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Editor’s Column: In Medias Res

HAT HAVE I LEARNED DURING MY YEAR AND A HALF AS EDI- tor of PMLA? Now, at the midpoint of my term, I thought WI might reflect on some of my hopes and hesitations about the editorship and think about what, from the submissions to PMLA and from the process of its publication, we might glean about impor- tant trends in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. Two things have delighted and frustrated me, in particular: the workings of the peer review process, on the one hand, and the disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries that inform our writing and teaching, on the other. On these issues and on their relation, I have some good news and some less good news to report. When Rosemary Feal called me two years ago to ask whether I would be interested in serving as the editor of PMLA, my first reac- tion was trepidation. How could I ever feel qualified to evaluate es- says representing the enormous range of fields and approaches in our profession? Why would I even want to spend so much time reading essays that in no way related to my own work? I had edited and co- edited several collections and special issues of professional journals, and each time I vowed “never to do it again,” to spend the time and energy on my work instead. At the time of this invitation, moreover, I was nearing the end of a leave year and far from finished with my project. And, being absorbed in my own work, I had developed just enough psychic distance from the institution to be able to interro- gate the standards I and others were applying. Wouldn’t the PMLA editorship draw me deeply into an institutional frame of mind, dic- tating standards and decisions that might not be mine? Clearly, the journal was at an excellent point in its history, its submissions up, the review process efficiently organized and run,

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interesting special-topic issues in the pipeline. a great deal of energy on peer review, and we Colleagues I spoke to even admitted reading generally read one another’s work with atten- PMLA more than they had in the past, ex- tion and generosity, writing evaluations that cited by its new look and some of the recently range up to several single-spaced pages. It’s added special features. Carlos Alonso, who not that we don’t impose our own standards was then the editor, described the Editorial and even, sometimes, our own prejudices, and Board meetings to me as the most intellec- it’s not that we don’t sometimes get impatient tually intense and provocative discussions with what we perceive to be the mistakes of I would ever participate in. The anonymous others. We are, for the most part, extremely submission process, particularly, ensured that demanding readers. But most of us also be- the deliberations focused on the work, not on lieve in revision, and we want to see the essays reputation, politics, or personality. we read meet very high standards indeed. To It was the prospect of these conversations that end, we are willing to scrutinize them and perhaps the eternal student in me that with enormous care, posing tough, provoca- made me throw caution to the wind. When tive, and productive questions to them. It is again might I have the chance—no, the obliga- rare for me to receive a letter of critique that is tion—not only to read in detail about, say, Lope not constructive as well as incisive. And those de Vega, Milton, Auden, Alejandro Morales, of us who submit our work are most often and Oliver Sacks in one sitting but also to con- open to critique and suggestion and willing sider debates about the linguistic turn, disability to revise, cut, reorganize. At its best, the peer studies, trauma studies, constructions of mascu- review process is a multistage conversation linity, religion, politics, and aesthetics? I would about the article’s subject among a number know what’s going on in the humanities, what of scholars who have high investments in that the hot issues were, how different fields were subject and its broader implications. defining and redefining themselves and the ob- Essays are submitted by MLA members jects of their inquiry. I would be able to regain across the United States and abroad, by gradu- some of the breadth that after several decades of ate students, independent scholars, and col- teaching and writing in one’s own disciplinary leagues in every rank on the tenure track. In locus one inevitably loses. And the teacher in the last five years, 1,342 regular essays were me was intrigued as well. Here was my chance submittted to PMLA (not including invited to learn what makes an article truly compelling, pieces), and 67 of them were published. Fifteen a knowledge that was sure to help me with my of the published authors were full professors, own writing and with my teaching as well. eleven were associate professors, twenty-six were assistant professors, twelve were graduate Indeed, I have learned a great deal not just students, and four were scholars in other ranks. from reading the articles but from the practice Forty were men and twenty-eight women. of evaluation itself, although I have regretfully Each essay submitted to PMLA is read also had a hand in declining a great number anonymously by a minimum of two and as of essays. I have even seen articles declined many as ten readers. Many are revised two or that, had I been able, I would have wanted to three times, and some of those may, in a final publish in the journal. The process is certainly assessment, still be declined by the board. The not foolproof. But virtually each of the arti- first two or, in disputed cases, three review- cles the journal declines is accompanied by ers generally represent the immediate field of helpful, engaged readings and by useful and the article. If they recommend it, it goes to the at times very detailed suggestions for revi- less specialized readership represented by the sion. Our colleagues, I quickly learned, spend Editorial Board. The board meetings I have  2 0 . 