P hiliPP l öffler Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory I. Identity Fiction in US Literary History Terminologies and concepts matter. “Postmodernism,” “Realism,” “The Elizabethan Sonnet,” or even ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-Poetry’ are categories designed not only to specify particular types of literature (their styles and subject matter) but also to relate them to overarching social and political formations. Within post-1945 literature in the US, for example, the experimental fiction of Thomas Pynchon and John Barth has been read as an artistic reaction to the consensus ideology of the Cold War decades; the ethno-racial novels of Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko have been viewed as expressions of a post-Civil Rights ethnic pluralism; and some readers have understood Tom Wolfe’s “Manifesto of the New Social Novel” as a perceptive anticipation of the stock market crash of 1987. Placing literary styles in social worlds is not a new phenomenon. The institutional history of literary studies as a whole could be explained as the sequence of attempts to authorize particular models of how the literary relates to the social-political. The logic of these models may thus in part explain the practice of reading within twenties-century academic literary studies. This essay seeks to inquire into the nature of academic reading by showing how conceptual tropes connect with and promote the authority of distinct professional practices. 1 To illustrate my argument, I delineate the creation of one specific category that twentieth century critics have referred to - both affirmatively and pejoratively - as identity fiction, literature that is nowadays associated with such works as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1969), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Toni Morrison’s Song of 1 The term practice is understood in its broadest socio-institutional sense as an incorporated form of disciplinary identity: an implied sense of what it takes to qualify as a member of a particular reading community and a set of skills used to objectify membership status. In other words, this essay is focused not primarily on what labels, such as “postmodernist poetry,” “second-wave literary feminism,” or “Victorian novel” could mean, but on how they come into existence, on how they gain authority, and on how they become instrumental in maintaining and defending professional reading standards. For a number of prominent theoretical discussions of the term “practice” see, for example, Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979); Theodore Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. (University Park: Penn State UP, 2002); Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5.2 (Summer 2002): 243-263. 150 P hiliPP l öffler Solomon (1977), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), or Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993). Historically, these novels rose to prominence as key texts in the “high cultural pluralist” orbit of the postwar “program era,” where they have been received benevolently as pluralist or multiculturalist expressions of a post-Civil Rights moment of political liberation. 2 Most of these novels have received a number of prestigious literature prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize (Morrison and Walker) and the Nobel Prize (Morrison), while they have also fared very well on the commercial book markets, as their impressive sales numbers and their rankings on representative bestseller lists confirm. 3 The majority of these texts are concerned with characters who belong to minority communities and whose central preoccupation it is to define and defend who they are; they introduce readers to their ancestral cultures, often from autobiographical narrative viewpoints; in short, identity fiction is an umbrella term for literature that is interested in the specificity of culture, as it were, and in the question why the idea of a so-called culture is worth protecting or at least worth acknowledging - often against the constraints of other, more dominant cultural or social-political formation, such as the nation-state, traditional family-hierarchies, and corresponding gender stereotypes and their implied political norms. The notion that the specificity of literature has to do with the uniqueness of the culture from which it originates and which it reflects is of course not new. The idea started to attract attention as part of the expressive nationalism that influenced both European and American Romanticism - prominent examples include Herder’s conception of Völker, Hegel’s philosophy of art, or, a little later, the Transcendentalist conception of the poet as a mediator of a true (national) self. 4 These ideas where appropriated and re-defined strategically at certain moments in US literary history. We may think of the Harlem Renaissance writers and the New Negro Movement during the 1920s 2 See Mark McGurl’s influential discussion of “high cultural pluralism” in his The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2009) 58-65. For good overviews on multiculturalism in the US see Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford UP, 2009). 3 For an instructive discussion of middleclass literary markets in the US see Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Readers in eth Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011). 4 See, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit.” 1774. Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787. Ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994) 9-108; Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 1830. Vol. 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”. 1844. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Mary Oliver (New York: The Modern Library, 2000) 287- 306. The most comprehensive discussion of that tradition is offered in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989). See especially pages 355-391. A collection of important American contributions to the topic is offered in Richard Ruland, ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature from Bradford to Whitman (New York: Dutton, 1976). Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 151 and, a few decades later, the artists and intellectuals engaged in the Black Nationalist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. 5 Despite this long and powerful tradition, however, identity fiction did not attain critical authority as a genre before the 1960s, and its commercial breakthrough occurred even later, during the 1980s and early 1990s. It seems persuasive to read the rise of identity fiction as an aesthetically filtered response to the political upheavals that took place during the 1960s and early 1970s. This social-expressionist explanation becomes even more persuasive, however, in conjunction with a second, intra-academic perspective: What helped to promote additionally the success story of identity-centered literatures was the emergence of what we may call ‘reading for difference,’ a new type of interpretive practice that came about with the advent of deconstruction in America and its academic standardization in English Departments during the 1980s and 1990s. Deconstruction and related reader-centered theory paradigms helped to establish a well-respected theory arsenal that seemed ideally applicable to political claims for minority representation and the acknowledgement of cultural difference. While claims for minority representation became increasingly powerful during the postwar decades, they had little appeal to people other than those interested in the political nature of these claims. The academic institutionalization of difference as a distinct reading goal translated the political program of postwar identity debates into critically authoritative theory options within the high cultural spheres of the university. To be sure, the rise of identity fiction during the postwar decades coincided historically and also reflected US social history in the 1960s; identitarian fictions became part of a critically powerful and coherent genre, however, mostly as a consequence of the rise of literary theory in US academic reading cultures. And the consecration of these literatures at the academy, in turn, boosted the persuasiveness of their political appeals. II. Identitarian Paradoxes Traditional views on American postwar culture favor reading the production of postwar literature as expressive responses to the general political atmosphere of the time. These views share the belief that the political liberation of America, reflected for example by the G.I. Bill in 1944, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, or the Higher Education Act in 1965, produced corresponding literary or cultural responses in the form of so-called minority literatures, the parallel rise of feminism, and queer literature after and before Stone Wall. This is a story of progress included in many of the ASA presidential addresses since at least the early 1980s. The same belief has informed the editorial policies of the Heath and Norton Anthologies; 5 A popular account of this trajectory can be found in Nathan Huggins’ seminal Harlem Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1971). An updated scholarly debate about the forms of Black Nationalism is included in Manning Marable ed., The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies (Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 152 P hiliPP l öffler it provides for the underlying script of The Portable 1960s Reader, edited by Ann Charters; and there are a number of prominent monographs, such as Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Spontaneity, that employ similar arguments to insist on the social-political nature of literary conceptual progress. The idea that conjoins these different examples is that the events of the 1960s were transmitted somehow coherently into corresponding literary styles and movements. However persuasive such causal explanations of literary change seem, they also perpetuate a universalistic model of historical progress that reduces the peculiarities of American literary culture in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to a mere reproduction of a larger historical movement that critics still associate with the political shiftsin the wake of the Civil Rights movement. This claim that there must be a necessary rather than only coincidental connection between literary production and social history has remained popular ever since, despite the fact that it produces viewpoints that are barely empirically provable. A brief anecdote will suffice to illustrate the continued relevance of this idea and its paradoxical logic. When Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Terry Tempest Williams, and other intellectuals and writers were arrested in Washington, D.C. in 2003 after protesting the invasion of Iraq - they overran a police line - it seemed only logical to some news commentators that their joint agenda must have been the plausible result or at least an expression of their prior literary careers. The reasons why this connection seemed very likely was that these women’s careers had also always been considered proactivist in their own individual ways, and for the press this meant simply minority-sensitive and hence subversive in a very crude, unspecified way. This sense of group coherence was construed on the basis of the writers’ shared opposition against American foreign politics, an opposition, however, that had nothing to do with the particularity of their work as ethnic or feminist writers. In fact, the identity-specific differences of their individual works did not matter at all, as Alice Walker herself claimed in an interview with Democracy Now: I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves. 6 The problem that readers might find here is not the fact that Walker abandons her commitment to cultural particularity and difference in favor of the vision of one world family, although this move alone seems illogical and politically dubious - being an African-American middle-class woman in the US with a respectable literary reputation is everything but the same as being a woman in Iraq sheltering against US military air raids. The more disturbing aspect concerns the retroactive assumption - conveyed through several news channels and activist media platforms - that being African-American, 6 http: / / www.democracynow.org/ 2003/ 3/ 10/ alice_walker_maxine_hong_kingston_ medea. Website last accessed September 6, 2015. