On Actually Enjoyable Academics

So our revels now are ended.  I have checked off each book on my titanic reading lists.  I have submitted my portfolio to my committee.  In less than 2 weeks, I defend my comps portfolio.  There is naught left but to prepare for battle.

Of those reading lists: roughly 50 of those books, or about a third altogether, were critical texts, works of scholarship written over the past century upon literary Modernism and Postmodernism.  My attraction to these art movements is derived in part, I dare say, from the same place that drives my childhood love of Star Trek: a sense of wonder.  For there's just this childlike awe about these texts, this feeling that all the old rules are off, that anything can happen now, that new worlds are upon us, that there exist infinite possibilities in infinite combinations that our imaginations are finally free to explore as widely and wildly as we are willing!

Even if so many of these literary experiments fail, even as they all must fail as their ambition far exceeds the limits of language and the sordid politics of this earth, as so many of these writers fell prey to the fatal seductions of fascism, of communism, of capitalism, etc and etc, yet still they at least tried, and dared to conceive of new ways of existing, of living, of thinking and of being.  For all their boundary-pushing, there's just something comforting about that sense of possibility.  I need no other defense of avant-garde literature than this: it makes the mind aware that other worlds are possible. 

Which is why I find so much of the criticism so stultifying, so frustrating, so inexcusably dull!  Great Guns, these literary scholars--folks, mind you, who have already dedicated themselves to soul-crushing years of poverty and grad school for the love of literature, who have basically won the lottery by scoring tenured-professorships whose sole job is to read beautiful books all day and teach them to students--these critics sprawl around them the most fascinating and exhilarating texts of the past 100-odd years, and they conclude that the best use of their prodigious gifts is to write about these texts as boringly as possible?!  They take great ideas and wonderful insights into ground-breaking texts, and cram them into the most formulaic and turgid of prose-styles?  Talk about missed opportunities, talk about an utter waste of potential!

Of course, scholars have been writing turgidly for as long as there has been scholarship.  Complain about Death and Taxes while you're at it, one might say, for all the changes you'll make to it.  Nevertheless, some rare few scholars are able to rise above the dense fog of torpor to create critical works that live up to the creative ones they examine.  I come not here to bury academese (it's not like that shuffling undead zombie can be buried anyways), but to sing the praises of those critics that actually make criticism seem worthwhile, who still preserve that childhood sense of wonder, and to remind myself what my critical writing should aspire to emulate as well.

Here's the small smattering of critical texts I read over the past 6 months in prep for comps, that I personally found well worth the effort:

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland

I groaned when I first checked out this 650-page behemoth--which then flew by faster than many 180-pagers I've had to drudge through.  Right from that killer first line--"If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?"--Kiberd's humor, insight, encyclopedic knowledge, and shear joie de vivre sweep you away on a journey that will convince you through the sheer force of its scholarship and personality that Ireland didn't just produce great literature: the literature produced Ireland.

Hugh Kenner The Pound Era 

As the '60s turned into the '70s, Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner was faced with a nigh-impossible task: how to recuperate the post-War reputation of Ezra Pound, whose critical recognition had significantly waned after siding firmly with the fascists during WWII?  (He was a POW of George S. Patton for crying out loud)?  Answer: by reminding us all why Ezra Pound mattered so much in the first place--namely, by producing a critical work as wild, inventive, innovative, insightful, and sheer fun as Pound's work originally.   

It is part Pound biography, part literary history, part artistic theory, yet still something different from and more than all those genres combined.  The book certainly lionizes Pound, but it is not hagiography; it does not attempt to skirt Pound’s fascism, for example, only explain it by means of his preoccupation with the “usury” endemic to capitalism, as Pound believed interest rates to be an exploitative evil that could only be neutralized through dictatorship (one anecdote—this text is rife with apocrypha—states that when Pound first became a radio propagandist for Mussolini, his speeches were so intellectually dense that the fascists worried he might in fact be sending coded messages to the Allies).  The byzantine prose and structure of Kenner’s suis generis blurs the line between scholarship and literature, rendering this tome perhaps more approachable as a fellow poetic work of late-Modernism than of criticism.

 John Harwood Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation

Admittedly, part of why I have been so preoccupied as of late with the torpidity of literary criticism is thanks to this very work.  Maybe I just enjoy a good rant and the English are just exceptionally good at them; but Harwood's book here is a tour-de-force of delightful academic writing, one that strives to be everything that modern scholarship is not.


He repeatedly punctures the utopic pretensions of literary critics, by in effect stating that if your goal is revolution and social change, then literary criticism is by far the least effective way to go about it, that the fate of human civilization certainly does not rest upon our interpretation of, say, The Waste Land, that most common readers in fact get along just fine without us.  And in fact, if one wanted to hatch a plan to sweep all the activists off the street, one could do no better than to convert them all to obscure French theorists, lodged in the ivory tower speaking past each other, unintelligible to anyone still on the streets. What Harwood wants more than anything is for us to remember why we read these works in the first place--not to impress people at parties, not to drone on in conferences, and certainly not to achieve tenure, no--it's because these texts are astonishing, and they can still overwhelm you aesthetically if you let them.

Leonard Diepeveen The Difficulties of Modernism 

Is it ironic that a book focused solely upon the difficulties of Modernist literature should be written so lucidly and clearly?  But Diepeveen has a real affection for his subject matter, and it shines through--the story of Modernism's reception history, how it was at once derided and praised as inaccessibly difficult from the very beginning, is a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with aplomb!  Whether you agree with TS Eliot that human civilization has now become difficult and so its poetry must as well, or if you think that this all so much pseudo-intellectual blustering and pontificating, you will find your views challenged and expounded upon in every chapter.  And not patronizingly or antagonizingly, either, no: Diepeveen thinks this topic is fun, and you can't help but have fun reading him, too.

What academics have you found actually enjoyable to read?