Ray Conlogue's Apocalyptic Reveries

This letter, sent to The Globe and Mail on June 12, 1991 in response to an article defaming university teachers of English, was not published: newspapers which would hesitate to print similar comments about other professions evidently feel that academics are fair game.

Ray Conlogue's Apocalyptic Reveries by Michael Keefer

The Editor, 
The Globe and Mail. June 12, 1991.

One hesitates to intrude upon the apocalyptic reveries of Ray Conlogue (“Cross Current,” June 11, 1991): it would be unkind to spoil the pleasure he evidently takes in posturing as a defender of Shakespeare against a new breed of academic Philistines. But only in his imagination are English professors, whom he seems to have trouble distinguishing from Red Guards, engaged in smashing up the monuments of our culture.

As a Renaissance scholar and a teacher of Shakespeare, I honour Mr. Conlogue's love of literature—but not his more obvious fondness for academic gossip, threadbare anecdotes, and cheap gestures of contempt. Samson laid about him with the jawbone of an ass; Conlogue prefers to brandish that of Claude Rawson, whose abusive article in a recent issue of the London Review of Books appears to be his principal source of information about contemporary academic life. Mr. Conlogue also has a friend who is a graduate student in English: rejecting her view of art and culture as “a site of contestation” in favour of a more urbane comparison to “a conversation among related people,” he promptly spoils the gesture by denouncing Jacques Derrida, the philosopher and literary theorist, as “a reactionary intellectual fraud.”

That may be the way some of us talk to our relatives. But one can only regret the intrusion of such language into what ought to be a reasoned debate over the role of the universities in transmitting a heightened awareness both of our cultural traditions and of the liberating potential of contemporary cultural and interpretive practices.

English studies have been revitalized during the past fifteen years by the work of feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist, and cultural materialist scholars. In my experience, and that of many of my colleagues, this work has made us more responsive to the needs of our students, more sensitive to the interactions between literary texts and the social contexts within which they are produced and interpreted, and more alert to the ethical implications of our teaching. It has also given new energy—I speak again from experience—to such traditional areas of literary scholarship as textual editing and the close reading of texts.

There have been and will continue to be lively debates among the exponents of different modes of literary interpretation. Students of literature are exposed to a wide variety of approaches by teachers who, whatever their methodological differences, share a commitment to the inculcation of independent critical thinking. The notion that university classrooms and lecture-halls have been “hijacked” for political ends is thus both malicious and absurd. Equally fatuous, as a glance at the course offerings of any North American university will show, is the claim that the literary classics have been dumped from the curriculum.

Only in ill-informed or ill-disposed minds could the rich diversity of new voices that is now evident in literary studies take on the nightmare shape of a monolithic, anti-democratic wave of “political correctness.”

Michael H. Keefer
University of Guelph
Vice-President and President-Elect, Association of Canadian University Teachers of English  

In Defence of Jenny Peto - A letter to Dalton McGuinty

In December 2010, three members of the Ontario legislature, one of them a minister in the provincial government, took the extraordinary step of denouncing a recently accepted University of Toronto Master of Arts thesis in the legislature as being “shockingly antisemitic,” “disgusting,” “hateful and poorly researched,” a “piece of garbage,” and an “attack on Ontario's Jewish community.”

I had read the thesis in question, and had formed a very different opinion of its qualities. I was struck by the indications both in news reports and in their own language that none of the three MPPs had read the thesis—despite which they were willing, under the protection of legislative immunity, to slander the author and the supervisor of the thesis (both of whom happen to be members, if dissident ones, of Ontario's Jewish community).

Taking advantage if the fact that the Liberal Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, had been a student of mine three decades earlier at the University of Ottawa, I addressed this open letter to him. It was published by Independent Jewish Voices/Voix Juives Indépendentes (17 December 2010), http://ijvcanada.org/racism/new-antisemitism/in-defence-of-jenny-peto-a-letter-to-dalton-mcguinty/, and at four other websites, among them PULSE Media, in 2010-11. I was unaware when I published this text that Eric Hoskins, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, is a doctor: I have altered the text, where appropriate, to recognize that title.

In Defence of Jenny Peto—A letter to Dalton McGuinty by Michael Keefer

The Right Honourable Dalton McGuinty, 
Premier of Ontario. 11 December 2010.

Dear Mr. McGuinty,

I am writing to you as a senior member of the teaching profession in Ontario’s college and university sector. I began my teaching career at Centennial College in Toronto nearly forty years ago, resigned from my position there in order to pursue doctoral research in England, and returned to Ontario in 1980—where I was taken on by the English Department of the University of Ottawa in time to have the pleasure of being one of your professors there in 1980-81.

I have taught at the University of Guelph since 1990—and have done external work as well, including service for one year as Chair of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s research grants adjudication committee in Literature, and for two years as President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.

Please forgive this recitation of ‘street-creds’—but since I'm addressing you on a very serious matter, I would like to hope that this letter may receive your personal attention.

I am prompted to write by an extraordinary episode that occurred in the Ontario Legislature on December 7th. Two MPPs, Mr. Steve Clark and Mr. Peter Shurman, rose in the Legislature with questions addressed to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Honourable Eric Hoskins. Both MPPs denounced, in the most strenuous terms, a Master of Arts thesis recently accepted by the University of Toronto. Mr. Clark called it “shockingly anti-Semitic” and “disgusting,” and asked, “What are you doing as Minister of Citizenship to stop the rising tide of anti-Semitism?” Mr. Shurman called the thesis a “hateful and poorly researched paper,” and invited the Minister to “speak up on behalf of Jewish groups who have been so deeply hurt by this piece of garbage and condemn it not as an academic paper but for the hate that it actually is.”

Responding to his questioners with expressions of appreciation, Dr. Hoskins said, “I join them in condemning this attack on Ontario's Jewish community.” His responses also included a double reference to the pride he felt “earlier this year when the Legislature came together to condemn anti-Semitism on our campuses....”

I would like to draw several issues to your attention.

1. Mr. Shurman is reported in the newspapers as acknowledging that he had not himself read the MA thesis that he denounced in such inflammatory terms. Dr. Hoskins appears not to have read it either—and the wording of his first response would suggest that he believed Mr. Clark also derived his opinions about it at second hand: “I too, was greatly disturbed and in fact disgusted when I read the immediate reports as well.”

In contrast to your colleagues in the Legislature, I have read Ms. Jenny Peto’s MA thesis, The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education. I believe that the language used by the two MPPs and by the Minister to characterize this thesis is very seriously misleading. It is in my opinion a well-researched study with a clearly-defined ethical focus; it makes thoughtful and interesting use of critical race theory to construct a persuasive interpretive framework, and it arrives through close critical analysis at conclusions that could lead into further productive work at the doctoral level.

2. The central argument of Ms. Peto’s thesis—alluded to by Mr. Clark and Mr. Shurman—is that two particular Holocaust education projects, the “March of the Living” and the “March of Remembrance and Hope,” are making instrumental and political use of the appalling history of Jewish martyrdom and suffering in the Shoah, and thereby perpetuating claims to victimhood that, in Ms. Peto’s words, “are no longer based in a reality of oppression,” but rather produce effects that benefit “the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state.”

Harsh though Ms. Peto’s language might seem to some readers, this is in fact an issue that is being vigorously discussed within Israel—perhaps most movingly and brilliantly by the film-maker Yoav Shamir, in his documentary Defamation. In that film’s climactic sequences, Shamir accompanies a group of Israeli teenagers who are being taken to Poland by one of the Holocaust education programs that Ms. Peto’s thesis discusses. There is a sequence in which these adolescents, having toured the site of the death camp at Auschwitz, are overwhelmed by the horror of the place and the appalling scale of the atrocities inflicted there; they huddle together in little groups, weeping. This scene is unforgettable. But scarcely less so is the new hardness that some of the young people then immediately express in relation to the sufferings of the Palestinians living in the territories illegally occupied by their country since 1967.

Shamir’s documentary leaves viewers with a clear sense that this hardness toward the Palestinians is an intended effect of the state-organized program whose workings he has shown us. (I would urge you and your colleagues, Mr. Premier, to watch this film: it is available online at http://www.defamation-thefilm.com/html/home_english.html. Mr. Clark, Mr. Shurman, and Dr. Hoskins may find it instructive that the argument they object to so vehemently in Ms. Peto’s work is unambiguously supported by Yoav Shamir’s documentary footage.)

3. Arguments similar to those of Ms. Peto’s MA thesis have recently been made by a distinguished Israeli politician, Avraham Burg, in his book The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes. For a brief account of this book’s relevance to current political debates in Canada, see Gerald Caplan, “A Mideast reading list for Tories willing to learn,” The Globe and Mail (27 August 2010). Noting that Burg, the son of a prominent Israeli cabinet minister, has himself been “a leader of the Labour Party, speaker of the Knesset, and chairman of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive,” Caplan writes that “From the heart of Israel itself, Mr. Burg has the courage to accuse his fellow Israelis of deliberately exploiting the Holocaust as an excuse to treat Palestinians deplorably.”

4. In their remarks in the Legislature on December 7th, the two opposition MPPs and your cabinet colleague agreed that Ms. Peto’s MA thesis is an expression of antisemitic hatred, and an attack on the Jewish community. I would argue that it is crucial for members of the Legislature to recognize that the issue of antisemitism has become heavily politicized in Canada—and that claims made on this subject have with increasing frequency been motivated by a desire to silence legitimate criticism of the actions and policies of the state of Israel by branding them as antisemitism and as hate speech.

Claims motivated in this manner have often taken the form of assertions that Canadian civility and decency are menaced by a “new antisemitism,” in which the traditional antisemitic loathing of Jews and Judaism has mutated into hatred of “the collective Jew” and now takes the form of attempts to demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel.

However, many distinguished contemporary scholars of Judaism and antisemitism have rejected attempts to expand the category of antisemitism by conflating it with criticisms of Israeli state policy and actions. These scholars include the late Raul Hilberg, whose magisterial three-volume work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) is acknowledged as the seminal study of the Shoah; University of Oxford philosopher Brian Klug, whose writings on antisemitism include “The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice (June 2003), and “The Myth of the New Antisemitism,” The Nation (February 2004); Yakov M. Rabkin, Professor of History at the Université de Montréal, whose book Au nom de la Torah: une histoire de l’opposition juive au sionisme (2004) was shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Award; and Marc H. Ellis, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, a theologian whose nearly two dozen books include The End of Jewish History: Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Palestine (2005).

Their principal reason for rejecting the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israeli policies is that its obvious purpose is to deflect attention away from Israel’s systematic violations of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, in its treatment since 1967 of the people of the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

A secondary reason is that this conflation actually detracts from the struggle against real antisemitism. As Professor Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens has written, “[W]hen a worthy cause, like that of ‘zero-tolerance to antisemites’, is appropriated by a regressive campaign whose purpose is, in effect, to terminate any critical engagement with the subjugation, repression and expropriation of another people, the Palestinians, then the worthy cause suffers. Antisemites rejoice when criticism of Israel’s Wall in Palestine is equated with antisemitism. For they are suddenly included in the wider community of fair minded people for whom the collective humiliation, mass harassment and disconnection of a whole people from their own backyards, not to mention the rest of the world, constitutes a hideous state of affairs in need of urgent redress.”

5. I have myself published on these subjects. I am the editor and part-author of Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (2010), a book described by Gerald Caplan, in the same Globe and Mail article in which he introduced Avraham Burg to Canadian readers, as “indispensable” and “important.” I would note that two matters raised in the Legislature, the first by the comments of Mr. Clark, and the second by Dr. Hoskins’s responses, are dealt with at some length in my book.

6. Mr. Clark asked Dr. Hoskins: “What are you doing as Minister of Citizenship to stop the rising tide of anti-Semitism?” But is there actually, as B’nai Brith Canada has repeatedly asserted, an alarming resurgence of antisemitism in Canada? Recognizing this as an important question, I devoted a long chapter to it in Antisemitism Real and Imagined (“Data and Deception: Quantitative Evidence of Antisemitism,” pp. 165-205). My conclusion, after detailed comparative analysis of the available statistical evidence, was that although Canadian Jews continue to be disproportionately victimized in hate crimes, antisemitic attitudes have declined steadily in recent decades, and Statistics Canada and Toronto Police Service data show declines in antisemitic hate crimes. It would therefore have been appropriate for Dr. Hoskins to reply by expressing a due determination to act firmly against antisemitism and all other forms of racism—and then to have added that according to the best available evidence, there is no “rising tide” of antisemitism in Canada.

7. The second of these two matters was evoked by Dr. Hoskins’s double reference to the pride he felt “earlier this year when the Legislature came together to condemn anti-Semitism on our campuses....” He was alluding to the vote taken in the Legislature on February 25th, 2010, in the presence of just thirty MPPs, to condemn Israeli Apartheid Week as “odious.”

It would have been more appropriate for Mr. Hoskins to feel shame over that vote, which revealed a remarkable level of ignorance among members of the Legislature.