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 153 queer, or feminist would naturally entail the same political stance towards American foreign politics. If this claim were true, we would have to assume that membership of culturally and socially disenfranchised communities - for example, African-Americans or homosexuals - creates inevitable bonds and political alliances in areas that have nothing at all to do with the commitments that group membership in these communities requires. The anecdote used here to illustrate the analogy between politics and literature matches the invention of identity fiction as a genre category in at least two respects: in the suggested belief in a historical necessity and in its consequent projection of group coherence among the individual writers. There is a sense that these writers - ethnic writers, feminist writers, and queer writers - share something despite the fact that they share relatively little, if anything at all. The notion that their literature addresses the same kind of problem requires the belief that the experience of being Asian-American at the West Coast - as in the case of Maxine Hong Kingston - is the same as or at least is somehow comparable to being African-American and growing up in Ohio - as in the case of Toni Morrison. While this seems quite hard to imagine, the mechanisms that allow for such moments of imagined solidarity are supported vigorously by many proponents of identity fiction. In a well-known interview with Shelly Fisher-Fishkin, Maxine Hong Kinston contends that she finds it so “freeing” not to be “constrained by just one ethnic group or one gender” and that reading Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams makes her “feel that I can now write as a man, I can write as a black person, as a white person; I don’t have to be restricted by time and physicality.” 7 The claim that as an Asian-American writer “I can write as a black person” is, to be sure, thought-provoking and exciting. But the vision of an identitarian choice it proposes can hardly be logically and politically defended. The commitment to an individual subject position, for example, as an ethnic writer, as a feminist, or as a vegetarian, becomes meaningful only by acknowledging that any other standpoint can at the same time never be just as valuable as one’s own. 8 The point of The Woman Warrior (1976), for example, is precisely that Kingston’s feminist program - her creation of a “strong woman persona” 9 - is inspired by her experience of growing up in California in a typically Chinese-American immigrant family with a laundry shop. The novel-memoir’s message is that growing up in this particular family and under these particular circumstances was crucial for the protagonist’s developing of an individualized sense of self-hood and identity. The snippets of Chinese history and the history of the Kingston family that are offered throughout the book are crucial in that they delineate a unique form of cultural life in the US. These memories and anecdotes have a specific function within this book, 7 Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” American Literary History 3.4 (Winter 1991), 789. 8 This point is fleshed out in great detail in K. Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005). See in particular Chapter 4, “The Trouble with Culture,” 114-153. 9 Fisher-Fishkin, “Interview,” 784. 154 P hiliPP l öffler and they cannot easily be replaced by any other history. This sense of particularity is also what the protagonist in Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (1990), Wittman Ah Sing, grapples with, as he muses: “So what do we have in the way of a culture besides Chinese hand laundries? You might make a joke on that - something about ‘What’s the difference between Chinese hand laundry and a French laundry? ’ Where’s our Jazz? Where’s our Blues? Where is our ain’t-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street strutting language.” 10 Novels such as Tripmaster Monkey (and other identitarian fictions) seek to define and even protect moments of cultural difference to maintain the integrity of the identitarian self. As a consequence of this ambition, these novels often convey a sense of intimacy that is very much determined by time and physicality, that is, by feeling, smelling, and touching, by bodily sensations in general. Readers experience the physicality of identitarian belonging and origin in descriptions of specific places and buildings, of food flavors and regional cuisine recipes, and - prominently in the post-slavery historical novel - of psychological and physical injuries and the resulting wounds. The specificity of time and space is central to these books, which, paradoxically, is also what challenges traditional explanations of why identity fiction has become successful as a literary genre. The larger political thesis associated with the rise of identity fiction - that the genre emerged mainly in response to the political 1960s - is plausible only if one downplays the genre’s central preoccupation, its commitment to particularity, such as ethnic origin, the originality of home, particular sexual preferences, and gender scripts. The more general consequence would then be - at least from a theoretical point of view - that insisting on the specificity of one’s ethnic background (for example, “I am African-American”) is just as useful as insisting on one’s culinary preferences (for example, “I am vegetarian”). What would remain is a very abstract and non-specific notion of difference, bereft of distinct ethical and political valences. III. The Rise of Literary Theory A viable starting point for thinking about an alternative explanation for the rise of identity fiction is Kenneth Warren’s What was African American Literature? (2011). Warren has suggested that the legal and political imperatives determined by the Jim Crow era created the “collective Project we recognize as African American literature” and that with the demise of Jim Crow - and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement - occurred the erosion of African-American literature as a historically coherent project. 