Theory and History of Literature series.
- 6.
More than a personal trauma for Bloom, this student demonstration was a landmark event in both the Black Campus Movement and in the university’s entanglement in culture wars discourses. See Ibram X. Kendi’s The Black Campus Movement (2012) and Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), respectively, for more on the Cornell protests.
- 7.
Guillory situates this canon war saga against the backdrop of shifting American class norms: “the category of ‘literature’ names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system” (1993, x). As the cultural value of literary education destabilizes, theory arrives, creates its own canon largely in measure to study the literary one, and provides cultural capital for an intellectual class that is no longer served—or is served less well—by the older values of literature alone (Guillory 1993, xii). As Guillory knows well, this new canon did not fully displace the traditional one, but created a new register for thinking—and a new de facto requirement for scholarly accomplishment in the humanities. Lost in Guillory’s study of this seeming paradigm shift is the appeal of “theory.” Many students and scholars surely found fulfillment in these works precisely because of their challenging nature, offering different challenges than those typically found within the traditional canon.
- 8.
See, for instance, Michele Wallace’s essay “Ishmael Reed’s Female Troubles” in her book Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (1994).
- 9.
As an aside, I would argue that it’s not at all clear Hank plays—or even aspires to—the role of comedic “straight man.” Rather than setting up the material by which others might shine, Hank hordes most of the good lines. In scant other cases, Hank is not the setup man but the object of the joke. For instance, on the day when the department is scheduled to vote on a recall of the chair, a referendum on Hank’s service as interim chair, Hank awakes from a nap in his office to find that he has peed his pants. Further slapstick ensues as, unable to appear presentable for the meeting, he crawls into the ceiling to eavesdrop on the meeting, discretely dropping copies of the university’s policy manual into the conference room, cuing those in attendance to the fact that their two-thirds vote won’t in fact impeach him from the chair position. If in the main Hank is not the “straight man” but simply another straight male professor, the novel’s comic lines often appear to punch down, reinforcing the privileges that are at signaled in the novel’s resentments of “theory.”
- 10.
Lavelle Porter unpacks the ambivalences and ambiguities of this satire: “But while the novel celebrates Japanese history and culture it also objectifies that history and culture, making it difficult at times to tell whether this is a novel that criticizes racism against the Japanese or reproduces it, particularly through its caricatures of Asians. Perhaps this is where the complexity of satire comes into play, as the use of humor to ridicule stereotypes can sometimes slip into that uncomfortable territory where it is difficult to tell whom the joke is on, and the artist can’t control how the joke is used” (2019, 137).
- 11.
Higher learning is in large degree a safeguard for our fragile democracy. This democratic function is born out in quantitative analysis. In “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes” (2020), Anthony P. Carnevale and associates at the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University studied datasets from the World Values Survey and found that American college graduates are less inclined toward authoritarian worldviews such as those that emphasize “authority and uniformity” over “autonomy and diversity” (2). “On the whole,” the authors conclude, “higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies—a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy” (Carnevale et al. 2020, 2). This is critical work, given the study’s findings that the U.S. is “moderately inclined” toward authoritarian perspectives, relative to international peers (Carnevale et al. 2020, 11). American public officials seem increasingly likely to adopt anti-democratic positions since the publication of these findings. Given this adverse baseline, the democratic function of the academy is all the more important, and the study indeed found evidence that higher learning reduces these authoritarian preferences—more so in the U.S. than in other countries (Carnevale et al. 2020, 18).
- 12.
Buckley can imagine academic freedom for a scholar’s research outside the classroom, but he manages not to see any relation between research and pedagogy and makes no allowance for expertise in the classroom. In fact, the only rights to be trampled in the classroom, in his view, are the student’s. Buckley creates a hypothetical scenario involving the dismissal of a socialist instructor, and with this straw-man in mind he claims, “No freedom has been abridged in the case of Professor Smith. Rather, the freedom of the consumer has been upheld” (1951, 168). A little further on he argues that “academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support” (1951, 169).
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Beal, W. (2024). Anti-intellectualism, “Theory,” and the Reactionary Impulses of the Campus Novel. In: Campus Fictions. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_3
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