2 ] Editor’s Column 323 chaired have indeed included some of the most Having just chaired my seventh Editorial stimulating discussions I have ever partici- Board meeting, I find I still cannot easily pre- pated in. It is rare to find pure agreement on dict how an essay is going to fare in discussion. the board, but, contrary to a common miscon- I often do not even know how, at first reading, ception voiced to me recently by a colleague, I I feel about it myself. Invariably there are top- have also not found that we decline work that ics that interest me in particular, others I know is innovative, risk-taking, or controversial in much less about. As I reread submissions, other favor of the safer essays on which we concur. criteria emerge. It is not enough to address a And although board members may apply quite topic that “should” be covered in PMLA: that divergent standards to the essays before them, topic must provoke a productive, coherent ap- reflecting disciplinary preferences and preju- proach and argument. It is not enough to read dices, in addition to personal ones, I have not a text by applying a certain theoretical frame- by and large found that those differences have work to it, as many of us learned or have taught caused the final decisions to favor some fields students to do. What is PMLA looking for in over others. Still, these are two issues about an essay? colleagues and students have asked which we need to be most vigilant. me. I find that some essays engage me imme- At our best, we consent to suspending our diately through their lively , or the sometimes strong and categorical judgments forceful way in which they raise the questions long enough to listen to one another’s opin- they wish to explore, or the broad range of re- ions. As one board member put it at our last sources they deploy to address their questions. meeting, “If some of these very smart people They might be anchored in a text or the work find something of great interest in an essay, of a writer I have never read, but they evoke there must be something there, and I want to that text or work or its period with an intensity hear what it is.” Some essays provoke long and or a passion I find infectious. They foreground heated arguments, at the conclusion of which, its relevance for me, here, now, by exhibiting if things go well, we roll up our sleeves and fig- what—intellectually and politically—is at stake ure out, together, how the author might be able in the inquiry. They think through theory, to respond to some of our objections in revis- practice theory, but do not exhibit theoreti- ing the paper. There is not one moment dur- cal knowledge for its own sake. They tell me ing those discussions when I do not imagine a story, the story of a mind working through a myself in the author’s position. I oscillate from problem, probingly, suggestively, with author- vowing I will never put myself through such a ity and openness at the same time, inviting me demanding process to envying the attention to join in the exploration with them. the essays receive from informed critical read- Board discussions are the discussions of ers asking tough questions. Before serving on nonspecialist, general readers. Still, we do not the board, I worried that nine or ten readers, insist that every essay we consider be of broad each with strong opinions and presupposi- interest to most PMLA readers but ask that it tions, negotiating with one another could be “the best of its kind, whatever the kind,” ruin an essay, flatten it to the lowest common as recent editorial policy established, and that denominator, make it safe and tame. That is it address “a significant problem [and draw] a risk, and surely some arguments might best out clearly the implications of its findings.” be put forward without having to answer to “PMLA,” the policy reads, “welcomes essays multiple critiques. I am convinced, however, of interest to those concerned with the study that few essays would not be improved, made of language and literature.” more subtle, layered, and complex, in response But what are those concerned with the to constructive critical scrutiny. study of language and literature interested in? 324 Editor’s Column [ PMLA

“You should change the letter you send to con- and allied organizations sponsor, the exper- sultant readers,” a colleague recently wrote me. tise of Advisory Committee members and “I was asked to review an essay about indig- consultant readers, and the essays submitted enous media. Is this included under ‘language to and published by PMLA do not sit comfort- and literature’? Why don’t you broaden the ably within those categories. As a comparatist categories to include other media discussed in who never knew whether to stay at the “En- PMLA, such as film, visual arts, performance?” glish” or the “foreign languages” hotel at A prospective author e-mailed recently to ask the convention, I know I am not alone in my whether PMLA was an appropriate venue for frustration with the traditional rubrics that her essay dealing with the representation of divide literary study and structure under- certain political events in popular media. graduate and graduate curricula and hiring. And at the last convention a graduate student Editing this journal has only confirmed