11 African-American literature - and other minority literatures - have of course not been eroded with the beginnings of the Civil Rights era. Warren’s book may be too deliberately provocative about this point. And yet his claim is 10 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 27. 11 Kenneth Warren, What was African-American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 7. Warren’s book is discussed at length in a PMLA forum on What was African- American Literature. See PMLA 128.2 (Spring 2013): 386-408. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 155 important in as much as it alerts attention to a significant, yet often disregarded institutional shift in the organization of ethnic literatures since the 1960s. African-American and other minority literatures were transposed onto a level of theoretical debate at the University during the 1960s and 1970s, where to stake claim to a particular identity gradually became part of a struggle for symbolic scholarly capital, rather than social or political recognition. In other words, Warren’s book is helpful for showing how the social and legal constraints produced and maintained during the Jim Crow era were appropriated and re-described as hallmarks of pluralism within the diversity-sensitive English Departments of the post-Civil Rights university. Particular scholarly standpoints may of course also be at the same time political standpoints - we may only think of Marxist literary criticism. Yet with the rise of the postwar university, the mechanisms needed to secure the connection between “the culture of the school,” 12 on the one hand, and national political culture, on the other, attained increased authority from within the disciplinary confines of academic English Studies itself. More specifically, what secured this connection between the school and national politics was a host of professional reading practices whose practitioners - English professors and other university-affiliated critics - reproduced the logic of academic study much rather than the struggle for political liberation. Following this historical trajectory, we may explain the emergence of identity fiction as a stable generic category in the context of literary theoretical debates that occurred in the US during the 1960s and 1970s. The rise and pluralization of literary theory in the US was a mostly university-based development evolving in part as a reaction against the hegemony of the New Critics and in part as a continuation of continental critical theory that began to shape US academic landscapes in the 1960s. An iconic event illustrating the dynamics of this shift is the international Humanities conference that took place under the title “Critical Languages and the Science of Man” at the newly founded Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966. The conference - featuring a congregation of European philosopher’s and anthropologists that included Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida - produced a clash of academic cultures that would prove to shape the theory worlds in the US and Europe in decisive ways. Derrida, who presented his seminal paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” later said that “what is now called ‘theory’ in this country may have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966.” 13 Even if Derrida’s claim overstates the importance of academic debates, the Johns Hopkins moment was a game-changing event in that it established a gateway for French continental philosophy into the US academic system. The invention of theory, its early consecration at such universities as Johns Hopkins and Yale and the subsequent founding 12 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 37. 13 Quoted in Richard Macksey ed., The Strcuturalist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), x. 156 P hiliPP l öffler of prominent theory journals such as New Literary History (1969), Diacritics (1971), Critical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Glyph (1978), or Representations (1983) led to the proliferation of new literary-theoretical terms and concepts - “difference,” “play,” “intertextuality,” “palimpsest” - that had immediate authority within the US academic system. These terms combined avant-garde prestige with a sense that traditional, new critical modes of reading were exhausted. As Jonathan Arac recalls, reflecting on his early attraction to New Literary History as a new platform for critical theory: A big part of what “theory” meant in New Literary History, and more broadly in conversations that the journal helped foster and that burgeoned in the seventies and continued into the eighties, was the possibility of thinking in ways that would necessarily interest colleagues in different fields of specialization. Each issue, and the sequence of issues, of New Literary History modeled the sort of ongoing exchange among very diverse interests and perspectives, brought together by common puzzles and hopes, that made so memorable the spontaneously organized and voluntarily sustained “theory discussion groups” that for some twenty years formed so characteristic and important a part of the American literary academy. 14 Moreover, these journals served the “need of evaluation,” 15 according to Jeffrey Williams, that the expanding postwar university system created and they helped to maintain the integrity of research universities as semi-autonomous educational institutions. 16 As another consequence of the theory boom in postwar Humanities Departments during the 1970s and 1980s: theory did not only develop into a field of its own, but the critical jargon it fostered also became a vital element in the academic legitimization of African-American studies, of Queer Studies, of Women’s Studies, or Postcolonial Studies, while it also reaffirmed their presumed political programs as oppositional and/ or interventionist movements. The academic texts produced in these contexts looked similar, seeking to account for both the current state of theory and the significance of the historical moment. Henry Louis Gates’ “Signifying Monkey” is a striking example to illustrate the assumed reciprocity of academic discourse and political world: 14 Jonathan Arac, “Reckoning with New Literary History,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009), 707. 