Teaching the Conflicts Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon And
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Teaching the Conflicts Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle Lee Barbrook Doctor of Philosophy Newcastle University May 2012 Abstract I read Neal Town Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle to interrogate what types of links they make to US countercultural writing, postmodern discourse in American culture, and perceived uninterrogated links to the term America itself in images of modern progressive liberalism. Postmodernist readings of literary texts came under increasing public scrutiny in intellectual debates of the 80s and 90s. My analysis is to situate and reconsider these fictions within debates happening in the North American academy at this time and the more recent one concerning the demise of poststructuralism in the humanities. Linking together works of Sean McCann, Michael Szalay, John Guillory and Mark McGurl I locate Cryptonomicon as constitutive of the postwar drift from the modernist aesthetic yet simultaneously developing within Sacvan Bercovitch’s model of dissensus. Through reference to McGurl’s work in particular, my thesis will offer the first sustained critical reading of Cryptonomicon relevant to the University’s new teaching standards of diversity and research excellence . Through Lauren Berlant’s concept of an intimate public I argue The Baroque Cycle develops a richly aesthetic form of criticism that challenges the consensus view of culturally affirming alternatives to American sociopolitical and economic life. In addition, each chapter charts specific aspects of the impact of European critical theories that presided over the marriage of intellectualism and professionalism in the North American academy. More specifically, and throwing particular focus on resistances to theory and canon change, I discuss how the politics of the classroom developed within the literary culture wars brought with it a renewed emphasis on what postwar professors taught in the classroom. ii Dedication To my parents iii Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge John Beck and Jess Edwards’s generosity for giving me the time to express myself in the viva. I would also like to repay a debt of gratitude to Stacy Gillis who set me on the road to my PhD. I would also like to pay my respect to Newcastle University for making it possible for me to obtain my doctorate. Finally, I would like to thank Shelia Roberts for her support and help over the years. iv Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………… ...ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………… .. ….iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………… .. …...iv Introduction. Rethinking Twentieth Century Literary Theory……………………….....1 Chapter 1. Postmodernity or Nativist Viewpoint ……………………………………… 42 The University in Ruins …………………………………………………………... ......47 The Conference Poster …………………………………………………………... ........84 Chapter 2. Culture Wars……………………………………………………………… .95 Rortyism………………………………………………………………………………. 96 Metafictional Paradox………………………………………………………………… 113 Chapter 3. Dissensus………………………………………………………………….. 142 The American Ideology………………………………………………………………. 145 The Female Complaint………………………………………………………………...160 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………….. 204 v Introduction. Rethinking Twentieth Century Literary Theory in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle My thesis has three chapters and two main objectives. The first objective is to reappraise a mode of ambiguity in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) and The Baroque Cycle ’s (2005) styles of writing. I will argue this mode, when reconsidered as a form of postmodernist experimentalism, invokes the 1990s new Americanist concerns about the cultural studies debates on the coercive aspects of assimilation in the formative stages of US literary canon formation. In my first reading, I will review critically Cryptonomicon’s writing and the links it makes to these concerns. This reading will take into account the specialised discourse community that became heavily involved in the mid to latter twentieth-century New Left and postmodernist critiques on the course of empire. When read through Sacvan Bercovitch’s key 1990s literary influences on the new Americanist Studies, this will also offer the opportunity to reappraise certain conditions that reflect the contemporary shift in attitude away from the postmodern culture-critique of ideology. I will argue that the anti-institutional political excesses of the New Left and the critical Left vocabulary that fuelled and stimulated the mid-1960s to the late 70s and early 80s public and academic debate on the coercive aspects of assimilation and cold war consensus politics have been replaced in the last twenty years in the US literary academy by a discussion on how the art impulse and the social instinct are reciprocally related to nourishing institutional norms. This reading offers the opportunity to reappraise how national politics is intimately related to literary production in the US. My thesis will take into account a wide range of views concerning these debates. This will include Mark McGurl’s recent book The Program Era (2009). In his book McGurl examines the academic relations between the postmodern-postructural claims on art and the postwar practices of the US system of higher education. Like John Dewey before him, McGurl argues that these practices when connected to the art impulse are also connected to the social instinct. McGurl ushers in a new era of progressive debate. His relationship between the postwar practices of higher education and a heightened respect for difference has provided much needed support and stimulation for the development of the graduate student’s personal growth in the modern changeover to a postindustrial economy. My aim is to interrogate the links between Stephenson’s writing on the transf ormative potential held in postwar literary theory and cultural studies and McGurl’s asking questions about “where does the individual’s recognition of the value of literary experience come from.”1 These two different but interrelated sets of readings offer the opportunity to explore further Cryptonomicon’s uses of a dominant postwar experimental mode of criticism. 1 McGurl, The Program Era , 63. 1 McGurl’s reading of Cryptonomicon shows how its writing can relate to nourishing institutional norms. His reading also shows how its writing can bring back an elitist aesthetic discourse tied to the aesthetic inventory of interwar literary modernism. Cryptonomicon’s conceptually troubling and politically flawed uses of the critical Left vocabulary when connected to the romantic conception of genius, as we shall see, helps to destroy the gestures that can link white progressives to a racial ideology in its own right. McGurl’s pure collegiate piece of work, reading Cryptonomicon through the dialectic of the creative writing classroom, is, at best, brief; however, his dialectic can prove to be the most important in current debates when reviewing themes taken up by postmodernist authors from the mid to latter twentieth-century. Whether Cryptonomicon is, or, is not, affirming of a postmodernist text is not the final judgment I shall make on its experimentalism. As we shall see in chapter one, its uses of a mode of ambiguity can place it in alignment with the essentialist drift in what McGurl calls the “anti -bourgeois bourgeois aesthetic we call modernism .” 2 From this viewpoint, I will take Cryptonomicon’s writing as at least partially connected to the postwar experimental impulses involved in the postmodernist acts of deconstruction. In its continuing resistances to a group of post-Vietnam university academics in the storyline we will also see, however, that when holding simultaneity of meaning in the modern leftist and liberal versions of what I take be is its ideology critique of US expansionist ethics it can also offer the opportunity to reappraise Sacv an Bercovitch’s way of understanding the importance of ideology in the shaping of the US. The second objective of the thesis is to tie my first two accounts on the humanities arts theory movement from interwar literary modernism to the poststructuralist use of language to Bercovitch’s renewed attention and the scrutiny he paid on the latter twentieth -century forms of politicised culture-critique in the American university. 3 In chapter three I will review a mode of ambiguity in Neal Stephenson’s three volu mes of The Baroque Cycle . This offers the opportunity to reappraise a separate sphere of influence for the uses of the postwar modes of experimentalism. A debate that centres in these novels, I want to argue, lifts the concerns about the coercive aspects of assimilation and the projects of cultural diversity in the US out of a dialogue, or, more correctly, dialogism with their European critical counterparts. 4 I 2 See McGurl, The Program Era , 66. 3 In the 1990s a group of new Americanist revisited debates about assimilation and the projects of cultural diversity. The first wave of the now not so new Americanists were ousted from their dominant positions and practices in the American university by a movement that looked to reinsert literary historical discussion into the practices that were being projected back on nineteenth-century texts. This renewed debate about art and ideology and the American Renaissance canon signalled the beginning of the end of the deconstructionist and poststructuralist legacies as the predominant methodologies for textual and historical appraisal for the graduate student. 4 It is not my point to argue that many of the debates stemming from the anti-institutional