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Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens Eeckhout, Bart. 2002. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. $49.95 hc. xi + 303 pp.

Harrington, Joseph. 2002. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modem U. S. Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. $50.00 hc. $24.95 sc. x + 228 pp.

Santilli, Kristine S. 2002. Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language. London: Routledge. $80.00 hc. xvi + 160 pp.

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A decade ago, I attended a conference that brought together literary scholars, engineers, politicians, and others interested in environmental issues. The keynote speaker remarked that when literary scholars address mixed audiences, they ought to refrain from using jargon. In literary conferences, he said, discipline-specific terms are of course meaningful. However, since environmental issues are typically interdisciplinary, literary scholars should use words that everybody else understands. In the question-and-answer period, a younger man with a goatee and black turtleneck stood up and argued that literary scholars should use as much jargon as possible in (apparently) every context in order to create an oppositional discourse. Immediately afterwards, an older man with unruly hair and a tweed jacket stood up and asserted that the black turtleneck was in error; in fact, all theory of the past thirty years had been one huge mistake. This prompted a rejoinder from another black turtleneck-and so it went, the black turtlenecks versus the tweed jackets, back and forth, all staking their positions on theory then crossing their arms as they waited for the other side to stop talking.

At the time, what struck me most forcibly was the debate's belatedness. The preposterous notion that all theory of the past thirty years should be jettisoned was clearly one generation's pique at having its premises questioned. For the tweed jackets, criticism properly dealt with the correct interpretation of text; method was somehow natural and inevitable, and thus they perceived themselves as writing without theory. I think most of my contemporary readers will find that last clause untenable. Nonetheless, the black turtleneck contention that theory is a good in and of itself seems equally untenable. If it is an alternative language you want, why not write in hip-hop dialect or Farsi? You don't have to read many essays in New Literary History to find politically-minded theorists worrying that the institutionalization of their oppositional discourse distances it from the cause it advocates. Certainly, the general dissemination of poststructural theory had the salutary effect of showing the world that all readings proceed from some theory, some method of locating significance. However, in the theoretical age, there was still the dream of adequacy, that Jacques Derrida had found the key to language, or Michel Foucault to sexuality, and so on. The average critic's job was to leave the theorizing to the New Authorities and simply apply their theories to other texts.

Thus, I am defining the theoretical age as one in which it was only necessary to announce a theory and apply it. The movement that began in opposition soon developed a legion of believers who refused to think beyond accepted parameters. I once sat in on a session on Bakhtinian readings at a graduate literary conference. In the question-and-answer period, I remarked that all three papers had shown us how theory could be applied to the works in question. I asked if the works suggest any critique, blindness, or need for further development in the theory. The three panelists, all from prestigious graduate programs, gave the same, one-word answer: no. Their curt reply indicated that the panelists had never considered the question and never intended to.

From my perch in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, that "no" answer was only adequate in the theoretical age. In this, the post-theoretical era, a critic must understand her own methods and the methods of others. Writing in a time when so many approaches are possible, she must address the pressing theoretical problem of our age: How to choose? These three books give us three different answers.

Kristine S. Santilli's Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language might be the most brilliant book written in the last decade. If it is, though, I am afraid the world will never know it, since it is hard for me to imagine too many readers with enough patience to read very deeply into the book.

One reason I say this is that Santilli never clearly defines "gesture." It is not "bodily gestures but rather the gesture of the words themselves." Poetry, she tells us, proceeds from and speaks to an essential "inwardness," and that, "[r]egardless of what poems actually say, the language of poems and the music they make gesture in the direction of our inwardness and of what may be found there" (xii). She returns to defining "gesture" in the first chapter, saying that her study looks at gestures as "linguistic and spiritual aspects of poetic language." She focuses on "spontaneous" gestures that "arise beside language but only in the presence of language, and which have non-specific meaning . . . which can only be understood in speculative or conjectural ways, much like the gestures of dance" (2002,1). For further clarification, she quotes David McNeill's quotation of somebody else: gesture is '"the movement of whose body is the world, whose speech the sum of all language, whose jewels are the moon and stars-to that pure Siva I bow!'" (2) Then Santilli then moves to a long, associative discussion of what a number of people-Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Lacan, Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Plato, Ovid, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many more-say about gesture. At the end, the poor reader is only more confused as to the meaning of the book's central term.

Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

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