Joseph North, _Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History_, part one

NORTH POSES AN interesting question: how is it that in the last three decades, with neoliberalism ascendant (with Thatcher and Reagan) and then regnant (ever after) in society at large, a leftist, progressive methodology predominated in academic literary studies, to the near-exclusion of any rivals? Even if we acknowledge that we need a suppler, more complex sense of how culture reflects material reality than the old base-superstucture model, even if we do not expect some exact mirroring to be going on, how did this oasis of leftism survive surrounded by conservative sand dunes?

The leftist, progressive methodology North has in mind is basically what we in the USA call New Historicism, but we might call it cultural studies. Its mission is to produce cultural analysis, with particular attention to the tactics of power, to marginalized or excluded voices, to the deconstruction of dominant ideologies. He argues that from the mid- to late-eighties on, there has been little disagreement that this is the appropriate way to conduct literary studies, that this is the kind of endeavor the profession rewards.

It has prospered in the face of neoliberalism's triumph, he argues, because it is not really all that leftist or progressive after all.

It thinks of itself that way, certainly, has convinced itself of its own counter-hegemonic bona fides, but North dissents. What he calls "the historicist/contextualist paradigm" is a solution to "the problem faced by scholars who, for complex reasons, explicitly disavow themselves of any commitment to the idea of academic work as radical political praxis, but who nevertheless want to try to get ahead in a discipline where grappling with live, as opposed to merely analytic, political questions, and thus the making of political claims for one's own work, has become a necessary requirement for advancement."

A rhetoric of this kind, which by turns avowed and disavowed intentions that could be described, or critiqued, as "political," must have seemed appealing to many in the academy who were nominally on the left but whose material interests, and associated real commitments, in fact lay with the newly net-liberalized institutions that seemed to promise to support them. (93)

Sophisticated cultural analysis looks radical, sounds radical, but does not ruffle any actual material-interest feathers.

I can see what he means--but hasn't some of this work (in critical race theory or queer theory, for instance) actually made a difference? Surely it has.

Still, he has a point, I think. So what would genuinely radical work in literary studies look like? North has thought about that, too.