The term “apartheid” was applied with clinical accuracy by Marwan Bishara in 2001 to describe what Israel had done in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from the early 1990s onward, “physically and demographically divid[ing] up the West Bank and Gaza into islands of poverty, or bantustans, while maintaining economic domination and direct control over Palestinian land and natural resources” (Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid [2001], p. 4). The term was re-used by former US President Jimmy Carter in 2006 (Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid)—a usage validated in 2007 by Israel Prize laureate and former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni (“Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel,” CounterPunch [8 January 2007]). And in January 2010, Henry Seigman, the former Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress and current President of the US/Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that Israel’s “relentless” construction of new settlements “seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that ‘achievement’ [...] Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the western world” (“Imposing Middle East Peace,” The Nation [7 January 2010]).

More conclusively, in May 2009 the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa published a report produced by a team of South African and international jurists and entitled Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A Reassessment of Israel's Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Under International Law (http://www.hrsc.ac.za/Document-3227.phtml). This report came to the conclusion that Israel’s rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is “a colonial system that implements a system of apartheid.”

Dr. Hoskins is proud to have condemned as unacceptable and hateful any application of the term “apartheid” to the structures of land theft, cantonment, and racialized subjugation, separation, and oppression of a subject-population that characterize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But South African legal scholars have had direct and bitter experience in their own country of the realities of apartheid. Are we to believe that members of the Ontario Legislature know better than they do what apartheid is?

* * * *

I would propose, in concluding, that the issue at hand is not one of whether we should provide Holocaust education to our children. I have strong feelings on this subject: I have traveled widely in Poland, and during those travels have walked on what I regard as sacred ground—in the vacant spaces that are all that remain of synagogues in Lodz and Lublin, in the surviving Old Synagogue in Kazimierz, in the gas-chamber at Majdanek, and in the hillside monument of shattered gravestones that is Kazimierz Dolny’s only memorial to the fifty percent of the town’s population who were murdered in the Shoah. What is at issue is not the question of whether our children should know this history, so they can dedicate themselves to ensuring that horrors of this kind can never be repeated: all of us, surely, believe this should be the case.

What is at issue, rather, is our right to subject the various representations of and responses to that history to lucid criticism and analysis—and to speak out openly when it appears that they are being used, not to bring young people into a determination to stand up against injustice, but instead to desensitize them to present-day actualities of dispossession, oppression, and suffering.

Ms. Jenny Peto has exercised that right in an MA thesis that in my opinion deals courageously with difficult and painful materials. I honour her for it.

I hope, Mr. Premier, that you and your fellow leaders in the Ontario Legislature—the Speaker of the House, the members of your cabinet, and the leaders of the two opposition parties, Ms. Horwath and Mr. Hudak—may be able to provide the appropriate leadership to bring other MPPs to an understanding of the principles of university autonomy and academic freedom, and the underlying principle that the intellectual work of universities must not be constrained by political interference.

I hope you may be able as well to inculcate a fuller recognition among members of the Legislature of the meaning of parliamentary decorum. Behaviour reminiscent of the denunciatory antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s does not enhance the dignity of our Legislature—and there is reason to believe that the statements made by Mr. Clark, Mr. Shurman, and Dr. Hoskins amount to an abuse of parliamentary privilege. It would appear that none of the three MPPs had direct knowledge of Ms. Peto’s MA thesis, and Mr. Shurman’s remark, reported by the National Post on December 9th, is particularly shocking in its casualness: “He hasn’t read the paper, but nonetheless owes it to his largely Jewish constituents to defend Israel on their behalf, he said.”

All three MPPs made statements which, if spoken outside the Legislature, without the protection of parliamentary privilege, would be recognized under Canadian law as libelous. I believe there are good grounds for rejecting these statements as irresponsible, ill-informed, and untrue. I would recommend, then, that the Legislature exercise its own collective parliamentary privileges—which include the power to discipline its members—by requiring Mr. Clark, Mr. Shurman, and Mr. Hoskins to withdraw and apologize for their remarks.

Yours sincerely and respectfully,

Michael Keefer
Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph.  

“Political Correctness”: An Annotated List of Readings

[First published in a special issue on “Political Correctness,” edited by Phyllis Artiss, of Philosophy and Social Action 19.1-2 (January-June 1993): 85-109. An earlier version of this annotated bibliography appeared in the Supplement on the “Political Correctness” Controversy, ACCUTE Newsletter (March 1992): 2-13, where it followed my essay “'Outside Agitators,' Inside Activists.”]

“Political Correctness”: An Annotated List of Readings by Michael Keefer

A previous version of this list appeared in March 1992 as a Supplement to the Newsletter of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. Like that version, the present list contains books as well as newspaper and journal articles; annotations have for the most part been confined to texts of the latter category. A number of items relating to Paul de Man's wartime writings have been included, in the grounds that the de Man scandal appears to have suggested to neoconservative polemicists the possibility of demonizing a wide variety of new developments in the humanities by associating them with anti-democratic and authoritarian ideologies.

Abella, Rosalie. “Equality and human rights in Canada: Coping with the new Isms.” University Affairs/Affaires universitaires (June-July 1991): 21-22. Distinguishing between civil liberties and human rights, Abella argues that “There is absolutely nothing to apologize for in giving the arbitrarily disadvantaged a prior claim in remedial responses.

----. “The new Isms and universities.” University Affairs/Affaires universitaires (Aug.-Sept. 1991): 17. In this sequel, Abella defends strategies of employment equity, remarking that it is insulting “to suggest to women and minorities that their increased participation is an invitation to violate the merit principle, rather than an attempt to acknowledge it.”

Abramowitz, Lenny. “Why it isn't wrong to be correct.” The Globe and Mail (30 Dec. 1991). An analysis of the “political correctness” debate in terms of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty. This application of Berlin is contested in a letter by Josef Skvorecky, “Deadly Correctness (9 Jan. 1992): A14.

Adler, Jerry, et al. “Taking Offence: Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus or the New McCarthyism?” Newsweek (24 Dec. 1990): 48-54. This anecdotal survey of speech codes and of curriculum developments in the humanities includes interviews with Stanley Fish at Duke University and with a National Association of Scholars organizer at the University of Wisconsin. According to this article, “PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy.”

Allemang, John. “The Rise of the New Puritanism.” The Globe and Mail (national edn., 2 Feb. 1991): D1, D4.

Amiel, Barbara. “A challenge to the new chancellors.” Maclean's (24 June 1991): 11. After suggesting that Oscar Peterson and Rose Wolfe owe their appointments as chancellors of York University and the University of Toronto to the fact that one is black and the other a Jewish woman, Amiel invites them to take a public stand against “political correctness.”

Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry A. Giroux. Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Artiss, Phyliss. “The real threat to academic freedom is those who feel threatened by change.” St John's Evening Telegraph (29 June 1991): 5. A response to Peter Boswell's column of 15 June 1991.

Asante, Molefi Kete. “Multiculturalism: An Exchange.” The American Scholar (Spring 1991); rpt. In Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 299-311. A defense of multiculturalist education and Afrocentrist scholarship in response to Diane Ravitch's “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures,” which appeared in The American Scholar (Summer 1990) and is rpt. in Berman, pp. 271-98.

Atlas, James. “On Campus: The Battle of the Books.” The New York Times Magazine (5 June 1988): 24-27, 72-74, 95, 94. A survey of debates over the literary canon, based largely on interviews with members of Duke University's English department.

Bate, Walter Jackson. “The Crisis in English Studies.” First published in Harvard Magazine (Sept.-Oct. 1982). Rpt. in Scholarly Publishing 14 (1983): 195-212.

Beers, David. “PC? B.S. Behind the hysteria: how the Right invented victims of PC police.” Mother Jones (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 34-35, 64-65. This essay contains a detailed account of the manner in which a single student's interruption of a lecture for some four minutes at SUNY-Binghamton in March 1991 became, in the hands of National Association of Scholars publicists and unscrupulous journalists, something comparable to “the Nazis' heyday,” “Stalin's reign of terror,” and Mao's cultural revolution.”

Bennett, William J. To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.

Berger, Joseph. “Conservative Scholars Attack 'Radicalization' of Universities.” The New York Times (15 Nov. 1988). This article describes a conference attended by some 300 conservative academics concerned to 'reclaim' the universities from leftist scholars described by one of them as “the barbarians in our midst.”

Berman, Paul, ed. Debating PC: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses. New York: Dell, 1992. The contents of this book (many of the essays are reprinted from other sources) are separately itemized in this list.

Bernal, Martin, and Michael E. Dyson. “On Black Athena: An Interview with Martin Bernal.” Z Magazine (Jan. 1992): 56-60. Bernal argues that his book “undermines the crusade against political correctness” by documenting the influence of racism and anti-Semitism on modern interpretations of ancient history, and thereby exposing as false the claim that Afrocentrists and others are politicizing a previously “objective” domain.

Bernstein, Richard. “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct.” The New York Times (28 Oct. 1990): section 4: 1, 4. The author is alarmed by statements made at a meeting of the Western Humanities Conference at Berkeley on “'Political Correctness' and Cultural Studies.”

Bérubé, Michael. “Public Image Limited: Political Correctness and the Media's Big Lie.” The Village Voice (18 June 1991): 31-37. Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 124-49. A lively analysis of Allan Bloom's “unfathomable lapses,” Roger Kimball's “vast array of dismissive Edwardian interjections,” John Taylor's “innuendo and confusion,” and Dinesh D'Souza's “inanities.”

Blattberg, Charles, et al. “The constructive challenge of feminism.” University of Toronto Bulletin (20 Jan. 1990): 16. In the wake of the murder of 14 women as “feminists” at the École Polytechnique de Montréal on December 6, 1989, a group of men at the University of Toronto produced this meditation on the need for men in the universities to support a feminist agenda and “to come to terms with the extent to which they contribute to a climate in which being a woman is uncomfortable or unsafe.”

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

----. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

Boswell, Peter. “Political correctness: the bane of academic freedom.” St John's Evening Telegraph (15 June 1991): 5. In an article largely derived from the 27 May 1991 issue of Maclean's (see Fennell), Boswell cites the Cannizzo and Rushton cases as evidence of “a potential threat to free speech and independent thought,” and worries about hiring quotas and curriculum changes. Response by Artiss.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. An introduction to a scholarly project that has been demonized by polemicists like Roger Kimball.

Brodkey, Linda, and Sheila Fowler. “Political Suspects.” The Village Voice (23 Apr. 1991). This account of the controversy over English 306, a proposed writing course at the University of Texas at Austin which was withdrawn after widely publicized accusations by members of the National Association of Scholars and others that it amounted to “indoctrination,” was written by two members of the committee which created the new syllabus.

Brooks, Peter. “Western Civ at Bay.” Review of Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, and Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals. Times Literary Supplement (25 Jan. 1991): 5-6.

Bruning, Fred. “Playing politics with political correctness.” Maclean's (10 June 1991): 11. Bruning suggests that the Bush Republicans intended to make “political correctness” the Willie Horton issue of the 1992 presidential campaign.

Burd, Stephen. “Chairman of Humanities Fund Has Politicized Grants Process, Critics Charge.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 Apr. 1992): A1, A32-33. This article documents claims that under its present chair, Lynne V. Cheney, the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. has routinely rejected grant applications which are judged excellent by peer reviewers but which do not conform to Cheney's political and methodological conservatism.

Bygrave, Mike. “Mind Your Language.” Weekend Guardian (11-12 May 1991): 14-15. Rpt. in Guardian Weekly (26 May 1991): 22. Initially patronizing ('PC' is identified with “the loony left”—“only, being Americans, they're twice as loony”), this article also outlines the context (of privatization, systemic racism, and the “secession” of the wealthy) within which American universities have been trying “to meet minority demands that the rest of society now routinely rejects.”

Cheney, Lynne V. Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1988.

Christensen, Jerome. “From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique of the Academy in an Age of High Gossip.” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 438-65.

Clark, George. “Upholders of 'political rightness' are the ones stifling debate.” The Globe and Mail (10 July 1991). Clark argues that “The much repeated dogma that 'political correctness' threatens intellectual freedom is a bogus claim to justify suppression of dissent, another version of McCarthyism.”

“Concern for Arts, Research Funding Follows Rust.” Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 5-6. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision that the government can withhold funding from family clinics that provide information in any instance about abortion has direct implications for U.S. government funding of university research.

Conlogue, Ray. “How long might it take to repair the damage wrought by the PC movement?” The Globe and Mail (11 June 1991): C1. Conlogue suggests a comparison between “the PC movement” and the Red Guards of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Cordes, Helen. “Oh No! I'm PC! But can we still be friends anyway?” Utne Reader (July-Aug. 1991): 50-56. A lighthearted survey of journalistic writings on both sides of the issue.

Corn, David. “Beltway Bandits.” The Nation (13 May 1991): 6-20. Corn remembers Dinesh D'Souza boasting at a conference for conservative students in 1982 that the Dartmouth Review had printed material stolen from Dartmouth's Gay Student Alliance. D'Souza's denials of the charge are shown by further investigation to be untrue (see “Letters,” 24 June and 8 July 1991).

Culler, Jonathan. “The Humanities Tomorrow.” Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 41-56.

