The New Bellertrism (1999)

Publicize Your Privates This past fall, alongside their stolid fleet of anthologies, Norton released a postcard-sized, surprisingly whimsical book called Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for Post-Hip (Boyd). Playing off 1991 bestseller, Life's Little Instruction Book, it gathers nearly four hundred epigrams that parody sensibility if not tenets of contemporary literary theory (a bubble on front reads Po-mo to Go!), containing lines recognizable to those who might have sat through college courses through 1990s, especially in humanities, such as Perform Your (presumably referring to polemic of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) or Voice Subjugated Discourses (harkening to general thrust of postcolonialism). One of featured epigrams (one of few that takes up a whole page), #13, is Publicize Your Privates, referring, one surmises, to recent turn toward autobiography in literary and proclivity to mention things like peeing and penises. [1] I start with this because I think it emblematizes a commonplace view-- commonplace enough to be object of popular parody--that academic literary in 1990s has been overtaken by what has variously been called criticism, autobiographical literary criticism, criticism, the new confessionalism, or permutations thereof. [2] That is, dominant and established mode of literary has moved from High Theory of 1970s and 80s, epitomized, say, by Paul de Man or Fredric Jameson, and from its difficult, more densely philosophical or social-scientific, impersonal tenor, language, and style, to more experiential, subjective, literary tenor and language of autobiography, among other things? Drawing on linguistics, continental philosophy, structural anthropology, and sociology, Theory purported a conceptual depth and precision (the attribution of rigor was highest compliment one could pay to a critical work, unrigorous a blunt dismissal), supplanti ng more appreciative, literary basis of previously dominant practice of close reading. (Though New Criticism mandated attention to formal structures of poetry, it was an avowedly literary form that it sought to identify, and impetus for that pursuit derived from tacit appreciation of poetry.) One might recall that, in early days of Theory Years, critics sought to encompass literary studies under banner of new human sciences and saw literary as a central component of science of signs. To amend Fredric Jameson's famous motto, desideratum for that earlier moment might well be summarized as Always theorize!, whereas now motto seems to have shifted to Always personalize! This shift is usually regarded as having been inaugurated by Jane Tompkins's 1987 essay, Me and My Shadow, which renounces straitjacket of philosophical apparatus of theory-driven that she herself practiced [4] and, in a more informal, suggestive essayistic style, calls for that would always take off from personal experience and feeling (Kauffman 126). By early 1990s, this shift was decisively stamped as criticism by Nancy Miller in Getting Personal (1991), and concretized in several collections, notably The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism (Freedman et al.; 1993) and Wild Orchids and Trotsky (Edmundson; 1993), which includes essays by established critics such as William Kerrigan, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and title piece by Richard Rorty. By later 90s, personal or confessional appeared to have attained full institutional status as a critical movement, one marked by publication of t he Routledge anthology Confessions of Critics (1996), edited by H. Aram Veeser, who is best known for his standard collection, The New Historicism (1989), establishing that movement nearly a decade earlier. …