Jeffrey J. Williams

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

This anthology of critical writing ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each of the 147 contributions has a headnote introducing the writer and making connections to other critics, theorists and movements. An introduction surveys the history of theory and criticism.

How platform leaders win

Purpose – To study successful strategies in platform industries, which are IT products that enable (a network of) users to communicate with each other, and that, consequently, exhibit network effects.Design/methodology/approach – The authors studied 15 platform industries, including their first‐mover, early entrants and current leaders. Also studied were historical documents, for example to find the time of market entry.Findings – Unlike traditional products (e.g. consumer products), platforms evolve over time by technically integrating separate platforms (“embrace and extend”). Two key patterns were found among platform leaders: follower advantage and staircase strategies. While follower advantage is also prevalent in traditional industries, staircase strategies are not. Complementary resources (i.e. resources the firm possesses outside of the product in question, for example R&D skills or customer relations) did not explain why the current leaders won.Research limitations/implications – First‐mover adva...

History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University

Much of our talk about the university centers on “the idea of the university.” The idea of the university has a formidable history in the humanities, from its classical expression in Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties (1798) and Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University (1854) up to contemporary revisions such as Bill Readings’ University in Ruins (1996) and Jacques Derrida’s “The University without Condition” (2002). This lineage— what I’ll call “idea discourse”—is a quintessential humanistic domain and, especially for those of us in literary studies, it tends to govern our analyses of the university. For instance, assessing the state of the university, Hillis Miller adduces: Something drastic is happening to the university. The university is losing its idea, the guiding mission that has sustained it since the early nineteenth century when, in Germany, the modern research university was invented. Newman’s The Idea of the University [sic] expounded for English readers both this concept of the university and, among other things, the place of literary study in such a university. … The new university that is coming into being lacks such a supervising concept. In place of the university governed by an idea is rapidly being put what Bill Readings calls the university of “excellence”… [which] names an empty tautology. (45)

The Rise of the Theory Journal

brief period between 1969 and 1979 saw the founding of a wave of new literary journals in the United States. They included New Literary History (1969), diacritics (1971), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1972), Feminist Studies (1972), New German Critique (1973), CHtical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Enclitic (1977), Glyph (1977), Structuralist Review (1978) , Discourse (1979), and Social Text (1979). They were joined by several established journals that retooled themselves along similar lines, such as Georgia Review, MLN, and Yale French Studies, as well as new entries in neighboring fields, such as the philosophybased Telos (1968), social-science-based Signs (1975), film-based Camera Obscura (1976), and art-based October (1976). They constituted a new kind of journal, the theory journal. The standard journals at the time were largely oriented around literary periods or fields and had a more empirical focus toward close readings or scholarly reconstructions; these new journals turned toward the larger concepts that framed the study of literature, such as language, gender, interpretation, or society. Though they varied in particular approach or political leaning New Literary History was nondenominational, whereas diacritics, for instance, tacked toward posts true turalism and Signs and Social Text had explicit political missions they shared a stress on theoretical and methodological issues, as indicated by many of their titles. Part of their theoretical mission was bringing news from the Continent to a U.S. audience. They also freely drew upon other disciplines, such as sociology or anthropology, whereas most previous journals were more narrowly wedded to literature. They often took an overarching perspective, questioning the role of criticism itself and the aims and boundaries of literary and other studies. And they were adversarial, especially in their first decade, self-consciously announcing, as in the title New Literary History, a. new way of doing criticism.

The Plutocratic Imagination

If we still take the novel as a register of politics and culture, it is not a good time for social democracy. Since around 1990, a new wave of American fiction has emerged that focuses on the dominance of finance, the political power of the super-rich, and the decline of the middle class. This new wave marks a turn in the political novel: the fiction of the 1970s and 1980s tended to expose conspiracies under the surface of formal government, whereas this new wave tends to see government as subsidiary, with the main societal choices occurring within the economic sphere. The novels animate the turn to neoliberalism, and thus we might aptly categorize them as “the neoliberal novel.” This turn is evident in perhaps the most prominent novel of the past decade, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Freedom depicts the dramas of a professional, middle-class, middle-American family around the turn of the new century. But rather than the novel’s just being a family drama, its plot explicitly hinges on politics. The protagonist, Walter Berglund, a lawyer, is a lifelong environmentalist who has declaimed population growth since his college years. (The other main characters are Walter’s wife, Patty; his best friend from college—and eventually Patty’s lover—Richard; and Walter and Patty’s son, Joey.) During the main action of the novel, Walter moves from his job working for the Nature Conservancy in Minnesota to work for a nonprofit foundation inside the beltway in Washington, D.C., the Cerulean Mountain Trust. The trust is funded by a super-rich benefactor named Vin Haven, who has made his money (nine digits, the book coyly notes) in energy but now has taken a special interest in protecting songbirds such as the cerulean warbler. The rub is that Vin will strip-mine the land before he donates it.