Davidson, Cathy N. “'PH' Stands for Political Hypocrisy.” Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 8-14. Rpt. in CAUT/ACPU Bulletin 39.4 (Apr. 1992): 18-19. In the course of a wide-ranging analysis of the “PC” debate, Davidson remarks that the media have “done little to examine connections between seemingly moderate aspects of the PC controversy (such as the demand that courses in Western civilization be restored to the general curriculum) and the ultra-right hate rags springing up on campuses all across the nation. This is hardly surprising considering the interconnections between the hate rags, mega-corporations, the government, conservative policy institutions, and the national media.”

Davis, Lennard J., and M. Bella Mirabella, eds. Left Politics and the Literary Profession. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

“Decline and fall of the North American educational system.” Taipan (Mar. 1992): 6-7. This article blames the inadequacies of American secondary and university education upon a “rewriting of history by 'politically correct' academics” which “threatens to have a negative effect” on the “progress-oriented work ethic” of the U.S., and could “result in the redistribution of property rather than the creation of new wealth.” The solution proposed is a continued privatizing of the educational system: “If just 15% of the government's education budget ends up in private hands by the year 2010, it will mean billions of profits for the savvy entrepreneurs who act now.”

DePalma, Anthony. “In Battle on Political Correctness, Scholars Begin a Counteroffensive.” The New York Times (25 Sept. 1991): A1, B8. This article reports the founding of Teachers for a Democratic Culture by “30 notable scholars,” among them Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gerald Graff, who “condemn the storm over political correctness ... as an attempt to derail affirmative action and legitimate attempts to revise curriculum.”

“The Derisory Tower.” The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 5-6. According to this editorial, “multiculturalists” in American universities are attempting to replace pluralist thought with “one of the most destructive and demeaning orthodoxies of our time,” according to which “race is the determinant of a human being's mind,” which is therefore unable “to wrest itself from its biological or sociological origins.”

Diamond, Sara. “Readin', Writin', and Repressin'.” Z Magazine (Feb. 1991): 45-48. This essay contains information about the network of American corporate foundations (among them Coors, Mobil, Smith-Richardson, Earhart, Scaife, and Olin) which provide generous funding to the National Association of Scholars and the affiliated Madison Center for Educational Affairs (which in turn funds some 60 right-wing campus newspapers, among them the notorious Dartmouth Review).

Doyle, John. “A new dogmatism is taking hold in Canadian universities.” The Globe and Mail (29 Apr. 1991). Alluding to controversies at several Canadian universities over material published in student newspapers, Doyle argues that “What is happening is a cultural revolution that has chilling echoes of the fanaticism that decimated intellectual life in China two decades ago.”

Drainie, Bronwyn. “Food for thought or anorexia of the mind?” The Globe and Mail (29 Dec. 1990): C1. Anxious reflections on literacy, multiculturalism, and “traditional Western thought.”

D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Free Press, 1991.

----. “Illiberal Education.” The Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1991): 51-79. Writing here for a liberal audience, D'Souza represents himself as a would-be occupant of the “middle ground” who finds that “It is not always possible in such disputes for a reasonable person, in good conscience, to take any side....”

----. “The New Segregation on Campus.” The American Scholar (Winter 1991): 17-30. D'Souza argues that affirmative action admission policies and the encouragement of minority separatism by university administrations are to blame for racist backlashes on American campuses.

----. “The Visigoths in Tweed.” Forbes (1 Apr. 1991): 81-84. Claiming that “the propaganda of the new barbarians” threatens “to do us in,” D'Souza urges his corporate readers to de-fund the humanities. “Resistance on campus to the academic revolution is outgunned,” he adds, “and sorely needs outside reinforcements.”

----, and Robert MacNeil. “The Big Chill? Interview with Dinesh D'Souza.” In Paul Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 29-39. A transcript of D'Souza's interview on The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (18 June 1991).

Duster, Troy. “They're Taking Over! and other myths about race on campus.” Mother Jones (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 30-33, 63-64. Challenging claims that “multiculturalism” and affirmative action programs are responsible for campus conflict and a lowering of standards, Duster also quotes the findings of a poll of 35,478 professors at 392 institutions, according to which 4.9% described themselves as “far left,” 36.8% as “liberal,” 40.2% as “moderate,” and 17.8% as “conservative.”

Ehrenreich, Barbara. “The Challenge for the Left.” Democratic Left (July-Aug. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 333-38. Remarking that “The American new right is becoming more and more like the new right in Europe—which has always focused on nativist and racist issues,” Ehrenreich proposes that a leftist defense of multiculturalism must also address its tendencies towards relativism and identity politics: “There can't be a left if there's no basis for moral judgment, including judgments that will cut across group or gender or ethnic lines.”

Ehrenreich, Rosa. “What Campus Radicals? The PC undergrad is a useful specter.” Harper's (Dec. 1991): 57-61. According to Ehrenreich's experience as a student at Harvard, American campuses “are no more under siege by radicals than is the society at large. It has been clever of the Kimballs and D'Souzas to write as if it were so. It is always clever of those in ascendance to masquerade as victims.”

Ellis, John. “Radical Literary Theory.” Review of Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English. London Review of Books (8 Feb. 1990): 7-8. While criticizing his “slash-and-burn mode of argument,” Ellis shares Washington's hostility to the politics of “Radical Literary Theory.”

Elson, John. “Academics in Opposition.” Time (1 Apr. 1991): 64. A sympathetic account of the National Association of Scholars as “the cutting edge” of opposition to multiculturalist, feminist, and minority curricula. “The N.A.S. Is funded in part by four conservative foundations, but [N.A.S. President Stephen] Balch insists, 'We follow our own lights.'”

Epstein, Joseph. “The Academic Zoo: Theory—in Practice.” The Hudson Review 44.1 (Spring 1991): 9-30. An attack on recent developments in English studies. Response in Hudson Review 44.3.

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.

Farrell, Lennox. “Power and 'political correctness'.” The Toronto Star (6 June 1991): A25. Farrell turns the tables on “anti-PC” polemicists by inviting his readers to imagine how they would respond to a world governed by a repressive “Afro-centric matriarchy.”

Fennell, Tom. “The Silencers: A New Wave of Repression is Sweeping Through the Universities.” Maclean's (27 May 1991): 40-43. The evidence of “repression” adduced in this article is slender in the extreme. (No mention is made of the murder of fourteen women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989.)

Fernéndez, Enrique. “P.C. Rider.” The Village Voice (18 June 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 322-25. Reminding us that “Whatever 'Western' means, one thing should be obvious: Latin-American and Anglo-American letters are either in it or out of it together,” Fernéndez advocates an “integrationist” multiculturalism: “If it's human, it's yours. Take it. Share it. Mix it. Rock it.”

Fish, Stanley. “The Common Touch, or, One Size Fits All.” In Gless and Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education, pp. 241-66. A strenuous and witty analysis of the “ethicist” assumptions and the “classically fissured” paranoia of conservative interventions in debates over literary canons and academic politics.

----. “There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too.” in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 231-45. Arguing against First Amendment objections to academic speech codes, Fish maintains that “there is no class of utterances separable from the world of conduct,” and that the category “free expression” is therefore an empty one; it follows that “because everything we say impinges on the world in ways indistinguishable from the effects of physical action, we must take responsibility for our verbal performances....” Citing the Keegstra case, Fish contrasts the sensible “contextualism” of the Canadian Criminal Code and Charter of Rights with “the categorical absolutism of American First Amendment law.”

Fraser, Laura. “The right's new boogeyman.” New York Daily News (1 Sept. 1991): 3. Reflections on a survey of college administrators which suggests that “the idea that the Politically Correct are taking over universities and the world is, well, incorrect.”

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition.” In Gless and Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education, pp. 95-117. Refusing to assign “a celebrated face to the forces of reaction” and thereby give “too much credit to a few men who are really symptomatic of a larger political current,” Gates outlines an answer to the question of how “the debate over canon formation affect[s] the development of African-American literature as a subject of instruction in the American academy.”

----. “Whose Canon Is It, Anyway?” The New York Times Book Review (26 Feb. 1989); rpt. In Berman, ed. Debating PC, pp. 190-200. A shorter version of “The Master's Pieces.”

----. “It's Not Just Anglo-Saxon.” The New York Times (4 May 1991): Op-ed section, 15. One of two articles (the other by Donald Kagan) published under the heading “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” Gates argues that “it's only when we're free to explore the complexities of our hyphenated culture that we can discover what a genuinely common American culture might actually look like.”

----. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Genovese, Eugene D. “Heresy, Yes—Sensitivity, No: An argument for counter-terrorism in the academy.” Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The New Republic (15 Apr. 1991): 30-35. While critical both of D'Souza's condemnation of black studies and women's studies programs and of his attack on black separatism, Genovese accepts his case studies at face value, and calls in violent language for “a coalition that cuts across all the lines of politics, race, and gender” to “close ranks” in defense of academic freedom against “atrocities” like those documented by D'Souza.

Gibbs, Nancy. “The War Against Feminism.” Time (9 Mar. 1992): 38-43. An extended discussion of Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Masterpiece Theater: An Academic Melodrama.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 693-717. When an undescribed text is found chained to the railroad tracks in Boondocks, Indiana, a large cast of critics and cultural theorists—from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to William J. Bennett—assembles at the scene of the crime.

Gitlin, Todd. “Incorrect Call.” The Village Voice (23 Apr. 1991). While critical both of the “illiberalism” of academic leftists and of the right's “panicky” reaction, Gitlin argues that “Authentic liberals have good reason to worry that the elevation of 'difference' to a first principle is undermining everyone's capacity to see, or change, the world as a whole.”

Glazer, Nathan. “Point.” One of two reviews (under the heading of “That D'Souza Book: Two Views”) of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Change (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 56-58. Glazer praises the book as “a balanced, well-researched meticulously documented account of disputes around race in a number of major American universities....”

Gless, Darry L., and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds. The Politics of Liberal Education. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992. These essays (except for the contributions of Stanley Fish and Francis Oakley and the introduction by Barbara Herrnstein Smith) are reprinted from a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 89.1 (Winer 1990). A number of the essays are listed separately here.

Gordon, Ted, and Wahneema Lubiano. “The Statement of the Black Faculty Caucus.” In Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 249-57. (A version of this text appeared in the Daily Texan [3 May 1990].) Gordon and Lubiano offer an agenda for “transforming the University into a center of multicultural learning: anything less constitutes a system of education that ultimately reproduces racism and racists.”

Gray, Mary W., et al. “Statement on the 'Political Correctness' Controversy.” Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 48. This statement was issued in July 1991 by a special committee appointed by the president of the AAUP.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is to Turn It Into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (12 June 1991): B1, B3. Rpt. in The Council Chronicle: The National Council of Teachers of English (Nov. 1991): 16. A response to George F. Will's Newsweek column of 22 Apr. 1991.

Hairston, Maxine C. “Required Writing Courses Should Not Focus on Politically Charged Social Issues.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (23 Jan, 1991): B1, B3. A writing specialist and professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin outlines her objections, both pedagogical and ethical, to the controversial English 306 writing course.

Hamacher, Werner, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Kennan, eds. Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Heller, Scott. “Scholars Form Group to Combat 'Malicious Distortions' by Conservatives.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (18 Sept. 1991): A19, A21. Gerald Graff, Houston Baker, Jr., Jane Gallop, Wayne Booth, Henry Louis Gates, and Stanley Fish are named as founding members of the Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an organization which wants “to set the record straight about such incendiary issues as 'political correctness' and free speech on campus,” and which criticizes “what it calls the 'blatant hypocrisy' of 'right-wing ideologues' such as [Dinesh] D'Souza and Lynne V. Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Henry, William A, III. “Upside Down in the Groves of Academe.” Time (1 Apr. 1991): 62-64. Henry claims that in the “upside-down world” of many U.S. campuses, “Obfuscatory course titles and eccentric reading lists are frequently wedded to a combative political agenda or outlandish views of U.S. culture.” He criticizes new “Afrocentric” curriculums and developments in feminist and gay studies.

Hentoff, Nat. “'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech.” Dissent (Fall 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 215-24. Hentoff sides with Yale President Benno Schmidt, according to whom the idea that “values of civility and community” should be allowed to supersede freedom of expression is “wrong in principle, and, if extended, is disastrous to freedom of thought....”

Hill, Patrick J. “Multiculturalism: The Crucial Philosophical and Organizational Issues.” Change (July-Aug. 1991): 38-47. A discussion of four frameworks for explaining diversity—relativism, universalism, hierarchism, and democratic pluralism—leads into an argument for a new curriculum that would incorporate “the currently marginalized.”

Hirsch, E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Need to Know. Boston: Houghton, 1987.

Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Of direct relevance to the 'PC' debate.

Hollander, John. “Reading as Was Never Read.” ADE Bulletin 98 (Spring 1991): 7-13.

Howe, Irving. “The Value of the Canon.” The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 40-47. Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 153-71. In reasserting the value of a traditional literary canon, Howe deploys Lukács, Trotsky, and Gramsci against the contemporary “cultural left.”

Hughes, Robert. “The Fraying of America.” Time (3 Feb. 1992): 44-49. Defining America as “a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory,” this article blames the “fraying” of a “sense of collectivity and mutual respect” upon right-wing “demagogues” as well as upon “pushers of political correctness who would like to see grievance elevated into automatic sanctity.” While criticizing “cultural separatism” and Afrocentrism, Hughes also denounces “the ongoing frenzy about political correctness, whose object is to create the belief, or illusion, that a new and sinister McCarthyism, this time of the left, has taken over American universities and is bringing free thought to a stop. This is flatly absurd.”