15 Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Rise of the Theory Journal,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009), 694. 16 As Williams explains: “The theory journal exemplified both the openness and closedness of the American university. For its part, theory spurred myriad new versions of critical work, at the same time that it made literature more apt for research. Theory was productive, and also incorporative, bringing new cohorts, from feminists to Marxists to semioticians, into literary studies. It was a strength of the American university of the time that it abetted and held contradictory forces - the general and the specialized, the public and the private, the political and the technical, opposition and accommodation - in productive tension. That tension informed the theory journal, which absorbed radical politics as well as hermeneutics and the ruminations of the seminar room. At the same time that some versions of theory turned a merciless critical eye on the state, theory affirmed the freedom of thought of American higher education. The theory journal celebrated, perhaps more than anything, innovation” (“Theory Journal,” 695). Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 157 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey - he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language - is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasm itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. 17 The passage highlights in exemplary fashion the way that Gates appropriates and strategically redeploys the idea of ethnic marginality. Marginality is presented both as a social problem that really defines life in the African- American community and thus requires political attention and as a theoretical problem that requires scholarly attention, and the argument Gates makes suggests that both sides are logically connected. The plight of racial segregation is turned into a thought-provoking move on the field of literary theory. 18 The success of Gates’ “Signifying Monkey” had to do with his critical-political bilingualism, that is, his ability to satisfy high theory aficionados without giving up his commitment as a politically engaged African-American. His essay was both politically and theoretically challenging and did not compromise either of the two sides. An almost identical sense of reciprocity - politics on the one hand, discourse on the other - has inspired the academic invention of several other minority literatures - prominently postcolonial literature and criticism - that all in their own ways explore the limits of subjectpositioning on the basis of terms, such as difference, hybridity, subalterity, or the abject. Of course Derrida’s idea of play or difference could not be further apart from Gates’ idea of difference and marginality, or Gayatry Spivak’s concept of subalterity. In most cases, the application of Derridian and Foucauldean vocabularies has produced the opposite of what deconstruction and poststructuralism were originally intended to be about: unresolved ambiguity and textual difference as a problem of literary interpretation and hermeneutics in general rather than ultimate interpretive goals. The linearity and teleology of reading demanded by traditional hermeneutical standards was thus reproduced in the allegorization of textual difference as a rather homogenous political message about cultural pluralism that everybody could agree with. This sense of agreement gradually replaced the sense of difference and openness and instead promoted an increasingly attractive theory world where food preferences became ultimately synonymous with the individuality of ethnic belonging, where difference in its originally Derridean sense had turned into institutionalized moments of sameness and coherence. 17 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9.4 (June 1983), 686. 18 One may also wonder whether Gates’ essay would have been published in Critical Inquiry in 1983 as a straightforward political manifesto - we may think of Amiri Baraka’s “Revolutionary Theater” as a counter example - had it not also been equipped so carefully with high-end literary theory. 158 P hiliPP l öffler IV. The Logic of Practice Tracing the emergence of identify fiction along the political liberation of America in the Civil Rights era creates inevitable contradictions. An alternative would therefore be to discuss the rise of identity fiction as reflecting a shift in the logic of academic practice that occurred parallel but not necessarily in response to the post-Civil Rights era. If the coherence suggested by identity as a conceptual category is the result of a particular scholarly reading habit, the goal must be to clarify why and on what grounds this category could become meaningful and influential. This requires replacing the universalist perspective proposed by social-political historiography with a field-specific perspective that combines science-historical models of conceptual change with theories typically identified with the so called “practice turn” in the social sciences. 19 In that sense, we could read events, such as the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966, or the “rise of the theory journal” (Williams) as institutionally specific moments of conceptual change, conditioning the production of new “puzzle solving strategies” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the term, methods of scientific sense-making created to account for a specific understanding of academic practice. 