In literary studies, a culture-war armistice

The culture wars are

so over

.

At least, some folks say, that's the situation in literary studies, which could be a harbinger for the nation.

The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), a national organization that began with a reputation for being "conservative," "old-fashioned," and even "right-wing," rolled into town over the weekend, at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel.

Scholarly sessions examined literary magazines, immortals such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and subjects from the decline of reading to the link between poetry and song. Guest writers included Edmund White and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Edmund White, America's most acclaimed gay novelist? Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer-Prize winning queen of the royal rise in Indian and Indian American literature throughout the world? Guests of a bunch of conservatives?

No big deal, say ALSC'ers, holding their annual conference in Philadelphia for the first time in the group's 14-year history. The old-fogy tag never fit, they say, and it's certainly not true anymore.

"That was the most ridiculous stereotype," said former ALSC President Morris Dickstein, the distinguished Manhattan-based literary scholar, chatting between sessions.

"The culture wars have died down," Dickstein explained. "Those ideological tensions are no longer as important. What you have now, at least in my department, is a kind of Maoist 'Let a hundred flowers bloom!' "

Stephen Burt, associate professor of English at Harvard, said the ALSC was "conservative in the sense that the national park system and the Endangered Species Act are conservative - so that [classic books] will be there for future readers."

The ALSC - current membership exactly 931 - took form in late 1993, when a handful of disgruntled literature scholars started a new association to rival the dominant organization in academic literary studies, the Modern Language Association (MLA).

The ALSC founders thought the MLA had become terminally trendy, oppressed by theory-laden jargon imported from French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and channeled through Yale-based thinkers such as J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man.

They accused the MLA of disdaining literature, not to mention writers who make it, and opened ALSC membership to scholars working in all languages, as well as to authors and journalists.

According to the magazine Lingua Franca, then the cutting-edge chronicler of academic literary battles, ALSC's appeal to "the great unbrainwashed" quickly attracted major figures such as John Hollander of Yale, E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University of Virginia, and Britain's Christopher Ricks, of Boston University.

Opposing "identity politics" - which drove some academic departments to represent almost every ethnic literature on syllabi and through faculty appointments - the ALSC, without opposing broadening, stood for diverse critical approaches.

It urged avoidance of jargon, attention to details of texts before burying them in subtexts, and respect for commonsense interpretations of literature.

The group's founders, Dickstein said, "were sticking more to aesthetic criteria than a kind of affirmative-action view of the canon. I don't think anyone had a problem with the figures who were rediscovered for multicultural reasons, like Zora Neale Hurston, who turned out to be really good."

To Dickstein, the word

traditionalist

captures original ALSC members.

"A lot of the people who started ALSC were personally liberal and professionally conservative," said Ricks, ALSC's outgoing president, who has mixed such tasks as editing the papers of Victorian writers with a serious critical book about Bob Dylan.

"The MLA has changed a good deal," Ricks said, from when, he added half-jokingly, it specialized in "Jane Austen and masturbation." He agrees with Burt's comment that the domination of literature by theory "popped like a balloon" in the late '90s.

Ricks belongs to the MLA, too. "People seeking jobs," he said, "need to be members of the MLA. It's no good telling our members that they are joining al-Qaeda if they join the MLA."

The ALSC's shift away from a "culture war" mentality has caused internal dissension. In recent years, members bent on a more aggressive political stance have put forth candidates to that end. They've been defeated.

To be sure, this weekend's sessions confirmed the ALSC's self-image as a jargon-free critical zone, with wit favored over priestly vocabularies. Columbia University scholar Edward Mendelson opened the session on "Literary Biography" by declaring, "I will rule out of order any passive-aggressive or purely destructive questions."

Listeners then enjoyed crystalline presentations on Edward Dowden, a much-abused 19th-century biographer of poet Percy Shelley; the famous "Peacock Dinner" given for British poet Wilfrid Blunt by Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats; and poet William Carlos Williams' relationships with women, the last convincingly delivered by Bryn Mawr scholar Emily Mitchell Wallace.

Incoming ALSC president Clare Cavanagh, a scholar and translator of Polish literature at Northwestern, hopes to recruit more non-academic lovers of literature, noting that ALSC's ecumenical quality is what attracted her in the first place: "To me, it's the place where my multiple identities come together."

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