Hurst, Lynda. “'Politically correct'? Think before you speak: New watchwords 'politically correct' cause controversy.” The Toronto Star (2 June 1991): A1, A12. A balanced discussion, focussed principally on the University of Toronto, of debates and disputes over issues of gender and of race (“the Cannizzo incident”).

Jayne, E. “Academic jeremiad: The neoconservative view of American higher education.” Change (May-June 1991): 30-41.

Jenish, D'Arcy. “A War of Words: Academics Clash Over 'Correctness'.” Maclean's (27 May 1991): 44-45. Recycling anecdotes from Taylor and D'Souza, this article also quotes opinions of people on both sides of the curriculum debate in the U.S. (apportioning space to opponents and supporters of new developments in a ratio of about 8 to 1).

Jonas, George. Politically Incorrect. Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1991. A collection of journalistic essays by a writer who, as David Olive rather cruelly suggests, is unlikely ever “to rise above the status of tabloid philosopher” (Olive, “Rants unworthy of raves,” The Globe and Mail [21 Dec. 1991]).

Jouzaitis, Carol. “Scholars stand up for colleges: Political-correctness charges a bum rap, they say.” Chicago Tribune (2 Oct. 1991): 1, 10. This article reports the founding of Teachers for a Democratic Culture by Gerald Graff and others. “Rather than choking debate, as their critics claim they have, members of the new organization say they are trying to open the discussion on campuses and educate the public about new literary theories and teaching approaches.”

Kagan, Donald. “Western Values Are Central.” The New York Times (4 May 1991): Op-ed section, 15. One of two articles (the other by Henry Louis Gates) published under the heading “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” Kagan writes that “Western culture and institutions are the most powerful paradigm in the world. As they increasingly become the objects of emulation by peoples elsewhere, their study becomes essential for those of all nations who wish to understand their nature and origins.”

Keefer, Michael. “Political Correctness.” Canadian Federation for the Humanities Bulletin 14.2 (Summer 1991): 7-8. This article attacks the “frothy denunciations of 'political correctness'” by such writers as Dinesh D'Souza, Tom Fennell, Claude Rawson, and George F. Will.

----. “Ellis on Deconstruction: A Second Opinion.” English Studies in Canada 18.1 (Mar. 1992): 83-103. An analysis of the 'PC' furore forms part of a critique of the scholarship and politics of an opponent of deconstruction.

Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

----. “The Periphery v. The Center: The MLA in Chicago.” In Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 61-84. (A version of this essay appeared in The New Criterion [Feb. 1991].) Finding much to displease him in the papers presented at the MLA conference, Kimball argues that “the substitution of certain political causes for disinterested appreciation may be said to have become the raison d'être of the Modern Language Association.”

King, Nina. “Classroom Notes: A Controversial English Department Deserves High Marks for Teaching.” The Washington Post (7 Apr. 1991): Educational review section 12-13. An account of Duke University's English program by one of the few journalists who has made any attempt to witness what supposedly “PC” academics do in the classroom.

Kingwell, Mark. “Enter the campus thought police.” The Globe and Mail (15 Apr. 1991). Repeating (though with ironic overtones) claims that “north America's colleges” are ruled by “the PC police,” Kingwell contrasts the radical insights of Marxist critique to the “superficial” relativism of “PC thinking.” Response by Ripstein.

Kinsley, Michael. “Hysteria Over 'Political Correctness': Where's this left-wing reign of terror on campus?” The Washington Post (3 May 1991): A25. A comparison of attacks on the “leftism” of the academy in 1951 and 1991. Kinsley remarks that the academic speech codes now excoriated as “politically correct” were in many cases instituted in the early 1970s by academic conservatives in response to left-wing student activism.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Pedagogy in the Context of an Antihomophobic Project.” In Gless and Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education, pp. 145-62. This essay offers an analysis (by a former student) of Allan Bloom's protectiveness of “the canonical culture of the closet,” and at the same time of “the homophobia uniformly enjoined on teachers throughout the primary and secondary levels of public school”; it argues that “The invaluable forms of critique and dismantlement within the official tradition, the naming as what it is of a hegemonic, homoerotic/homophobic male canon of cultural mastery and coercive erotic double binding, can only be part of the strategy of an antihomophobic project.”

Kramer, Hilton. “The Prospect Before Us.” The New Criterion (Sept. 1990); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 315-21. Kramer complains of the imposition of “politics—above all, the politics of race, gender, and multiculturalism—as the only acceptable criterion of value in every realm of culture and life”; this “liberal McCarthyism” is the work of what he calls the “barbarian element.”

Krauthammer, Charles. “Hail Columbus, Dead White Male.” Time (27 May 1991): 61. For Krauthammer, the destruction of Inca civilization is outweighed by the consideration that its destroyers represented “a culture of liberty that endowed the individual human being with dignity and sovereignty.”

----. “Clarence Thomas and Liberal Orthodoxy.” The Washington Post (12 July 1991). Making it appear that effective power is in the hands of “the liberal establishment” and “the civil rights establishment,” Krauthammer insinuates that for the Senate to make an issue of the qualifications of opinions of presidential appointees like Carol Iannone and Clarence Thomas is improper.

Lazere, Donald. “Conservative Critics Have a Distorted View of What Constitutes Ideological Bias in Academe.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (9 Nov. 1988): A52.

Leahy, David. “Au diable l'hétérogène: les attaques contre le 'correction politique'.” Spirale [Montréal] (Feb. 1992): 13. Dans cette introduction “aux mythes hystériques anti-'PC',” et aux débats qui entourent la question “PC,” Leahy suggère que le “Nouvel Ordre mondial” est incapable de tolérer, “même au nom de la différence symbolique,” “des universitaires qui aimeraient voir leurs institutions contribuer au renouvellement et à la transformation sociale.”

Lehman, David. “Deconstructing de Man's Life: An Academic Idol Falls into Disgrace.” Newsweek (15 Feb. 1988): 63.

----. Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York: Poseidon Press, 1991. Reviewed by John Sturrock, “Alarms off-campus,” Times Literary Supplement (25 Oct. 1991): 22.

Levine, Gerge, et al. Speaking for the Humanities. American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 7, 1989. A rejoinder to William Bennett's To Reclaim a Legacy.

Lindenberger, Herbert. “The Western Culture debate at Stanford University.” Comparative Criticism 11 (1989): 225-34. A brief account of Stanford's “Western Civilization” (1935-c.1968), “Western Culture” (1980-88), and “Cultures, Ideas, Values” courses.

Mangan, Katherine S. “Entire Writing-Course Panel Quits at U. Of Texas.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (13 Feb. 1991): A16. An account of the controversy over English 306 at the University of Texas at Austin.

McCormack, Thelma. “The counterattack against feminism: How Maclean's helped promote a media backlash.” Canadian Forum (Sept. 1991): 8-10. Rpt. as “Politically Correct” in CAUT/ACPU Bulletin (Apr. 1992): 17-18. A critique of D'Souza and other polemicists, and a defence of curriculum reform and of Women's Studies programs.

McIntyre, Sheila. “The Campaign Against Political Correctness.” Symposium: A Student Arts Magazine [University of Western Ontario] (Dec. 1991): 6-7, 20. This abridged transcription of a lecture delivered at UWO offers an analysis of the philosophical differences underlying debates over “PC” and “merit,” and points to inconsistencies and hypocrisy in the position of 'anti-PC' polemicists (who, McIntyre argues, “have never operated according to their own first principle” of formal equality).

Menand, Louis. “Illiberalisms.” Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The New Yorker (20 May 1991): 101-07. An analysis of inconsistencies and errors in D'Souza's book (among them a wildly incompetent potted history of literary criticism), supplemented by a brief account of his previous career as an opponent of minority rights. While agreeing with some of D'Souza's arguments, Menand remarks that “It is not pleasant to see a man who did so much to poison the wells turning up dressed as the water commissioner....”

----. “What Are Universities For? The real crisis on campus is one of identity.” Harper's (Dec. 1991): 47-56. Menand argues that right and left are alike misguided in seeing the university as a social microcosm; the university should “renounce the role of model community and arbiter of social disputes that it has assumed,” and “stop trying to set up academic housing for every intellectual and political interest group that comes along....”

“MLA Survey Casts Light on Canon Debate.” MLA Newsletter 23.4 (Winter 1991): 12-14. This survey suggests that the traditional literary canon is far from having been displaced or usurped by matters related to new “isms” or to “political correctness.”

“The Modern Language Association's Statement on the Curriculum Debate.” MLA Newsletter 23.3 (Fall 1991): 5-6. Rpt. in the Supplement to the ACCUTE Newsletter (Mar. 1992): 16-18.

Morrison, Paul. “Paul de man: Resistance and Collaboration.” Representations 32 (1990): 50-74.

Munroe, George B. “The Case Against the Dartmouth Review.” Wall Street Journal (22 Oct. 1990): A14. An exposé of the backing of the Dartmouth Review and other off-campus newspapers by right-wing foundations, and an account of the network of government agencies and public-policy institutes which have fostered neoconservative polemicists like Dinesh D'Souza.

Nightingale, Kevyn D.I. “Why being 'correct' isn't right.” The Globe and Mail (20 Jan. 1992): A16. Offering (in response to Abramowicz) a wildly garbled account of Isaiah Berlin's two freedoms, this article denounces affirmative action and claims that progressive change will come through “economic pressure levied by the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith.”

Nodelman, Perry. “Is 'beauty' in the eye of the politically correct?” The Globe and Mail (25 June 1991): C1. Challenging the rhetoric of Ray Conlogue's article of 11 June 1991, Nodelman argues that “Calling Shakespeare 'beautiful' is merely an unscrupulous way of reinforcing a particular faction's power by denying that it is factional....”

Olivas, Michael A. “Counterpoint.” One of two reviews (under the heading “That D'Souza Book: Two Views”) of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Change (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 58-60. Olivas argues that D'Souza “often gets his facts wrong,” and that his slanted analysis “resembles a debater's brief.”

Paglia, Camille. “Ninnies, Pedants, Tyrants and Other Academics.” New York Times Book Review (5 May 1991): 1, 29, 33. In characteristically overheated language, Paglia claims that a comparison with 1960s American popular culture exposes the “followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault” as “the real fossilized reactionaries of our time.”

----. “Academe Has to Recover Its Spiritual Roots and Overthrow the Ossified Political Establishment of Invested Self-Interest.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (8 May 1991): B1-B2.

----. “The nursery-school campus: The corrupting of the humanities in the US.” Times Literary Supplement (22 May 1992): 19. Arguing that Roger Kimball's “tenured radicals” are not authentic leftists at all, Paglia also proposes that “Leftists have damaged their own cause, with whose basic principles I as a 1960s libertarian generally agree, by their indifference to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their unforgivable lack of professionalism as scholars.”

Perry, Richard, and Patricia Williams. “Freedom of Hate Speech.” Tikkun (July-Aug. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 225-30. Commenting on certain “ironies of free-speech opportunism” in the reporting in the U.S. of campus speech codes prohibiting verbal harassment and hate speech, the authors suggest that “One might instructively compare this situation with the new Canadian constitution, which specifically limits the protection of certain kinds of hate speech, without much evidence that this provision has started Canada down the slippery slope towards being a Stalinist police state.”

Pfaff, William. “Universities burdened with pressures of changing values: Well-meaning people are promoting a new form of academic repression.” London Free Press (28 May 1991): A7. No such people are identified in this article.

Pollitt, Katha. “Why Do We Read?” The Nation (23 Sept. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 201-11. “In America today,” Pollitt argues, “the underlying assumption behind the canon debate is that the books on the list are the only books that are going to be read....” She resists the “medicinal” assumption she find shared by both sides in the debate: the view that “the chief end of reading is to produce a desirable kind of person and a desirable kind of society....”

Poston, Lawrence S. Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 53-56. A careful, balanced, and finally rather devastating analysis of D'Souza's arguments.

“President Bush Names 8 Scholars to Sit on Humanities Board.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 Apr. 1992): A25. According to this article, four at least of Bush's eight nominees to the National Council on Humanities, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Humanities, are members of the neoconservative National Association of Scholars. Liberal academics are reported to have criticized what they see as an ongoing 'packing' of the council (at least four of whose 27 members are already members of NAS) with opponents of multiculturalism and women's studies.

Raskin, Jamin. “The Fallacies of 'Political Correctness'.” Z Magazine (Jan. 1992): 31-37. Raskin argues that “while 'political correctness' purports to describe censorious language or policies, it is in fact intended to render unspeakable or unthinkable whole categories of belief about power.” This article, which refutes four recurrent fallacies of 'anti-PC' polemics, is to be followed by a sequel entitled “PC Sophistry and Do Conservatives Really Support Free Speech?”

Ravitch, Diane. “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures.” The American Scholar (Summer 1990); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 271-98. A critique of “particularist,” as opposed to pluralist multiculturalism. A response by Molefi Kete Asante (“Multiculturalism: An Exchange”) appeared in The American Scholar (Spring 1991) and is rpt. in Berman, pp. 299-311.

