Closed Encounters

Closed Encounters

Literary Politics and Public Culture

Jeffrey Wallen

OUT OF PRINT

Challenges the practices of the academy and takes aim at the failings of both Left and Right.

It's committed. It's political. It's socially engaged. It's academic criticism in the nineties. But what does it achieve? In a provocative and fair-minded look at current critical practices and the future of the academy, Jeffrey Wallen draws a disturbing picture of public intellectuals in search of a public and cultural critics unable to enter a dialogue with others.

Wallen argues that literary politics is no substitute for debate on genuine political issues. Taking up several of the most influential critics of recent years—Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and many others—Wallen asks: Can their desire to persuade an audience beyond the classroom be fulfilled? And can cultural critics realize their ambitious social and institutional goals for change? In a work that is neither of the Left nor of the Right, but likely to unsettle both, Wallen argues that literary criticism actually undermines the prospects for the dialogue it calls out for.

In addition, Wallen argues that the institutionalization of critiques of truth and difference—critiques that appear to liberate us by revealing that knowledge and values are constructed, and can therefore be transformed—often leads to a further constraining of thought and narrowing of outlooks. In his analysis of the administration of conflict, Wallen describes the troubled state of academic freedom and points to a shift from the institutional protection of dissenting views to the institutional protection from views one finds unpleasant.

Yet the prospects are not bleak: Wallen emphasizes that academic critics continue to play a crucial role in crafting what we expect from discussion. In this spirit, Closed Encounters lays the groundwork for fashioning a truly public, socially engaged criticism.

"This is the kind of triumphalism of the present that has distinguished so much of the work done in recent years, whose otherwise admirable political agendas are accompanied by a confidence in the superiority and a-historicality of the contemporary moment. A compelling case for a new standard of academic writing that could lead to a revival of the essay form itself: there is no mystification, no pontification, no condescension, no secret language of apocalypse or liberation in these chapters, and yet Wallen manages to write persuasively and with the urgency about the crisis in the conditions of thinking itself." —MLN

"An outstanding book that is persuasive and written with admirable civility. His thesis, formulated before others but never worked out with such precision and passionate care, is that theorists on both right and left have stopped listening to each other." —College Literature

Jeffrey Wallen is associate professor of comparative literature at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

224 pages | 5 7/8x9 | 1998



Closed Encounters *Literary Politics and Public Culture* Jeffrey Wallen		OUT OF PRINT
Challenges the practices of the academy and takes aim at the failings of both Left and Right. It's committed. It's political. It's socially engaged. It's academic criticism in the nineties. But what does it achieve? In a provocative and fair-minded look at current critical practices and the future of the academy, Jeffrey Wallen draws a disturbing picture of public intellectuals in search of a public and cultural critics unable to enter a dialogue with others. Wallen argues that literary politics is no substitute for debate on genuine political issues. Taking up several of the most influential critics of recent years—Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and many others—Wallen asks: Can their desire to persuade an audience beyond the classroom be fulfilled? And can cultural critics realize their ambitious social and institutional goals for change? In a work that is neither of the Left nor of the Right, but likely to unsettle both, Wallen argues that literary criticism actually undermines the prospects for the dialogue it calls out for. In addition, Wallen argues that the institutionalization of critiques of truth and difference—critiques that appear to liberate us by revealing that knowledge and values are constructed, and can therefore be transformed—often leads to a further constraining of thought and narrowing of outlooks. In his analysis of the administration of conflict, Wallen describes the troubled state of academic freedom and points to a shift from the institutional protection of dissenting views to the institutional protection from views one finds unpleasant. Yet the prospects are not bleak: Wallen emphasizes that academic critics continue to play a crucial role in crafting what we expect from discussion. In this spirit, Closed Encounters lays the groundwork for fashioning a truly public, socially engaged criticism. "This is the kind of triumphalism of the present that has distinguished so much of the work done in recent years, whose otherwise admirable political agendas are accompanied by a confidence in the superiority and a-historicality of the contemporary moment. A compelling case for a new standard of academic writing that could lead to a revival of the essay form itself: there is no mystification, no pontification, no condescension, no secret language of apocalypse or liberation in these chapters, and yet Wallen manages to write persuasively and with the urgency about the crisis in the conditions of thinking itself." —MLN "An outstanding book that is persuasive and written with admirable civility. His thesis, formulated before others but never worked out with such precision and passionate care, is that theorists on both right and left have stopped listening to each other." —College Literature Jeffrey Wallen is associate professor of comparative literature at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. 224 pages \| 5 7/8x9 \| 1998