The Counterintuitive Critics

Walter Benn Michaels is one of the most prominent, and polarizing, figures in contemporary criticism. When literary theory was reaching its peak in U.S. literature departments in the early ’80s, he co-wrote the polemic “Against Theory,” which incited a long string of responses, rejoinders, and rebuttals. Next, amid a turn toward more historical readings of literature and its “political unconscious,” he attacked the pieties of politically-oriented critics, arguing that texts often rebut the politics they seem to advocate. And over the past decade, he has attacked the value of diversity, in books such as The Trouble With Diversity (Metropolitan Books, 2006) and myriad essays, holding that it diverts attention from the deeper divisions of class.

Not everyone is a fan, but people take note of Michaels’s positions, even if to mark them as enemy territory.

While he has strong views and is not shy about promoting them, perhaps his greatest influence has been less public: training a bevy of critics who are redefining 20th- and 21st-century American literature, many of them grouped around the collective called Post45. In particular, in the 1990s he advised a number of Ph.D. students at the Johns Hopkins University who, now at midcareer and with two or three books under their belts, have taken central roles in the field. They include Mark McGurl, professor of English at Stanford University and winner of the 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; Amy Hungerford, professor of English and American studies at Yale University; Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University; Catherine Jurca, professor of literature and executive officer for the humanities at Caltech; and Michael Szalay, professor and chair of English at the University of California at Irvine.

To be sure, it takes a program to train a student. There seem to be special moments at certain universities when things bubble up in critical work through an alchemy of faculty, students, and the intellectual current, usually fostered by favorable institutional circumstances. The confluence of people and ideas in the literature program at Hopkins in the 1990s is a case study.

Some Books by Walter Benn Michaels’s Students at Hopkins

MICHAEL CLUNE

American Literature and the Free Market (Cambridge U. Press, 2010)

Writing Against Time (Stanford U. Press, 2013)

White Out (Hazelden, 2013)

Gamelife (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

J.D. CONNOR

The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010) (Stanford, 2015)

SHELLY EVERSLEY

The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century

African American Literature (Routledge, 2004)

AMY HUNGERFORD

The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (U. of Chicago Press, 2003)

Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton U. Press, 2010)

Making Literature Now (Stanford, 2016)

CATHERINE JURCA

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century

American Novel (Princeton, 2001)

Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year (U. of California Press, 2012)

MARK MCGURL

The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James (Princeton, 2001)

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard U. Press, 2009)

MICHAEL SZALAY

New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Duke U. Press, 2000)

Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party (Stanford, 2012)

The most famous such confluence in contemporary literary studies, usually called the Yale School, occurred at that university during the 1970s and early ’80s. It saw a number of critics theorizing about the difficulties of language and uncertainties of knowledge loosely under the banner of deconstruction, a term invented in the late 1960s by Jacques Derrida, who lectured regularly at Yale beginning in the 1970s. The Yale School scholars had a great deal of influence not only from their writing but through their students, many of whom took jobs around the country teaching the new theory.

About a decade later, the University of California at Berkeley bred a distinctive movement coalescing around the New Historicism, which Stephen Greenblatt named in 1982 to describe what he and colleagues there, including Catherine Gallagher, D.A. Miller, and Michaels (who taught there from 1977 to 1986) were doing. They showed an enhanced attention to social history, particularly the way that texts expressed the ideological discourse of an era. From their large institutional tent, they launched an array of students into the field.

Comparatively small but with a concentrated and close-knit graduate program, Hopkins saw its exceptional moment in the 1990s and early 2000s. Along with Michaels, it fielded a number of notable scholars, among them the art critic Michael Fried, the poet and Americanist Allen Grossman, the theorist Neil Hertz, and the British literature specialist Mary Poovey. Graduate students at the time included Sharon Marcus, now a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who has become prominent for advocating “surface reading,” and Tim Dean, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a well-known queer theorist.

The Hopkins moment did not propound a particular approach but, as Clune puts it, “produced an atmosphere of intense, high-stakes intellectual engagement. One key for students seeking new footing after the heyday of theory was a weekly lecture series featuring outside speakers. No one missed it, and to “ask a question was a rite of passage,” he recalls. It also fostered a combative ethos, which Hungerford says was thrilling but “could be lonely and individualistic.” Szalay says that in nearly two decades as a professor himself he has not found any other place that matches the energy he experienced at Hopkins.

The group also benefited from propitious institutional conditions. Healthy fellowships and other kinds of support were available, with minimal teaching, and a small upswing in the job market provided more perches for critics graduating from the program. According to data from the Modern Language Association, after the number of positions advertised hit a trough of about 1,200 per year during the mid-1990s, the late ’90s and early 2000s saw an increase of around 50 percent.

Since 2008, of course, the number has fallen to even lower levels than in the mid-90s. Whatever the talents of individual practitioners, the wealth or paucity of jobs can make or break a generation of critics. The effect of job prospects on criticism and scholarship has yet to be documented, but, with the prevalence of adjuncting and promising scholars pushed toward alternative careers, one can only expect that criticism shrinks. Fresh critical thinking requires time and a supportive community.