Rawson, Claude. “Old Literature and its Enemies.” Review of Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature; Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry; and David Lehman, Signs of the Times. London Review of Books (25 Apr. 1991): 11-15. According to Rawson, the rise of theory in literary studies has resulted in “professional misconduct, bordering on intellectual terrorism in extreme cases,” and “a hijacking of the classroom by militant proponents of special-interest groups.”

Ripstein, Arthur. “In defence of shedding our blinkers.” The Globe and Mail (22 Apr. 1991. Dismissing Mark Kingwell's talk of relativism, Ripstein argues that while study of “the works of dead European men” is “crucial to understanding the way our culture views the world,” there are reasons to doubt that 'the classics' provide “an appropriate vocabulary for groups that have been historically mistreated and marginalized to voice their concerns.”

Robbins, Bruce. “Tenured Radicals, the New McCarthyism, and 'PC'.” New Left Review 188 (July-Aug. 1991): 151-57. Robbins' survey of the controversy includes the suggestion that “the whole purpose of the PC assault is to extend the Reagan/Bush agenda, taking over or silencing institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities that fund and therefore set research agendas, and above all preparing the public for a cut in federal funding of higher education.”

Rothenberg, Paula. “Critics of Attempts to Democratize the Curriculum are Waging a Campaign to Misrepresent the Work of Responsible Professors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (10 Apr. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed, Debating PC, pp. 262-68. The editor of a book widely denounced as a “primer of politically correct thought” (Newsweek [24 Dec. 1990]) criticizes misrepresentations of it by journalists and by the neoconservative National Association of Scholars.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Raritan 11.1 (Summer 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 172-89. Said follows Frantz Fanon in offering “a critique of the separatism and mock autonomy achieved by a pure politics of identity that has lasted too long and been made to serve in situations where it has become simply inadequate.” With respect to the canon debate, he suggests that it may not “finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read.”

Schorow, Stephanie. “Tyranny of the Left: Freedom of speech under fire.” London Free Press (22 June 1991): E1. Based on material provided by the neoconservative National Association of Scholars, this article claims that “A McCarthyism of the left has arisen on U.S. campuses....”

Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. A detailed and chilling account of the purges of the late 40s and 50s which will challenge those who give credence to current claims about 'political correctness' as a 'new McCarthyism.'

Scott, Ian. “Feminist paper's editors receive death threats.” The Halifax Mail-Star (8 Nov. 1991): A3. This article reports death threats received by the editors of Pandora in Halifax, and a separate incident in which the editors of a bimonthly newspaper at Queen's University received the following message in a newsprint collage: “Congratulations! Here's your politically correct death notices ... we're gunna rape u dykes. In fact, we will kill any and all feminists slowly.”

Scott, Joan Wallach. “The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What's Really at Stake?” Change (Nov.-Dec. 1991): 30-43. Scott argues that in the campaign against 'political correctness,' “the entire enterprise of the university has come under attack, and with it that aspect that intellectuals most value and that the humanities most typically represent: a critical, sceptical approach to all that a society takes most for granted.... We are experiencing another phase of the ongoing Reagan-Bush revolution which, having packed the courts and privatized the economy, now seeks to neutralize the space of ideological and cultural nonconformity by discrediting it.” She analyzes the 'PC' debate in relation to a tradition of American anti-intellectualism, and comments on the manner in which “The logic of individualism has structured the approach to multiculturalism within the university—on many sides of the question.”

Searle, John. “The Storm Over the University.” Review of Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals; Darryl Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education; and Timothy Fuller, ed., The Voice of Liberal Leraning: Michael Oakeshott on Education. The New York Review of Books (6 Dec. 1990): 34-42. Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 85-123. Searle deplores what he sees as the politicizing of the humanities by the “cultural left”; while sympathetic to Kimball, he notes the “thinness” of his analysis.

“Senate Committee Rejects NEH Council Nominee.” MLA Newsletter 23.3 (Fall 1991): 1-4. A brief report on the Carol Iannone affair, in which the MLA, having opposed the nomination to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities of a scholar who had published only three refereed articles, was widely denounced in the American press.

Siegel, Fred. “The Cult of Multiculturalism.” The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 34-40. An attack on the “academic cultism, paranoia and power-mongering” which Siegel identifies as features of a “multiculturalist” orthodoxy derived from Foucault, from “deconstructionism,” and from “black and feminist agendas.”

Sinfield, Alan. Letter to the London Review of Books (23 May 1991): 4. A response to Claude Rawson, “Old Literature and its Enemies.” On the same page a letter by Penny McCarthy defends Sinfield against the charge of indoctrinating students.

Singer, Peter. “On Being Silenced in Germany.” The New York Review of Books (15 Aug. 1991): 36-42. Of relevance to the 'PC' debate on this continent.

Smith, Doug. “The 'new McCarthyism'.” Canadian Dimension (Sept. 1991): 8-13. A detailed analysis of the biased and duplicitous coverage of the 'political correctness' debate in the 27 May 1991 issue of Maclean's.

Smith, Jean Edward. “The dangerous new puritans.” The Globe and Mail (21 Oct. 1991): A15. A political science professor who believes that Milton wrote Areopagitica to protest “the censorship policies of King Charles I,” and that Princeton, where he studied during the McCarthy era, “did not knuckle under to the pressures of the moment” (for another view, see Schrecker), attacks the “storm-trooper tactics” of the “moral vigilantes” and “purveyors of sensitivity” who make up the 'political correctness' movement.

Stimpson, Catharine R. “Is There a Core in This Curriculum? And is it Really Necessary?” Change (Mar.-Apr. 1988): 27-31. An analysis of four competing attitudes towards cultural literacy is followed by an outline of a syllabus which would “show culture, not as a static and immobile structure, but as a kinetic series of processes, in which various forces often compete and clash.”

----. “New 'Politically Correct' Metaphors Insult History and Our Campuses.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (29 May 1991): A10. Challenging claims about a 'new McCarthyism,' Stimpson remarks that “No US senator has stood up holding a list of 'racists' and 'sexists' in higher education.”

----. “Big Man on Campus.” Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The Nation (30 Sept. 1991): 78-84. While conceding that “the curricular and intellectual movements that have grown since the 1960s provide their share of silliness, folly, rigidity and blather,” Stimpson argues that D'Souza's book “saturates educational debate with slippery rhetoric, inconsistency and falsehood.”

----. “On Differences: Modern Language Association Presidential Address 1990.” PMLA 106 (1991); rpt. in Berman, ed. Debating PC, pp. 40-60.

Sutherland, John. “Down with DWEMs.” Review of Charles Sykes, ProfScam; and of Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals. London Review of Books (15 Aug. 1991): 17-18. Commenting that “The American press is waging a campaign against American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books,” Sutherland argues that “The basic problem is much the same as it was in the Eisenhower years.” His review offers a brief but well-informed analysis of the “body-snatcher paranoia” at work in much of the 'PC' furore.

Sykes, Charles. ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. New York: St Martin's Press, 1989.

Taylor, John. “Are You Politically Correct?” New York (21 Jan. 1991): 32-40. A collection of anecdotes designed to show that American universities have succumbed to a “fascism of the left,” and have substituted political indoctrination for education. (The sensational account of the Stephan Thernstrom case with which this article begins can be compared with Jon Wiener's discussion of the same episode.)

Tight, Malcolm, ed. Academic Freedom and Responsibility. Milton Keynes: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press, 1988.

Valdés, Mario. “Answering Back.” MLA Newsletter 23.3 (Fall 1991): 4-5. Comments by the President of the MLA on the gross misrepresentations of the MLA by American editorialists and op-ed writers over the issue of Carol Iannone's nomination to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Washington, Peter. Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English. London: Fontana, 1989.

West, Cornel. “Diverse New World.” Democratic Left (July-Aug. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 326-32. Commenting on the multiculturalism debate in the U.S., West argues that “The political challenge is to articulate universality in a way that is not a mere smokescreen for someone else's particularity.”

Wiener, Jon. “Deconstructing De Man.” The Nation (9 Jan. 1988): 22-24.

----. “Dollars for Neocon Scholars.” The Nation (1 Jan. 1990): 12-14. A detailed account of the large sums ($55 million in 1988) being spent in American universities by the John M. Olin Foundation “in an effort to reshape the curriculums, take the intellectual initiative away from the academic left and give scholarly legitimacy to Reaganite social and economic policies.”

----. “What Happened at Harvard.” The Nation (30 Sept. 1991): 384-88. On the basis of interviews with the people involved in what Dinesh D'Souza represented as an attack on the free speech of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom by black students and by administrators, Wiener concludes that “almost every element of the story D'Souza tells in erroneous.”

Will, George F. “Radical English.” This nationally syndicated column was published on 16 Sept. 1990, and rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 258-61. Reporting on debates over curriculum at the University of Texas, Will claims that there and elsewhere “political indoctrination [is] supplanting education.”

----. “Literary Politics. 'The Tempest'? It's 'really' about imperialism. Emily Dickinson's poetry. Masturbation.” Newsweek (22 Apr. 1991): 72. An attack on the MLA's opposition to Carol Iannone's nomination to the NEH Advisory Council. Will describes Lynne Cheney, the Chairman of the NEH, as “secretary of domestic defence,” and declares that “The foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal.”

----. Curdled Politics on Campus.” Newsweek (6 May 1991): 72. Will speaks of “a war of aggression against the Western political tradition and the ideas that animate it.”

Winkler, Karen J. “Proponents of 'Multicultural' Humanities Research Call for a Critical Look at Its Achievements.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (28 Nov. 1990): A5, A8-9. Scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West are quoted as expressing concern over some of the directions taken by multicultural research.

----. “A Conservative Plans to 'Sound the Guns' at NEH.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 Apr. 1992): A33. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., a recent appointee to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the humanities who opposes multicultural curricula, affirmative action programs, women's studies and Afro-American studies, is quoted as claiming that the Constitutional principles that shape American politics have “lately come to be menaced by the increasing democratization of politics.” He adds that “It's ironic that conservatives have to use politics to rid the campus of politics, but we do.”

Wong, Frank F. “Diversity & Community: Right Objectives and Wrong Arguments.” Change (July-Aug. 1991): 48-54. An attempt to mediate between advocates of cultural diversity (amongst whom Wong counts himself) and the views of academic neoconservatives like Allan Bloom.

Woodward, C. Vann. “Freedom & the Universities.” Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The New York Review of Books (18 July 1991): 32-37. Judging D'Souza's investigation to be “reasonably thorough” and his documentation to be “fairly detailed, if sometimes very selective,” Woodward concludes that “there is reason to hope that the current aberration in the academy may be halted before it is too late.” Several responses appeared in the NYRB (26 Sept. 1991): 74-75.

“Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper.” The New York Times (1 Dec. 1987, late ed.): B1.

Zuckerman, M.B. “The professoriate of fear.” US News and World Report (29 July 1991): 64.

The Function of English Studies at the Present Time

This short paper was presented for a discussion session on English Studies at the End of the Millennium, which formed part of a symposium, What is the Future of English Studies?, organized by Douglas Freake and Faye Pickrem of York University's Department of English and held in York University's Bethune College Gallery on February 1, 1996. The keynote speakers were Linda Hutcheon and Christopher Dewdney; I was joined in the discussion session by Arun Mukherjee, Christie Carlson, and Diana Brydon. This paper has not previously been published.

The Function of English Studies at the Present Time by Michael Keefer

Douglas Freake has asked us to be concise. If as a result some of what I have to say seems either elliptical or insufficiently nuanced, I hope there may be a chance to unfold some of the pleats during the discussion period.

I would like to begin by complicating my title, with the addition of a subtitle: “Cultural Politics as Palimpsest.” Let me remind you that a palimpsest is a piece of parchment or vellum on which an original text has been erased, and a secondary text overwritten; under certain conditions the reinscription can itself fade, and the original text again become legible.

I want to say something today about the cultural politics of English studies, in the context of the cultural politics of what surrounds us. I want to raise the question—as a question—of strategies of resistance to the implementation and the imposition on us of a corporate agenda. And I want to suggest that one of the shapes that agenda takes is a haunting of the academy by a paradigm out of our own disciplinary past.

My Arnoldian title is meant as a reminder of the logic of cultural legitimation on which the discipline of English studies was founded. That logic, I would argue, was one which combined deliberate mystification with something I would like to call “subtractive politicizing.” By “subtractive politicizing” I mean a kind of metonymy-in-bad-faith, in which a part is made to stand for the whole—but with tendentious results. E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture can serve as a familiar example. Subtracting from his image of early modern England all expressions of dissent, heterodoxy, or subversion, Tillyard was left with a chorus of voices praising hierarchy, order, degree, and due subordination: he had subtracted from the whole a large part of what the textual archive contains, and his representation of Elizabethan literary culture was thus heavily politicized—but subtractively politicized.

