academy that I often ¤nd stuffy and irrelevant. True, I have had some won-
derful colleagues, but on the whole I ¤nd that I just don’t speak the same
language as most of the members of my department. Yes, we read the same
theorists, but whereas most academics tend to adopt a particular paradigm
(psychoanaly tic criticism, Marxist criticism, Deconstruction, the Frankfurt
School, Cultural Studies, Gender criticism, etc.), I’ve always felt skeptical to-
ward such allegiances—largely, no doubt, because the adoption of a theoreti-
cal model always puts the literary work in a secondary position—a position
where the poem tends to be no more than an example of X or a cultural
symptom of Y.
Why should this be the case? Why does “theory” (whether feminist or
postcolonial, psychoanaly tic or the new globalization theory) now have so
much more cultural or academic capital than even the most central of liter-
ary texts: Hamlet or the Divine Comedy or Ulysses? I would argue that the
death of the canon—of a list of texts that one expects the student to know—
makes it extremely dif¤cult to maintain a sense of cohesiveness or commu-
nity at the departmental, much less the institutional level. How can a me-
dievalist specializing in, say, Piers Plowman, be expected to know about the
Harlem Renaissance or ¤lm noir? And vice versa: can we expect a specialist
in, say, Latino cultural studies to know Jacobean drama? Increasingly, the
only way of engaging one’s colleagues in other periods or literatures is to ¤nd
an umbrella—whether Queer Theory or Lacanian criticism, or the Frankfurt
School—that might embrace the now largely disparate areas of “literary”
study.
But where does this leave the poet? Ironically, however new and up-to-
date the theoretical paradigm in question, that paradigm is more user-friendly
when it comes to the work of earlier periods than in relation to the cutting-
edge poetry or artwork of our own moment. The paradigmatic, in other
words, is inevitably at odds with the confusion and richness of work-in-
process. Bakhtinian narrative theory, for example, has proven enormously
useful vis-à-vis the novel from Diderot to Toni Morrison, but what about the
video art of Bill Viola? Or a hybrid lyric narrative/documentary/historical
text like Susan Howe’s Pierce Arrow? Or the “Little Sparta” sculpture park of
Ian Hamilton Finlay?
Given these aporias, for a critic of contemporary writing like myself,
academic af¤liation tends to take an institutional rather than intellectual
form—namely, the bonding with one’s colleagues, however disparate, over
issues of academic politics—hiring, departmental governance, curriculum
planning, all of the above easily turning into what we all enjoy, namely, aca-
demic gossip. On this level I can engage my colleagues in colonial American
262 Chapter 14