Three years ago, the online magazine How2 posed the following forum question. I just missed the deadline for response, but it is posted beneath…

THIS ISSUE’S FORUM QUESTION

Taking risks in critical writing often seems impermissible for those of us seeking jobs, tenure, promotion, and most telling, publication. At the same time, many of us are fascinated by more experimental forms of expression and desire to participate in critical writing that is more riveting, evocative, and boldly playful, making use of innovations that are not only permitted but often valorized in the poetry that we, as critics and readers, discuss. Given the extreme pressures to publish in academia, most writers in academic contexts feel compelled to conform to certain styles of writing, with their attention focused especially on the audience of reviewers who ultimately determine whether or not an article is eligible for publication in “juried” and traditionally targeted print journals.

What are the risks and rewards of carrying the innovative project over into our forms of critical discourse? We are interested particularly in how this dilemma is experienced and negotiated by women in various stages of their professional and writing lives. What are the models of critical style available to us? Do women feel pressure to conform to certain styles in order to survive in this profession? If they do not, what makes it possible for them to write in another way? Is audience the determining factor for their style, and if so, how do they envision this audience? Is inclusion of the personal a taboo, an innovation, or has it been worn out by overuse? And, as importantly, how has the proliferation of online publications changed assumptions about public intellectual exchange, and transformed the parameters for critical dialogue?

my response:

If I were an academic, instead of an independent agent/writer who made a conscious choice after graduate school not to enter the academy, these are questions I would ask myself should I find myself in the quandary described in this issue’s forum:

Why did I ally myself with a normalizing institution in order to reap its financial and social benefits only to complain that the writing I am “compelled” to do there is not sufficiently “riveting, evocative, and boldly playful”?

Why, if I want to write in more “experimental” forms (although I have a sneaking suspicion that those forms are, at this point in literary history, at least as codified as straightforward exposition – this forum question itself being evidence of “experimentalism’s” modishness), don’t I follow one of the following strategies?

1) I could write in two or more styles (one conventional, one as I will), pandering properly to the forums I aim at.

2) I could quit my academic job and find some other way of making a living that allows me to use my writing energy as I see fit, or…

3) … if I could bear the wait, I could first do whatever it takes to get tenure, and then whatever I want.

Might it not be true that academia’s “extreme pressures to publish” generate a great deal of useless and intrinsically unmotivated scholarship, theorizing, and paper wastage?

If I feel compromised by the structures I have elected to be contained by, couldn’t I use my will and get out? Or, if I am very stubborn and idealistic, couldn’t I try to change those structures? Would I use so much energy doing so that I might forget to read or write?

As to the question, “Is inclusion of the personal a taboo, an innovation, or has it been worn out by overuse?”, I might ask myself, “Am I not looking for an absolute answer from some validating and authoritative – but actually nonexistent — “audience of reviewers” in the firmament?” Isn’t it true that for any individual reader or writer, the answer might be yes, yes, and yes (or the inverse)? Aren’t there certainly some glowing examples of women academics who have managed to write the personal in their criticism brilliantly? Don’t Maria Damon and Rachel Blau du Plessis come to mind as some “models of critical style” available to those who want to write critico-subjectively within the academy? Aren’t there others?

Do I not have deep within me a sinking feeling that for academics everywhere to make “use of innovations that are not only permitted but often valorized in the poetry that we, as critics and readers, discuss” is to weaken the impact of said innovations by further recuperating them? And doesn’t that makes it all the more difficult for poets (including those allied with the academies) to find new newer newest iconoclastic strategies for academics to puzzle over…? And isn’t it also true that for the most part, truly iconoclastic strategies are ignored by those whose job it should be to notice them????????????