Critical Exhaustion: Lyric Attachments in Contemporary Literary Studies

Abstract

“Critical Exhaustion: Lyric Attachments in Contemporary Literary Studies” draws on insights from feminist criticism to rethink debates about method and the politics of higher education that have shaped literary scholarship since the 1990s. Investigating attachments to lyric poetry across the stories scholars tell about disciplinary crisis and culture wars, the dissertation contends that the interface between poetics and the identity interdisciplines is a robust site for understanding the cultural politics and economic transformations of U.S. research universities over the last several decades. Reframing the origins and afterlives of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of “reparative reading” in this context, the dissertation reconsiders how redemptive investments in the aesthetic value and forms of criticism itself have underwritten contentious conversations among literary and cultural critics about how their methods ought to engage their shifting status within universities or a broader “crisis of the humanities.”Grounding its analysis in studies of archival correspondence, journals, and teaching materials, as well as close readings of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction, the dissertation presents four case studies in pairs of writers more often discussed in the context of separate fields or moments: Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein (Language writing), Adrienne Rich and June Jordan (feminist criticism), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rafael Campo (queer studies), and Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand (Black feminist theory). Reassessing the creative approaches to critical practice these writers developed across periods of upheaval, expansion, and backlash against the fields of gender and race studies with which they have been affiliated, the chapters unearth intimate, institutional histories that have brought reparative hermeneutic claims into contact with poetics. Each chapter explores how writers turn to poetic forms of criticism or study in moments of fracture and fatigue to reconsider why these forms bind themselves to specific sites of social injury, restitution for racialized and gendered exclusions, and wider political struggles around the terms of intellectual legitimacy, merit, expertise, and authority. Forgoing the impulse to valorize or dismiss how this writing defies convention, the dissertation schematizes its crisis rhetoric to critically reframe the legacies of “reparative reading” and consider the social forms of duress that foster countervailing investments in the power of writing among writers, readers, and scholars alike.Attending to writers who have themselves inspired wide-ranging debates about the purpose of writing in the humanities, “Critical Exhaustion” clarifies how ambivalent, optimistic attachments to poetics have been commonplace in contemporary literary studies and feminist criticism, unsettling recurrent narratives of poetry’s marginality and reevaluating how these narratives suffuse scholars’ struggles with some of the more dramatic political, cultural, and technological changes of the last few decades.