my sought me out to question the relevance of sense that we may need to rethink our catego- PMLA essays to the literature classroom. Most ries so that they better reflect the work we do, of the essays are purely interpretive, focusing allowing us perhaps to look beyond local hab- on particular texts, she insisted, and few, if its, often perpetuated for their own sake. any, articulate what literary study is for—the When I asked the PMLA staff to send objectives she feels she needs to define in her me some statistics on submissions “by field” course planning and in her classroom. for the last five years, a number of individual In previous Editor’s Columns, I have ex- fields, as categorized by the MLA, were well pressed my frustration with authors’ and con- represented, others much less so (18 essays in sultant readers’ narrow interpretations of what sixteenth-century British, 19 in seventeenth- constitutes a “scholarly article.” To me, “the century British, 32 in eighteenth-century Brit- best of its kind, whatever the kind,” includes ish, 63 in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century a broad range of writing styles and forms of American, and 218 in twentieth-century scholarship. These new questions elicit new American, for example, as opposed to only frustrations with some of the boundaries of 25 in pre-1800 French and 43 in post-1800 our discipline and its divisions within the French, 16 in post-1800 German, 9 in Italian, MLA, boundaries that shape and delimit our 30 in Spanish). Something is wrong with the understanding of “language and literature.” submissions, and the way they are categorized If we look at this issue alone, we find a reflects a problem that goes beyond the two number of disciplines invoked in every one hotels at the convention. Why, at the MLA, of the essays, and we find that the “signifi- are we keeping English and “foreign” lan- cant problems” raised by the essays cannot guages on separate, nonintersecting tracks? be contained in the methods offered by one Why are all “foreign” languages related to one discipline, even one as capacious as ours, but another more than they are to English? What demand inter-, cross-, trans-, or maybe even is the status of language itself in the MLA and postdisciplinary responses (since I believe in PMLA? Although I am convinced that we that what we call interdisciplinarity remains need to work to attract more submissions to too deeply rooted in the disciplines and actu- the journal in underrepresented periods and ally, in many cases, has the effect of under- literatures, I am heartened by the fact that the girding them). Although MLA divisions are largest category of submissions was labeled still organized by language or nation, genre, “General and Miscellaneous”: 303 essays and period—a categorization that is also re- (roughly a quarter of all submissions) escaped flected in the selection of the PMLA Advisory our traditional system of categorization. This Committee—the sessions that MLA divisions should give us pause.  2 0 . 2 ] Editor’s Column 325

Let us look at this issue as an example. Al- Sacks with Don DeLillo, the contributors sig- though one could say that a given essay fits un- nificantly expand the category of writers tra- der the rubric of twentieth-century American ditionally taught in literature departments. studies, or Chicano studies, or Milton studies, Do these essays tell us where we are as a each also addresses problems that radically discipline, what the hot issues are? Certainly transgress the boundaries of these subfields. they do, inasmuch as they illustrate the com- Reading them through the eyes of the general parative and cross-disciplinary connections reader, one learns a great deal about Lope de we make in our reading, the methodologi- Vega, or Alejandro Morales, or W. H. Auden. cal flexibility we typically show. In reaching But one learns more about how to frame a beyond, outside, and across disciplinary and question, how to read texts in relation to one subdisciplinary boundaries, these essays, as another and to contemporary problems or well as many others I have read for PMLA, events. Two of the essays in this issue respond have indeed provided the intellectual breadth directly to the crisis of reading and represen- that enticed me to the editorship in the first tation resulting from September 11, 2001. Two place, a breadth that traditional divisions reread a past moment (the Enlightenment) within the association belie, I am afraid. from a particular vantage point in the twenti- The special features in this issue also il- eth century; two deal with the specter of reli- lustrate these disciplinary disruptions and gion and its constitutive force; several confront reconfigurations and the enormous range of the relation between aesthetics and politics. what “those concerned with the study of lan- They thus engage their readers on a number of guage and literature” are interested in reading different levels, opening out from specific and about and contributing to. The papers from local textual or generic questions to broader the Conference on Disability Studies and the methodological and intellectual problems. University chart the growth of a new field, Alison Weber, for example, finds she has to one that reaches across disciplinary divides return to a more traditional biographical ap- and expands the boundaries of academic proach to engage construction of the mascu- inquiry. The agenda of disability studies is line subject through religion in Lope de Vega. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb uses reception inherently activist as well as scholarly and theory, and the figure of Voltaire, to compare pedagogical. As Michael Davidson and Tobin two mid-twentieth-century invocations of Siebers write in their introduction to the con- the Enlightenment, in Auden and in Hork- ference papers, “The emerging field of disabil- heimer and Adorno. James Berger returns to ity studies provides a critical framework that the eighteenth-century figure of the wild child reorients the basic assumptions of various to illuminate contemporary responses to the fields of knowledge, from political science to “fall” of language by Don DeLillo and Oliver architecture, from engineering to art history, Sacks. Feisal Mohamed interrogates recent re- from genetics to law, from biology to , readings of Milton’s Samson Agonistes occa- from public policy to education.” While the sioned by the terrorist attacks of September 11 conference papers describe the construction both from within Milton studies and from the of an expansive interdisciplinary field, many perspective of contemporary concerns with of them come back to the special contribution religious violence. And Dean Franco illumi- of the humanities and literary studies in par- nates The Rag Doll Plagues from psychoana- ticular as the authors “shift . . . emphasis from lytic and historical vantage points. Note also a medical context that seeks to classify and that in reading Derrida with Morales, Hork- cure individual impairments to a new context heimer and Adorno with Auden, and Oliver that exposes the ways in which impairment 326 Editor’s Column [ PMLA

has been constructed, stigmatized, and em- lieve, is on the “formalizing calculus,” the in- bodied in human beings. . . .” stitutional logic and comforting conventions This issue also introduces a new focus for that Derrida helped us to disrupt. the regular feature The Changing Profession: The cover of this issue illustrates this well. state-of-the-art essays describing and evaluat- Touching Writing, by Svetlana Boym, a multi- ing a subfield, summarizing current questions talented literary scholar and MLA member and debates as they are carried out in recent and, like Derrida, an exile and border crosser, publications. The present issue contains invited connects body and text in the image. The essays by Stephen G. Nichols on interdisciplin- of touching writing brings us back to the in- ary formations in the “New Middle Ages,” Julie terconnections between the linguistic and the Stone Peters’s reflections on the “interdisciplin- counter-linguistic turn discussed by James ary illusion” of law and literature, and Bruce Berger in this issue. The image shows the ma- Robbins’s critical look at the genre of “com- teriality of the text—the artist’s copy of Of modity histories.” Future state-of-the-art essays Grammatology—and its history, a history of will engage new work both in well-established multiple rereadings over twenty years. Boym’s fields and in emerging interdisciplinary forma- light touch is able to reflect Derrida’s touching tions and approaches, such as the “new formal- writing—its haunting traces and its survival. ism,” , feminist criticism, race theory, What is literary study for? After a year indigenous studies, hemispheric studies, south- and a half of reading the essays submitted to ern studies, Pacific and Russian studies, and PMLA, I know that, at least implicitly, we re- African and Brazilian literatures and cultures. spond to this question in every issue and that, These essays respond to the fact that, while not in doing so, we perform the future of the hu- publishing individual book reviews, PMLA still manities. Critique, Christy Bruns, my inter- wants to discuss work in particular subfields, locutor at the convention, writes me, is not at the same time giving a sense of how those enough: “The question that troubles me . . . is subfields are defining and redefining their pa- this: In approaching literary texts primarily to rameters and the stakes of their inquiry. critique them are we missing something im- Finally, this issue features a forum on portant, both in our thinking about literature the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s work for liter- and in the ways of reading that this objective ary studies. It is early, of course, to assess the requires?” If not critique, then what? To some, legacy of so monumental a figure, and per- the intense and passionate attention to particu- haps even impossible to do so in the midst of lar texts (whatever their genre or discipline)— mourning his loss. Contributors highlight the whether or not they are, in Anthony Appiah’s impact of different texts and preoccupations of terms in his talk at the 2004 convention, in his and describe his contribution in divergent themselves “worth holding on to and passing ways. A number of them, however, pinpoint on,” whether they do or do not conform to any the profoundly cross-disciplinary (or un- or particular definition of the literary—may seem ill-disciplined, as Geoffrey Bennington writes) local, even narrow, or dismissable as “purely reach of his thinking, the disciplinary trans- interpretive.” In just eliciting the question, gressions that made his work so instrumental What’s it for? literary/humanistic study dis- for the study of language and literature, even as rupts received ideas. To my mind, however, it it addressed philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and can only do so if it does not rely on unques- politics. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak invokes tioned and delimiting categories or boundar- Derrida’s “ to work of deconstruction ies, whether disciplinary or other. altogether outside the formalizing calculus of the academic institution,” and the stress, I be- Marianne Hirsch