In fact, the rise of theory in literary studies in the mid- and late 1980s was fostered by a spike in jobs: Typically nearly 2,000 advertised each year. To represent the new paradigms being argued and written about, literature departments advertised for between 40 and 60 full-time jobs for theorists each year from 1986-89, giving theory a solid institutional foothold.

The Hopkins moment reflects a revisionary turn, with critics versed in but questioning theory, resulting in work like McGurl’s sociology of the institution of literature in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009), or Marcus’s call for more descriptive criticism rather than grand theoretical critiques. It represents a post-theory generation, modifying the headier claims of high theory about language, interpretation, society, gender, and the psyche.

Now, substantial foundation and other funding has carved out a space for the digital humanities, ushering in its prominence. Rather than many flowers blooming, though, tenure-stream positions in standard literary fields have shrunk, putting critical practices on a diet, and we have developed a tiered model. In place of all professors being equal, an entrepreneurial professor designs, garners grants for, and runs a project, with demi-professors and grad students collecting data.

Michaels’s students from Hopkins are probably best defined not as a school and more by a style or stance. They take various approaches, but they follow Michaels’s practice of debunking conventional views — of creative writing, religion, the New Deal, the suburbs, the free market, and race. To wit, McGurl’s The Program Era develops a new sociology of literature to counter the widely accepted notion that writing programs had produced cookie-cutter fiction, arguing that in fact fiction has flourished in scope and variety under its contemporary institutional roof. Hungerford, employing ethnographic reportage and for a time acting as an embedded scholar at the novelist Dave Eggers’s enclave for McSweeney’s in San Francisco, calls attention to “subsistence writers” rather than well-known ones to describe writing outside programs in Making Literature Now (Stanford University Press, 2016).

In general, Michaels’s students look at the way that politics expresses itself in literature, but not in the ways we might think. Because of their habit of argument, I call them the counterintuitive critics, and they have led a wave of Americanist critics in that vein. Clune, who has stepped outside of academic criticism to write two acclaimed memoirs, says that a weakness of the group could be its reflexive skepticism. “The rigorous arguments, the competition, the skepticism of political correctness: All that could be turned into a dogma of its own.”

Great critics don’t always make great teachers. Sometimes a charismatic presence might override students, or simply produce facsimiles. Michaels is known to be a vibrant lecturer, animated and characteristically reinforcing points by snapping his fingers, but the key to his graduate teaching is how he directs dissertations. According to Gordon Hutner, editor of the leading journal American Literary History and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Michaels has been perhaps the most influential dissertation director of his generation” in American literature, from his time at Berkeley as well as Hopkins.

To an unusual extent, Michaels takes a hands-on approach. He goes over his Ph.D. students’ writing intensively. At the beginning of the dissertation, he’ll meet with a student at least every other week, working through two or three pages at a time. “We’ll go through the damn thing until it sounds right,” Michaels says. “Not all through the thesis — you’d go crazy, they’d go crazy — but of the dissertations I’ve directed and the books that have come out of them, every one has at least one chapter, or at most two, where we did that.”

“One of my graduate students said it was like being on a team with the world’s most controlling Little League coach. That’s true, but the flip side is that once they finish, they can do whatever they want.”

His aim is that students “get to the point where they can articulate a problem that anyone can see the interest of.” Though Michaels often argues about theoretical concepts like meaning and intention, he writes so that the line of argument is direct. As Clune puts it, he “strips away impressive-sounding (to impressionable graduate students) jargon and renders fashionable ideas in clear language.” That is one of the distinctive features, too, of his students: They avoid jargon, and you know what the argument counters.

We frequently learn more from our mistakes than our successes, and by his own account Michaels himself wrote a poor dissertation on Henry James, which he never published as a book. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he studied with Hugh Kenner, a major critic of modernist literature, with books such as The Pound Era (1971), which McGurl’s The Program Era evokes. However, says Michaels, “Whatever Hugh was good at, it was not directing dissertations.”

Kenner “would just look at it and say, ‘That’s pretty good, but I don’t know about this part.’” It wasn’t until Michaels’s first job, he says, with advice from colleagues including Stanley Fish, that he learned how to write literary criticism. “I think that the effect was that I figured out more on my own what to do, which made it easier for me to teach it.”

Given his hands-on coaching, I found it curious that Michaels is largely hands-off thereafter. In fact, former students, though expressing admiration, report relatively little contact after they graduate. Michaels treats them with a kind of tough love as they leave the graduate nest: “I never read my students’ first books because the aversive relation to the dissertation at that point is so intense,” he says. “But I read most of their second books. Some of them have written important books that I think are profoundly wrong, but that’s OK, and I’m sure they have their own reservations about my work.”

Since he moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, Michaels has chaired the English department twice and been involved with building the graduate program. He is adamant that the students there are as good as those anywhere else and that his method is portable. But he notes the challenge of placing students, particularly without an elite imprimatur, in the current job market.

One of his finishing Ph.D. students has recent articles in both PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association, and American Literature, a standard in the field, but so far has not gotten a tenure-track position in his job search. Not only have jobs declined, but about half those advertised are not tenure-stream positions. It’s hard to coach when the league is shrinking.

Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University and an editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. His most recent book is the collection How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (Fordham University Press).