Gerald Graff just completed a year as president of the Modern Language Association, and with several much-noticed publications (some with Cathy Birkenstein-Graff) in recent times — here and here, for instance, and here) — he might appear to occupy the higher circles of the elite humanities professors. He has also come in for frequent criticism lately (I think he undervalues Great Books and Great Books curricula, for instance), and part of it may be due to his apparent perch at the top of the profession.

It wasn’t always that way, though. 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.”

Remember how powerful the celebrity sectarianism was. A distinguished scholar, now retired, once told me a story about giving a lecture at Yale in the mid-70s, and being baffled by the course of the Q&A. The opening questions seemed so hesitant and cautiously probing, he recalled, but after a certain time, they became sharp and insistent. The turning point? De Man, in the back of the room, delivered his judgment of the talk. Suddenly, everyone else in the room felt free to weigh in.

Graff would have none of it. The blandishments of patronage and the good graces of the powerful didn’t affect him. He stuck to his position and demanded a reasoned response, not a cliquish one. As the years passed, he made peace with Derrida (see here), thereby resisting the opposite temptation, the adversarial identity, the anti-Theorist. But in that collaboration with Derrida (the volume of Limited Inc), while Graff admired Derrida’s analytical persistence, he didn’t slip into subordination.

And when poststructuralism edged into political and identitarian themes, and the coercions amplified (to criticize rising theoretical notions of racial and sexual difference was to risk stigmatization), Graff kept going. One noteworthy deflation of his took place in the pages of New Literary History in 1987. The centerpiece of the volume was an essay entitled “The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms,” by Ellen Messer-Davidow. It bore the standard portentousness of critical theory at the time, as exemplified by the following sentence:

“Other [feminists] fear that the enterprises of writing and thinking, let alone criticism, are so thoroughly infected by patriarchal ideology that women can achieve expression only through a new female biolanguage or rebellious silence.”

Graff was one respondent, and I remember reading his short piece with some astonishment. While others in the volume treated the essay as oh-so-serious, Graff pinpointed its basic binary (to use the language of the era) and summed it up with casual alacrity: “The contrast between traditional and feminist thought that runs throughout Messer-Davidow’s essay is greatly overdrawn.” He drew up a list of traits in the essay, one “MALE-TRADITIONALIST,” the other “FEMINIST.” The former includes “detached knower, vanishes into anonymous objectivity”; “sharp distinction between representation and reality”; “truth seen as universal”; “‘dominance and submission.’” The latter includes “does not ‘embrace the self/other dichotomy’”; “sees reality as dynamic, relational”; “perspectivism”; and “‘reciprocal empowerment.’”

Graff translates the “male” side into its actual name: “The more common name for what Messer-Davidow subsumes under ‘male-traditional’ is postivism, or, more broadly, empiricism.” Furthermore, empiricism has had no small number of male critics, from the Romantic poets to the Frankfurt School.

The response helps explain why Graff outlasted his critics among the Theorists. It also indicates why Graff made the turn to pedagogy in the late-1980s, and why he was able to engage with off-campus culture warriors on the Right in fruitful ways that his colleagues could not.

More on Graff and teaching in the next post.

(Brainstorm illustration based on a photo at Gerald Graff’s Web page)