The Studio of Literature: An Interview with Tom Lutz

Tom Lutz started with a simple idea: newspapers were shrinking their review pages and there was no West coast version of the New York book reviews, so, a longtime resident of Los Angeles, he founded the LA Review of Books (LARB). Since its fi rst appearance as a Tumblr account in 2011, it has quickly grown to a major site, now publishing more than 1500 new pieces per year, sponsoring several channels (such as Avidly, which covers television), a book club, a print quarterly, a radio show, and a blog, and enlisting an extensive network of donors and members. Lutz has crossed between academic and public spheres throughout his career, with two university press books and two trade books. His fi rst book, American Nervousness: An Anecdotal History (Cornell UP, 1991), traces the motif of nerves that runs through a wide range of American literature and culture circa 1903, in fi gures such as Teddy Roosevelt and Hamlin Garland. He continued to look at the realm of feeling in the trade book, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (Norton, 1999), which covers a capacious range, this time from the ancients to the contemporary U.S. In his third book, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Cornell UP, 2004), he returned to academic precincts, showing that American literature has long been caught in the tension between inclusiveness and selectivity. Moving back to a wider public, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), examines the idea of slacking—and work—in a tour through American fi gures from Ben Franklin to the Beats, along with likeminded writers such as Samuel Johnson. Born in Connecticut in 1953, Lutz had a fi tful academic start, working jobs from cook to contractor to musician before he went to college. He attended the University of Dubuque and University of Massachusetts, from which he received his BA in 1980. He went on to do his PhD in Modern Thought at Stanford University (1988), from there taking a position at the University of Iowa, where he was a professor from 1988-2006. After a year visiting at CalArts, he moved to UC-Riverside in 2006 to chair the creative writing program, although he resigned the chairmanship in the face of massive budget cuts to the California system in 2011 (see http://chronicle.

Innovation for What?: The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education

“Innovation” is the new mantra of American higher education. It is invoked as an indubitable good by college presidents and government officials, business advisors and philanthropists alike. It typically refers to developments in technology aimed at delivering “educational content” and transforming the way that universities themselves work, as well as developing products for businesses outside. Beyond the vista of continual progress that it projects, the rush for innovation carries a deliberate politics that has largely gone unquestioned. Innovation for what? For what purpose, and with what result? And for whose benefit?

Criticism and Connection: An Interview with Michael Walzer

Michael Walzer is a social critic. For over six decades, he has commented on politics, war, and religion in a score of books and in Dissent magazine, which he has had a hand in editing for a good part of that time. A keyword for Walzer is “connection,” and he emphasizes the ways in which people form their values in communities—national, religious, political, and intellectual. This view is sometimes called communitarianism; contrary to the standard theory of liberalism, which stresses the rights of individuals, Walzer focuses instead on the way in which rights are formed within the context of their associations Moreover, justice is decided not in an overarching frame but in different “spheres” and through interpretation. This leaning toward interpretation undergirds Walzer’s view of war, and he is known for “just war theory.” A student of Irving Howe (the New York Intellectual who founded Dissent in 1953), Walzer began publishing in Dissent as an undergraduate, commenting on communism in Europe and the civil rights movement in the US. Thereafter followed a string of books, on the history of revolution and the possibility of social democracy in The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Harvard UP, 1965); on contemporary politics in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Harvard UP, 1970), Political Action (Quadrangle, 1971), Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat (Basic, 1980), and The Politics of Ethnicity (co-author; Harvard, 1980); on war in Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic, 1977; 4th ed. 2006); and on political theory in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic, 1983). Walzer’s idea of connection grounds his definition of the intellectual, which he elaborates on in Interpretation and Social Criticism (Harvard UP, 1987) and A Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (Basic, 1988); in the latter he asserts that “criticism follows

Rewriting Literary History: An Interview with Elaine Showalter

In her introduction to The Vintage Book of American Women Writers (Vintage, 2011), Elaine Showalter writes, “The main reason women do not figure in American literary history is because they have not been the ones to write it.” She has spent much of her career remedying that, from her first monograph, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton UP, 1977; rev. ed. 1998), which recast the field of British literature, to her survey, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf, 2009), which is the first comprehensive history of its kind. As she remarks at the conclusion of Jury of Her Peers, “we need literary history, critical judgments, even a literary canon, as a necessary step toward doing the fullest justice to women’s writing.” Showalter’s first book was an anthology, Women’s Liberation and Literature (Harcourt, 1971), and an important dimension of her work has been editing anthologies and collections of women writers, such as These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Feminist P, 1978). In the 1980s, she turned to writing a cultural history of the psychiatric treatment of women, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (Pantheon, 1985), and to creating feminist theory, in her landmark collection The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (Pantheon, 1985) and the subsequent Speaking of Gender (Routledge, 1989). Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, she capped off work on British literary history with Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Viking, 1990) and the anthology Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (Rutgers UP, 1993). Through the 1990s, Showalter gradually shifted to a focus on American literature, in Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford UP, 1991) and in the edited volumes, Alternative Alcott (Rutgers UP, 1988) and Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women