Matthew Arnold's true importance is as an ideologue, the inventor of a mode of argument that subtractively politicizes literary culture by separating it from the categories of the “practical” and the “political” while at the same time mobilizing it, in an eminently practical manner, in support of a cultural politics defined for him by such thinkers as Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Joseph Joubert. This, in brief, is the argument of Arnold's most famous essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

At a key moment in that essay, Arnold reveals in its full perversity the logic of cultural justification that impels his argument: “Joubert has said beautifully: 'C'est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit.' (Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.) Force till right is ready; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler.”

Joubert's epigram is elegantly Machiavellian in its suggestion that “right”—the whole array of legal, legislative, and cultural institutions and persuasions in terms of which the legitimacy of a governing order is constituted—is in effect the continuation, the consummation of a regime of governance based on brute force. But Arnold coarsens the thought through his addition of the harshly paradoxical notion that force is legitimate, both before and after it has been legitimized. Through this addition, “right” becomes not merely a supplement to force, but a superfluity. (When, let us ask, will right be ready? If that which has not been legitimized is in fact always already legitimate, is there any reason why its legitimation should not be indefinitely deferred, leaving us forever, like the tramps in Beckett's play, en attendant Godot?)

I think that the Arnoldian logic of cultural legitimation is doubly pernicious. Insofar as it has been accepted, in one or another form, by practitioners of literary studies within the academy, it has in the past blinded us to the significance of our own practices. And insofar as it has become common currency among those outside the academy who would advocate a monologic and repressive “common culture” as a means of fending off the canonical redefinitions that result from transcultural exchanges and the minglings of populations, and as a means of resisting the claims of women and of minorities of all kinds, it has provided neoconservatives like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, William Bennett, Christina Hoff Sommers—and in Canada, John Fekete and Neil Bissoondath—with a repertoire of maneuvers, hallowed by custom, that they have not hesitated to deploy in their defences of what Fekete calls the “body of culture,” once “robust,” but now, alas, “infected with the viral cancer of half truths.” (What a remarkable statement that is: Fekete seems not to have absorbed Susan Sontag's observation that the application of disease metaphors to socio-political debates is an invitation to violence. A cancer, left unchecked, will kill the host organism. And how do we deal with cancers? We cut them out with a scalpel, or we seek to kill the cancerous cells with radiation or chemotherapy.)

During the past half-dozen years our profession has been subjected to virulent attacks of an unprecedented intensity, the cumulative (and intended) effect of which has been to make the public feel that people who devote themselves to training up new generations of “cultural storm troopers,” “moral vigilantes,” “Red guards,” “new puritans,” “PC thought police,” and “neo-McCarthyists” can make no very strong claim for public support.

The PC furore and a longer-term withdrawal of public support from institutions of higher learning are together aspects of a larger cultural and political crisis—the most notable signs of which include an ever more overwhelming dominance of narrowly economic, corporatist, utilitarian, and instrumentalist habits of mind, and a correspondingly steady shrinkage of the public space within which genuinely critical analysis of the present state of affairs is possible.

How are we to respond to this depressing situation? Well, in one sense—his activities and his commitments as a public intellectual—Matthew Arnold provides us with a useful example. We must, in brief, take up our responsibilities not just as scholars and teachers, but as public intellectuals. And one of the first questions we need to confront is that of developing strategies of oppositional engagement—of resistance, in the first instance, to hypocrites, buffoons, and liars of the type that presently adorn the Cabinet of the government of Ontario. (This may seem strong language, but what else is one to say of people like our Education Minister John Snobelen, who came into office proclaiming his intention to “invent” or “create” a crisis in our education system, and to mislead the public as to the state of that system—and who then, when these remarks were made public, retreated into the pathetic pretence that in the jargon of corporate consultants, “create a crisis” means something altogether different than what ordinary humans might understand by the words?)

We need, then, to defend our interpretive and teaching practices—no-one else is going to do it for us—within what remains to us of a public sphere, or within what we can reconstruct of a public sphere, an oppositional critical space. We need to be aware that part of what we will have to confront is a palimpsestic re-emergence, in the hands of contemporary neoconservatives and other courtiers of corporatism, of an Arnoldian paradigm of literary, cultural, and political legitimation that once animated our own discipline.

In confronting this ghost, it may help us to remember two lines from a poem written a millennium ago to commemorate a battle in which people whose distant ancestors had been raiders and looters found themselves obliged to take up arms against invaders who continued to follow these ancient professions—in effect, against practitioners of a paradigm that the defenders had long since abandoned. I am referring, of course, to the anonymous Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, and in particular to those lines in which, as the Anglo-Saxon shield-wall crumbles, one of the older warriors expresses his devotion to the cause:

Hige sceal thé heardra, heorte thé cenre, 
Mod sceal thé mare, thé ure maegen lytlath.

(Thought shall be firmer, heart keener, 
Courage shall be greater, as our might lessens.)

Humanism, Theory, the Humanities: The (Dis)function of Criticism at the Present Time

[This text was presented as an invited paper at the Calgary Humanities Institute Research Network on the Justification of the Humanities, University of Calgary (10-11 March 1995). The organizers had made it clear that their own orientation was conservative or neoconservative; this paper proposed to upset their applecart. Plans to publish the proceedings of the conference fell through by early 1996: by that time, my book Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars had appeared, and due to overlaps between this piece and several sections of that book, I left this text unpublished. Some parts of its argument, however, may retain a separate interest.]

Humanism, Theory, the Humanities: The (Dis)function of Criticism at the Present Time by Michael Keefer

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” VI

I

We are here to discuss the justification of the humanities. But what meanings does this phrase carry? Let us ignore, for the moment at least, the earliest attested (and now long obsolete) sense of “justification”—a word which in the legal discourse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries denoted the execution of a sentence, or capital punishment. We are engaged, I take it, in something diametrically opposed to stringing up or beheading the humanities: an exercise, rather, of exculpation or of apologetics, of vindication, defence, and legitimation.

But should we perhaps also admit, in a figurative sense, that further meaning which “justification” carried in printing shops—the adjustment or alignment of the borders of a type-face within the printer's forme, bringing (as Moxon wrote in his 1683 disquisition on printing) “the Right and left-sides of a Matrice to an exact thickness”?1

Though the allegory may be blatant, it is not frivolous. For in undertaking to justify the humanities, we are very clearly entering the domain of cultural politics. Whether we acknowledge the fact or try to conceal it from ourselves, we are by implication embarking on a process of alignment and adjustment, of definition and delimitation, one result of which will be a determination of what is to count as belonging to the “text” of the humanities, and where precisely the discursive space assigned to this category will end, giving way on the right and on the left to the blank margins that constitute its boundaries.

“Justification,” then, implies a politics of delimitation, of adjustment and alignment, as well as a politics of legitimation. And there may well arise within this cultural politics of delimitation, which operates as an inescapable counterpoint to the politics of legitimation, some shadow of that earliest attested meaning of “justification.” For if certain notions of what belongs within the humanities are to be consigned to the margins, either quietly or by main force, then they are in effect being “justified”—given the chop—in something like that archaic sense.

If time permitted, I would want to pose in the main body of this paper a number of linked questions about what precisely is to be justified, in the sense of vindication or legitimation—and to whom, and for what purposes. As it is, I will be able only to touch upon these areas of inquiry. But before doing so, I would like briefly to consider the context within which any attempt at a justification of the humanities must now be situated. The fact that current work in certain areas of the humanities has during the past five years become the object of a sustained campaign of vilification—one might almost say of demonization—is not something that any serious discussion of the justification of the humanities can evade.

II

The great game of PC-bashing began in 1990. According to the NEXIS database, the term “political correctness,” which did not so much as appear in the American print media in 1985, was mentioned by a total of thirty-six articles during the next four years, and by sixty-six articles, some of them very widely noticed, in 1990. Then came the explosion. The number of articles referring to this term rose to 1,553 in 1991, to 2,672 in 1992, and to 4,643 in 1993, with a further 1,427 in the first quarter of 1994.2 A large proportion of these references have occurred in the course of attacks upon university scholars in the humanities (most especially in the fields of literary and cultural studies), who have thus for half a decade been on the receiving end of a rising chorus of criticism and abuse from neoconservative journalists, think-tankers, government officials, and fellow academics in the United States and Canada. (And then there are the radio talk-show hosts.)

The flow of brickbats has of course not been entirely one-way. But as Ellen Messer-Davidow has shown in her exhaustively documented study of the institutional framework of the attack on what she calls “liberalized higher education,” the resources available to neoconservative participants in the debate have been of a different order of magnitude than those accessible to their opponents.3

The situation in Canada is in at least three respects crucially different from that in the United States. For example, in 1987 conservative academics in the U.S. formed the National Association of Scholars; between 1989 and 1991-92, NAS's support in grants from conservative foundations (including Olin, Scaife, Coors, and Smith-Richardson) and other donors rose from $611,000 per year to almost $683,000—substantial subsidies for an organization which by 1993 claimed some 3,000 members. Thanks to this support, to its affiliation with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, and to its close ties with conservative think-tanks like the Hudson Institute and the Heritage Foundation, NAS has been able to exercise a significant influence upon the unfolding of the “political correctness” controversy.4 NAS's Canadian equivalent, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, was founded in 1992 and held its first conference in March 1993, under the auspices of the Fraser Institute and with financial support from NAS.5 Although its more than 200 members include some distinguished (and some very vocal) scholars, SAFS has not had a comparable influence upon public discourse in Canada—in part because there is not as yet a comparable infrastructure of right-wing foundations and think-tanks in this country.

Another significant difference between our situation and that of our American colleagues resides in the fact that research funding in Canada has not been politicized to anything like the degree it has in the United States. The “arms' length” principle that has prevailed in Canadian governmental funding for cultural production and humanities research appears to have protected our Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, up to the present, from the blatantly political manipulation to which the American National Endowment for the Humanities has been subjected.

Like the members of SSHRC's governing Council, members of NEH's National Council on Humanities are supposed to be appointed on the basis of their scholarly qualifications: the Council is congressionally mandated to “provide a comprehensive representation of the views of scholars and professional practitioners in the humanities.” But by 1991, when at least four of the Council's twenty-seven members were also members of NAS, fears arose that Lynne Cheney, the Chairman of NEH, was seeking to stack the Council with scholars who shared her adamant opposition to non-traditional methodologies in the humanities. When in that year the nomination of Carol Iannone, another prominent NAS activist, was opposed by the Modern Language Association on the grounds that she had published less than a handful of scholarly articles, a noisy controversy ensued, one of the highlights of which was Newsweek columnist George F. Will's labelling of the MLA's more than 30,000 members as enemies of the people. Claiming that “MLA hostility is nearly necessary for creating confidence in anyone proposed for a position of cultural importance,” Will described Lynne Cheney as “secretary of domestic defense” in a “low-visibility, high-intensity” cultural war—and compared her role to that of her husband Richard, George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. But according to Will, “The foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal.”6

Fears of a politicized stacking of the NEH Council were revived in 1992, when at least half of a slate of eight new nominees turned out to be NAS members.7 In the same year, scholars from several disciplines, supported by former NEH staff members, presented evidence to show that under the chairmanship of Lynne Cheney, research applications “from controversial scholars and from those who use non-traditional approaches are routinely rejected ... even when the proposals get top ratings from the agency's own peer reviewers.” According to one former NEH staff member, “Projects dealing with Latin America, the Caribbean, some women's studies, and anything appearing as vaguely left wing are seen as suspect”; another claimed that applicants are warned away from certain “buzz words,” such as “social history,” “deconstruction,” or “feminism.”8 Nor were concerns about the integrity of the NEH calmed when Harvey C. Mansfield, one of the 1991 nominees to the Council whose confirmation had gone unopposed, declared his intention “to adopt a West Point approach and sound the guns against those in the humanities who want to destroy the greatness of our intellectual past.” In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mansfield made clear his agenda as an opponent of multicultural curricula, affirmative action programs, women's studies, and African-American studies. Remarking that the Constitutional principles which shape American political life have “lately come to be menaced by the increasing democratization of politics,” he added: “It's ironic that conservatives have to use politics to rid the campus of politics, but we do.”9

A third difference between the Canadian and American scenes is a matter of the extent to which the latter has become pervaded by what might be called organized incivility. For example, on June 12, 1994 the New York Times Book Review ran a critical review by Nina Auerbach of Christina Hoff Sommers' book Who Stole Feminism? On the following Monday the paper's phone lines were jammed by callers angrily urging the editor to disavow the review. With the help of an advance copy of the review and the willing collaboration of conservative journalists, Sommers herself subjected Auerbach to a campaign of vilification, based upon the claim that Auerbach, recognizing herself as a teacher of Sommers' nephew at the University of Pennsylvania who had been criticized in the book, had in an act of “professional malfeasance” used the review to “settle scores.” By June 14, Auerbach had been denounced by Jim Sleeper in the New York Daily News as a liar, and her review had been described by Hilton Kramer in the New York Post as “a major intellectual scandal.” Within days, Rush Limbaugh was informing his radio audience of some twenty million Americans “that 'militant gender feminazi feminism' and the New York Times were trying 'to kill this book' by 'reacting hysterically.'”10 As Auerbach herself writes,

The issue to Sleeper and to subsequent columnists became, not politics, scholarship, feminism, her book, or my review, but their attempts to get me to acknowledge an anonymous comment Christina Sommers claimed was on a term paper no one in the press ever asked her to produce.... Had Sommers lied less stupidly, bringing in larger, more important issues than my own self-interest; had I not had a twelve-year association with the Book Review; had the pressure on the Times been less boorish—I might have fallen into the abyss reserved for those whose book reviews are disclaimed and their authority taken away.11

There has as yet been no equivalent episode on this side of the border. However, the temperature of debate on such issues as multiculturalism and gender appears to be rising, as may be instanced by some of the more regrettable lapses in John Fekete's recent book Moral Panic. Fekete declares, for example, that “two decades of biofeminism [have] succeeded in infecting our thoughts and feelings with the viral cancer of half truths and the emotional tyranny of false appeals”—thereby uncritically succumbing, I would suggest, to the very condition named in the title of his book.12

The foregoing glimpses of the “political correctness” controversy should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, as Wayne Booth has suggested, “the PC ploy” has on occasion been used “to attack something that actually deserves attack: self-righteous, smug or repressive (and thus morally inconsistent) impositions of 'tolerance' or 'civility.'”13 I hope they may suffice to show that whatever attempts at a justification of the humanities we engage in here must be understood within a larger context, which in recent years has been characterized by determined and well-funded attempts to justify—to re-align, to legitimize—the discourses which inhabit the area bordering on the right margin of the humanities, while at the same time subjecting those towards the left margin to a more summary kind of justification—to something very much resembling a sentence of obliteration.

