Back in the mid-1980s, when I started graduate school and, like so many others, dove into Derrida, de Man, and Co., and divided the world into (smart) Theorists and (dumb) anti-Theorists, one figure stood out. The older antagonists — M.H. Abrams, Murray Krieger, and a host of straightforward literary historians and close-reading formalists — had already faded, it seemed, and poststructuralists of various kinds had all the momentum and cachet of a successful coup in process. Longstanding humanisms were in retreat, and it was fun to pore through “Differance,” “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” and “What Is an Author?” and feel part of a major movement, a historic tide of epochal thought. Poststructuralists liked to cast themselves as rogue dissenters back then, lone Davids battling the oldsters, challenging and sometimes being victimized by regnant orthodoxies. In truth, though, many joined the critical vanguard precisely because of its group identity and exercised fierce group loyalties when given the chance. The clannishness was mighty and comforting, and it lingered through the 1990s. But here was this guy — yes, Gerald Graff — going against the poststructuralist grain, a contemporary of first-generation theorists but with apparent sympathies with a previous generation’s more traditional appreciation of literature. He took on the Masters and their disciples as if he didn’t realize that things had already changed, and that current thinking had established as true and proper the very notions he criticized. It was easy to dismiss him, and I recall one of my teachers muttering at the mention of his name, “Oh, Graff, the guy doesn’t get it.” . . .
Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/gerald-graffs-direction.
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