III

One of the most commonly repeated charges levelled by neoconservative polemicists against contemporary scholarship and teaching in the humanities appears in what might be called its canonical form in Roger Kimball's book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. According to Kimball,

Proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other politically motivated challenges to the traditional tenets of humanistic study have by now become the dominant voice in the humanities departments of many of our best colleges and universities. And while there are differences and even struggles among these various groups, when seen from the perspective of the tradition they are seeking to subvert—the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought—they exhibit a remarkable unity of purpose. Their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods and goals of traditional humanistic study.14

This passage deploys the first three terms of my title—“humanism,” “theory,” “the humanities”—in a pattern whose classic paranoia mirrors the conclusion of my last paragraph: the “politically motivated” discourses collectively referred to as “theory,” and seen by Kimball as antithetical to “the values, methods and goals” of humanistic study or humanism, are in the process of taking over the humanities. (As may already be evident, I disagree with Kimball's diagnosis, which combines unrelenting hostility towards new currents of interpretation with a very partial and sadly limited understanding of the traditions he so earnestly wishes to defend.)

The mere mention of “theory” seems to be enough to trigger an aggressive reflex on the part of some neoconservative polemicists: it is presumably on account of the first word in the title of their book Theory of Literature (1949) that Austin Warren and René Wellek earned the disapprobation of Dinesh D'Souza, who in one of the more idiotically off-target broadsides of his bestseller Illiberal Education owlishly reproaches them for having disseminated the notion “that the definition of literature was problematic and posited circumstances under which Shakespeare might be displaced by the Manhattan phone book or by graffiti.”15 Yet while reductive caricatures of “theory” have become the special property of neoconservative participants in recent debates over the orientation of liberal education, “humanism” appears to be more generally misunderstood—by the theorists who typically attack it, by the traditionalists who defend it, and of course by the public, whom one could hardly expect to make sense of a matter that has been so thoroughly obfuscated by the experts.

IV

The related term “humanities” is sometimes also misunderstood. Two years ago in the Château Laurier in Ottawa, I had the pleasure of attending the Corporate Humanist Awards banquet organized by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities as a means of enlisting support within the private sector for humanities research and teaching.16 Mingled and yet wholly distinct, like the droplets of oil and vinegar in an ill-shaken salad dressing, business people and the representatives of some fifty-odd scholarly associations made hesitant conversation under the glittering chandeliers of the banqueting hall. Yet it was after the salad course—and after the rubber chicken and scarcely less rubbery dessert as well—that I was made aware by the gentleman on my right, a senior executive and a nominee for a Corporate Humanist award, of how perplexing he found the whole occasion. What, he asked me, did all this chatter about scholarship—about history, philosophy, musicology, classics, and literary theory—have to do with the Federation for the Humanities' humanitarian goals?

I am not going to tell you what I said in response. The genre of my anecdote must by now be clear: in Vladimir Propp's taxonomy of folk tales there are no doubt analogues to it among the stories told by braggarts and tricksters. This may be enough to suggest that the probability of you being naive enough to believe any conclusion to this tale that flatters its teller is no larger than the probability of my being modest enough to recount one that doesn't.

Turning therefore from a narrative to an interrogative mode, let me ask you for advice. How should I have responded? Would it have been appropriate to make a learned allusion to the Noctes atticae of the second century A.D. grammarian Aulus Gellius? He explains that

Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly, do not give to the word humanitas the meaning it is commonly thought to have, namely, what the Greeks call philanthropia, signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good feeling toward all men without distinction. Rather they give to humanitas about the force of the Greek paideia, that is, what we call “learning and instruction in good or liberal arts.” Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized.17

It might have been undiplomatic to reveal to my dinner companion that he shared with the corporate humanists of Nero's and Caligula's time a very basic misapprehension about the nature of the humanities. (I can imagine his face assuming the thoughtful expression of one who has found a scorpion in the pocket that he thought contained his billfold.)

Or should I have confronted more directly the much larger question which underlies the naive one of my dinner companion—and which has very appropriately been made the theme of this conference? What benefit is there, and to whom, in all our chatter within and about the humanities? How are we to legitimize what we do?

V

One problem with the question in this form is that it presupposes a belief that we are all doing much the same thing. But is it not the case, in the field of literary and cultural studies at least, that a number of very different and mutually incompatible things are being done? Is there not, for example, a radical incompatibility between those of us who would describe themselves as humanists, guardians of a traditional literary canon and of traditionalist canons of interpretation, and those whose interpretive practices are inflected rather by post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, deconstruction, discourse theory, feminism, cultural materialism, or (one of the most recent developments) queer theory? Perhaps so, since some of the tendencies in that second list are programmatically “anti-humanist,” in the sense of rejecting claims about human autonomy and selfhood that are widely assumed to be implied by humanism.

And yet even the most preliminary gesture in the direction of historicizing these terms leads to unsettling results. Take, for example, the first and last of the terms I have mentioned: “humanist” and “queer theory.” In what appears to be the earliest occurrence of the word umanista in Italian literature, Ariosto wrote:

Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti
che fe' a Dio forza, non che persüase, 
di far Gomorra e i suoi vicini tristi...

Ride il volgo, se sente un ch'abbia vena
di poesia, e poi dice:—E gran periglio
a dormir seco e volgierli la sciena.

[Few humanists are without that vice which did not so much persuade, as forced, God to render Gomorrah and her neighbour wretched .... The vulgar laugh when they hear of someone who possesses a vein of poetry, and then they say, “it is a great peril to turn your back if you sleep next to him.”]18

This is satire, to be sure. Yet writings of Erasmus and other centrally canonical humanists could be adduced in support of the view that there are important intersections between the cultural practices of Renaissance humanism and the territory marked out by queer theory as its own. To what extent, then, does “humanism,” once we choose to remember the term's historical dimensions, remain antithetical to some of the other labels in that list of contemporary modes of interpretation?

Consider for a moment the case of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, whose participation in the early sixteenth-century humanist republic of letters included active correspondence with Reuchlin, Trithemius, Erasmus, Lefèvre d'Étaples, Capito, and Melanchthon. Agrippa's most frequently reprinted book, translated into English as Of the Vanities and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, offers a radically sceptical challenge to the first principles of scholastic logic, and in a parodic recapitulation of the labours of Hercules proposes a sequence of serio-comic refutations—I nearly said deconstructions—of all human knowledge. There is indeed a sense in which Agrippa's writings could be described as participating in a proto-deconstructive countercurrent to the orthodoxies of his age. Resonances with deconstruction will be obvious to any reader of the philosopher Jacques Derrida's essay “La pharmacie de Platon” who considers Agrippa's suggestion that his book De occulta philosophia is of quasi-medicinal value (“nam & medicorum volumina inspicientibus contingit cum antidotis & pharmacis simul etiam venena legere”: “for they that look into the books of physicians, do together with antidotes and medicines, read also poisons”)19—together with the vehement opinion of orthodox polemicists that Agrippa's textual pharmakon was not medicine but, as the late-sixteenth-century chronicler André Thevet wrote, “[la] regorge de sa mortelle poison,” and that Agrippa himself was a witch-doctor or pharmakeus—in the words of the contemporaneous political theorist Jean Bodin, “le plus grand Sorcier qui fut oncques de son aage”—rather than a doctor of souls.20

This embattled humanist also stands out, no less clearly, as a male feminist. In one of his earlier writings, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, he argues (I quote from a mid-sixteenth century translation) that

betwene man and woman by substance of the soule, one hath no higher pre-emynence of nobylytye above the other, but both of them naturally have equall libertie of dignitie and worthynesse. But all other thynges, the which be in a man, besydes the dyvyne substance of the soule, in those thynges the excellente and noble womanheed in a manner infynytely dothe excell the rude grosse kynd of men....21

Some of the arguments with which Agrippa develops this claim are deliberately frivolous, and yet he insistently challenges the misogynist and patriarchal legal culture by which women, “being subdewed as it were by force of armes, are constrained to give place to men, and to obeye theyr subdewers, not by no naturall no[r] divyne necessitie or reason, but by custome, education, fortune, and a certayne tyrannical occasion.”22

Nor was his feminism merely theoretical. At a time when such interventions were dangerous, he mocked the theological faculty of the University of Cologne for having given its approval to that notorious handbook of witch-hunters, the brutally misogynist Malleus maleficarum; and when in 1518 he served as municipal advocate in the city of Metz, he put his life and career on the line by intervening in the case of a woman who had been arrested and tortured by the inquisition on a charge of witchcraft: Agrippa secured her release and the return of her property—and made the inquisitor who was persecuting her answer to a charge of heresy.23

VI

The point of these examples is not to suggest that some clearly definable ideology called “Renaissance humanism” can be identified as congruent with or ancestral to such contemporary tendencies as feminism, deconstruction, and queer theory. As is widely known, the cultural practices associated with humanism arose out of the interactions of a nascent (or re-nascent) Italian civic culture with the remains of ancient Roman and Hellenistic literary, rhetorical, juristic, philosophical, and historiographical writings; and as Paul Oskar Kristeller has rightly insisted, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the term “humanist” carried no specific doctrinal or ideological sense, but referred simply to a professor or student of the studia humanitatis, which was “a well defined cycle of teaching subjects listed as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy....”24

However, I want to emphasize one crucial feature of this development: namely, that humanism opened out within that civic culture a discursive space, which the advent of printing subsequently made accessible across western Europe under the name of “the republic of letters”—a space within which various forms of writing (among them the highly wrought epistles with which humanists flattered, cajoled and bombarded one another) could acquire a previously unknown degree of autonomy, and within which thoroughgoing critiques of constituted authority and of authoritative dogma could be envisaged and undertaken.

I am thus not seeking to identify Renaissance or early modern humanism with any particular collection of ideological currents. The ideological and discursive complexion of humanism can be more adequately appreciated if humanism is conceived rather as a collection of enabling strategies, which is also to say, a rhetoric (Renaissance humanism was, if anything, rhetorical)—but a rhetoric whose general tendency and function was to bring into being and to sustain a discursive space, a public sphere, within which the power of established authority could no longer sustain its previously overwhelming position as a criterion of judgment, and within which the goal of legitimizing established authority no longer exercised a determinative influence upon the various forms of writing which at one and the same time constituted and were enabled by this newly opened discursive space or public sphere.

Thus, for example, Johannes Reuchlin's struggle against the theologians of the mendicant orders in support of the right of Jews within the Holy Roman Empire to retain their own books and practise their religion, which opened up a ten-year struggle, likened at the time to another siege of Troy, was supported by a chorus of humanist writers, among them Ulrich von Hutten with his brilliantly acerbic collections of Epistolae obscurorum virorum. In a similar sense, the old claim that Luther hatched the egg Erasmus laid has this much truth to it: first, that Luther took on, though with very different inflections, a humanist project of return ad fontes; and secondly, that what saved Luther from the fate of Jan Hus during the crucial years from 1517 to 1521 may very well have been the fact that many participants in that humanist culture which Erasmus can metonymically be taken to represent identified “Eleutherius” (the humanist cognomen with which Luther signed some of his early writings, and a name that humanists evidently felt to resonate with their discursive projects) as one of their own.25

One can hardly mention Erasmus and Luther in the same breath without remembering that in 1524-25 their controversy over free-will established a clear line of demarcation between a Platonizing humanist theology and the theology of Reformation Neo-Augustinianism. But as I have already proposed, the most helpful way of delimiting Renaissance humanism may be through an analysis of discursive function rather than of ideological or doctrinal content. To take just one example, Cornelius Agrippa was active in disseminating Luther's writings in the early 1520s, and his De vanitate (written in 1526, printed 1530) appears to contain strong echoes of Luther's doctrines, among them the catchword sola fide, “by faith alone.” At the same time, however, this book has strong affinities with Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Is De vanitate Lutheran in tendency, as some of its less careful readers have asserted, or is it expressive rather of a radical Erasmianism? Neither alternative is adequate, although the second may be closer to the mark. A consideration of discursive function would show that for all its piety and its apparent biblicism, De vanitate is engaged in the same project of a dispersal of originary authority that is more clearly evident in De occulta philosophia;26 its rhetoric operates quite clearly to open up a space within which something resembling a genuinely critical discourse becomes possible—and, not at all surprisingly, its early reception history is marked by attempts to close down such a space.27

VII

In this light, the history of twentieth-century appropriations of the term “humanism” is a melancholy one. One example will suffice: Douglas Bush's classic study The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939). Bush makes clear his desire, “without denying the importance, the necessity, of the rebellious side of the Renaissance ... to emphasize the more neglected and, I think, more truly representative elements of orthodox conservatism.”28 In what I would call a subtractive politicizing of his subject matter, Bush identifies humanism with this tendency. Erasmus, for example, is proleptically transformed into a follower avant la lettre of that great Victorian Matthew Arnold: his humanism is aligned with the ideal of a universal state “in which reason and the will of God should prevail,” and with “the ideal of a liberal, aristocratic, and international orthodoxy of sweetness and light.” Bush insists that “The two great philosophic enemies of religion and morality, and hence of Christian humanism, were sceptical and naturalistic doctrines”29—thus with the stroke of a pen banishing from the ambit of humanism such figures as Lorenzo Valla, Gianfrancesco Pico, Cornelius Agrippa, François Rabelais, and Michel de Montaigne, not to mention Erasmus himself, whose contributions to the development of a revived sixteenth-century scepticism have been lucidly analyzed by Richard Popkin.30 After this, one learns without surprise that, like “the great body of continental humanists,” English humanists were “unanimous in the defence of established authority”—a defence which appears, however, to have been an anxious matter. For as Bush immediately adds, “this solid, all-embracing orthodoxy is a dyke which the smallest stream of water may undermine and every hole must be stopped.” But reinforcements are available: Shakespeare himself, we are informed, “is no less attached than the most orthodox humanist to constituted authority, is no less scornful of the mob.”31

The image of Shakespeare in the role of the boy in the Dutch folk-tale, earnestly pressing his finger into a hole in the dyke, is idiotic. But what is more substantially wrong with this is its partiality, in both senses of the word—its tendentious and transparently politically motivated erasure of much that belongs within English Renaissance humanism. Bush is engaged in what I have termed a subtractive politicizing of humanism—or what might also be called, in some or all of the senses discussed in my opening paragraphs, a “justification” of humanism.

VIII

In concluding, I would like to make explicit a number of points that have only been lightly touched on in the course of these remarks. I have suggested that humanism has been grievously misunderstood, not just by those who have subjected the term to orthodox misappropriations, but also by those who, in the name of “theory,” have criticized or dismissed it altogether. Such dismissals commonly allude to something called “essentialist humanism,” which I agree deserves criticism, but which appears to be more distinctly a nineteenth- and twentieth-century invention, the result of reading the history of the constitution of subjectivities through lenses tinted by post-Cartesian ideologies of human autonomy, than anything that would arise out of a scrupulous consideration of humanist texts of the Renaissance.32

Without pretending to diminish or obscure the ideological faultlines that traverse this area of the humanities, I have suggested that the apparent bifurcation of the field of literary and cultural studies between “theory” and “humanism” may rest upon a number of insufficiently examined premises. One might add that “theory,” no less than “humanism,” is a term that demands critical scrutiny—not least because the word implies an optical relation between knower and known of a kind that seems incommensurate with the forms of intricately reflexive analysis developed by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray.33

And finally, let me confront the ghost of Matthew Arnold, who has haunted this paper from the beginning (and the title of whose best-known essay is echoed in my subtitle). Arnold's reputation as a critic and cultural theorist in the English-speaking world has never been easy to explain to outsiders. Do we value him as a reasoner? As Gerald Graff observes, “Arnold's idea of defending reason in Culture and Anarchy amounts to repeating catchphrases like 'reason and the will of God' with such mind-numbing frequency that we overlook the fact that Arnold never precisely defines these terms—indeed, he actively opposes such definition....”34

Or do we value him as someone who expands our mental horizons? To quote Graff again:

Insofar as reason implies the extension of the boundaries of consciousness as far as they can reach, Arnold is eager to curtail it. He inherits the romantic fear that increasing self-consciousness means the decline of cultural health, yet missing from his constitution is any of the romantic compulsion to stretch the limits of self-consciousness regardless of the consequences.35

It is certainly not as a spokesman for a democratic understanding of culture that we read Arnold. When in 1866 a crowd demonstrating in support of extending the franchise pushed down some wrought-iron railings in what became known as the Hyde Park riots, Arnold quoted his father's opinion: “'As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!' And this opinion we can never forsake, however our Liberal friends may think a little rioting, and what they call popular demonstrations, useful sometimes to their own interests....”36

Arnold's true importance is an an ideologue, the inventor of a mode of argument which subtractively politicizes culture by separating it from the categories of the “practical” and the “political” while at the same time mobilizing it, in an eminently practical manner, in support of a conservative and anti-democratic cultural politics defined for Arnold by such thinkers as Burke, Coleridge, and Joubert. This, in brief, is the argument of Arnold's most famous essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

At a key moment of that essay, Arnold reveals in its full perversity the logic of cultural justification which impels his argument:

Joubert has said beautifully: “C'est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit.” (Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.) Force till right is ready; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler.37

Which is to say that force is legitimate, both before and after it has been legitimized. And when will right be ready? If that which has not yet been legitimized is in fact always already legitimate, then is there any reason why its legitimation should not be indefinitely deferred?

In the opening sections of this paper, I suggested a model of “justification” in which the humanities were subject to the deforming influence of forces imagined as external—whether in my image of writers like Roger Kimball or Dinesh D'Souza as malicious and ill-informed ideologues, or in their image of scholars like me as, in D'Souza's memorable phrase, “Visigoths in Tweed.”38 In Arnold's quotation from Joubert, another closely-related model is evident, one in which the domain of culture (let us say the humanities) is made to function as a means of legitimizing or justifying “the existing order of things.”

But from my brief account of humanism another possibility emerges. It is commonplace enough to suggest, as I have done, that the activities of Renaissance humanists opened out and sustained a discursive space or public sphere within which real movement towards a freedom at once social and individual became conceivable. (This notion is of course no novelty: it has been extensively discussed by thinkers as diverse as Jürgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton.)

From the same text of Walter Benjamin's which gave me the epigraph to this paper a phrase with which to describe that movement towards and into freedom comes suddenly into mind: a “leap in the open air of history.”39

I close with two questions. Are such leaps ever possible? Would human life be endurable under the presupposition that they were not?

NOTES

1  Oxford English Dictionary, “Justify,” 9.

2  The NEXIS database figures are quoted from Democratic Culture 3.1 (Spring 1994): 2.

3  Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education,” Social Text 36 (Fall 1993): 40-80.

4  Messer-Davidow, 49, 60, 63-64; see also Jon Wiener, “Dollars for Neocon Scholars,” The Nation (1 January 1990): 12-14; Sara Diamond, “Readin', Writin', and Repressin',” Z Magazine (February 1991): 45-48; and Michael Keefer, “'Outside Agitators,' Inside Activists: Who's Paying for What?”, Philosophy and Social Action 19.1-2 (January-June 1993): 18-23.

5  The program of the “University in Jeopardy” conference, held on March 12, 1993 at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, acknowledged financial support from NAS in bringing in the conference's principal speaker, Dinesh D'Souza (who was accompanied at the conference by Barry Gross, the treasurer of NAS).

6  George F. Will, “Literary Politics,” Newsweek (22 April 1991): 72.

7  “President Bush Names 8 Scholars to Sit on Humanities Board,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (8 April 1992): A25.

8  Stephen Burd, “Chairman of Humanities Fund Has Politicized Grants Process, Critics Charge,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 April 1992): A1, A32-33.

9  Karen J. Winkler, “A Conservative Plans to 'Sound the Guns' at NEH,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 April 1992): A33.

10  John K. Wilson, “Sommers and Her Conspiracies,” Democratic Culture 3.2 (Fall 1994): 9.

11  Nina Auerbach, “Christina's World,” Democratic Culture 3.2 (Fall 1994): 12.

12  John Fekete, Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising (Montréal and Toronto: Robert Davies Publishing, 1994), p. 345 n.4. Do we need to be reminded that, as Susan Sontag has observed, the social application of disease metaphors of this kind is very commonly an invitation to social surgery—that is, to violence? Fekete's book merits close reading and commentary, but while his arguments are in some places forceful, they are elsewhere not sufficiently cogent to support his conclusions.

13  Wayne Booth, “A Politically Correct Letter to the Newspaper,” Democratic Culture 3.1 (Spring 1994): 2. More often, Booth adds, references to “political correctness” serve as “a mere coverup for positions authors prefer not to express openly”—such as mockery of “(1) decency; (2) legality; (3) moral or ethical standards; (4) justice, fairness, equality of opportunity; (5) tact, courtesy, concern about hurting people's feelings unnecessarily; (6) generosity; (7) kindness; (8) courage in defending the underdog; (9) anti-bigotry; (10) anti-racism; (11) anti-anti-Semitism; (12) anti-fascism; (13) anti-sexism; (14) refusal to kneel to mammon; (15) sympathetic support for the jobless, the homeless, the impoverished, or the abused; (16) preservation of an environment in which human life might survive; (17) openness to the possibility that certain popular right-wing dogmas just might be erroneous.”

14  Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990; rpt. New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. xi.

15  Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 177. The joke resides in the fact that Wellek and Warren were principal theorists of the New Criticism, which during the 1940s and 1950s became the dominant interpretive tendency within English departments in the North American academy, and remains the basis of what is now thought of as “traditional” literary interpretation—even though in 1948 the New Criticism was denounced by Douglas Bush, then president of the Modern Language Association, for its “aloof intellectuality” and “avoidance of moral values” (see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 248). Criticizing the New Critics' “appalling professional jargon,” which makes reading “a science for experts,” G. B. Harrison, another pre-New Critical traditionalist, proposed that “There is a great danger that the study of English literature may be destroyed by the new critics...” (Profession of English [1962; rpt. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1967], pp. 64-65).

16  An initiative of Professor Roseann Runte during her tenure as President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, the Corporate Humanist Awards were intended to encourage members of Canada's corporate elite to provide financial and political support to humanities scholarship, teaching and research in Canadian universities. In this the awards were an abject failure: the derisory total of corporate donations received in 1993 came to substantially less than the CFH's disbursements in awards to various Corporate Humanists.

17  Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, xvii, translation quoted from Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne, 1991), p. 2.

18  The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto, trans. Peter DeSa Wiggins (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 152-53; qtd. from William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 29-30.

19  See Agrippa, Opera, ed. R.H. Popkin (2 vols.; Lyon, c. 1600; facsimile rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), vol. 1, sig. A2v; the translation is that of J.F. (1651), cited from Three Books of Occult Philosophy written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, ed. Donald Tyson (St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), p. li.

20  Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (2 vols.; Paris, 1584), vol. 2, fol. 544; Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1581), fol. 219v.

21  Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Of the nobilitie and excellencie of womankynde (London, 1542), sigs. A2v-A3.

22  Ibid., sig. G.

23  See Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 59-61. The inquisitor had charged that the woman must be a witch because her mother had likewise been accused of sorcery: Agrippa responded that this was evidence of heresy, in the form of a flat denial of the efficacy of the sacrament of baptism.

24  P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 3.

25  For a convenient outline of the issue, see Alistair McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), ch. 2. “Eleutherius” in a latinized form of the Greek word for “freedom” or “liberty”: eleutheria.

26  See my article “Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic 'Rebirth' and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia,” Renaissance Quarterly 41.4 (Winter 1988): 614-53.

27  The book was promptly condemned by the theological faculties of Paris and Louvain, and subsequently by the privy council of the Emperor Charles V.

28  Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939; rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 33.

29  Bush, pp. 65, 83, 85. “Sweetness and light” and “reason and the will of God” are Arnoldian phrases which recur throughout his most famous book, Culture and Anarchy (1869).

30  See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

31  Bush, pp. 88-89, 95.

32  What is needed in this respect are readings of, for example, Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico that could be more attentive than past readings to the constitution of subjectivity in their writings—and, on the other hand, readings of Descartes that would attend more closely to the manner in which his discursive itineraries rest upon appropriations of specifically Renaissance materials. (For an attempt at the latter, see my article “The Dreamer's Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly 49 [1996], forthcoming.)

33  The Greek word theoria refers primarily to an act of looking at, viewing or beholding, and only by extension to a process of contemplation or speculation.

34  Gerald Graff, “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture,” in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 189.

35  Ibid.

36  Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Lipman, p. 135.

37  “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Arnold, Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 12.

38  See Dinesh D'Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” Forbes (1 April 1991): 81-86; rpt. in Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding, ed. Patricia Aufderheide (St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1992), pp. 11-22.

39  Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” XIV, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1970; rpt. London: Fontana, 1973), p. 263.