20 The literary history of the postwar period may thus be described accordingly as the product of a system of competing reading and writing rules that define the structures of the field and the work of its practitioners - by authorizing new scholarly moves when necessary and by making other moves obsolete. Most importantly, these rules are field-specific. Their authority reflects academic fashions and scientific rituals rather than the centrality of particular historical events. A powerful example would be the institutional history of US literature departments in the postwar decades and their collective grappling with and eventual turn away from the reading paradigms set by the New Criticism. The term practice, then, helps to describe a habitualized and incorporated understanding of performance that enables literary critics to position themselves within their community as well as to talk about and thus authorize 19 Andreas Reckwitz usefully distinguishes “practice theories” from classical theories of social (inter)action with their mentalist or materialist basis, defining “practice” (Praktik) as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz “Social Practices,” 249). 20 Kuhn explains that scientific communities perform irrational and non-linear techniques of adaptation. They automatically develop and habitualize the use of new analytical tools in response to a situation in which common puzzle-solving vocabularies cease to work successfully “[…], the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should.” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 67-68. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 159 their work. Practice, in this sense, is neither the enactment of a pure idea, that is, an intentional move nor a mere reaction triggered by the externality of political or social environments. As Bourdieu put it in the Logic of Practice: Just as a mature artistic style is not contained, like a seed, in an original inspiration but is continuously defined and redefined in the dialectic between the objectifying intention and the already objectified intention, so too the unity of meaning which, after the event, may seem to have preceded the acts and works announcing the final significance, retrospectively transforming the various stages of the temporal series into mere preparatory sketches, is constituted through the confrontation between questions that only exist in and for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes and the solutions obtained through application of these very schemes. 21 The crucial point of this passage concerns what Bourdieu labels “questions” - which is what Kuhn calls “puzzles.” Practices are developed to cope with a cluster of questions that is meaningful only to experts - they “only exist for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes.” Specialists have acquired an internalized sense of their professional identity that automatically guides them to apply schemes successfully, that is, in accordance with the field’s internal demands and regulations. If we expand on the metaphor of a sports game and the relevant playing field, the literary critic could be viewed as a player who reacts intuitively to the entirety of a game situation. For example: when the shortstop of a baseball team induces a double play, he usually does not think about the individual components his fielding procedure requires, he does not ponder heavy metaphysical questions before stepping on second base and then firing the ball over to first. The shortstop activates a series of physical reactions that are ideally suited to handling the game situation as a whole. Moreover, the reactions of the baseball player make only sense within the limits of the baseball field. No one is interested in the fielding skills of a shortstop outside the realm of baseball. Such internalized rules and the possibility of their immediate application are just as central to the business of literary criticism and the methods used to maintain the integrity of the field. For example, many scholars would agree that Toni Morrison is a good choice for a class on contemporary American literature, yet they would feel less inclined to include Stephen King on their reading lists. Few academics in the contemporary English Department would interpret the meaning of a literary text as the expression of the author’s intention, whereas a good deal of criticism featured in daily newspapers judges literary works on account of exactly that connection. And while theory-minded PhD-students may deem it necessary to explore the primitivist discourse in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the general public may simply enjoy the novel’s authentic exotic setting. There are no definite rulebooks that literary scholars could consult comparable to little kids as they learn to play soccer or baseball. Yet there are a number of institutional procedures that may be read as fulfilling the same 21 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Social Practice (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1977), 55. 160 P hiliPP l öffler function as a baseball rulebook, mechanisms that standardize preferred reading practices, while at the same time excluding others. On a very basic level, these distinctions are established in undergraduate methodology classes and introductory lectures dealing with the history of criticism and the evolution of the field as a whole. Students learn about the “intentional fallacy,” the “death of the author,” or “subaltern identity” not only because these are relevant concepts within the academic study of literature, but also because these concepts solidify a particular history of theory as the backbone of the discipline in general. There are also larger mechanisms, however, that define and structure the field in as much as they create exemplary moments of institutional self-legitimation. In his seminal essay “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement,” (1979) Gene Wise uses a theatrical metaphor to describe these processes of self-legitimization. He borrows Kuhn’s notion of paradigm not just to describe a field-specific pattern of thoughts; he speaks of “paradigm dramas” in particular to illustrate “more fundamentally, an actual instance of that pattern of thinking in action.” 22 Using Wise’s understanding of drama, one could interpret Sacvan Bercovitch’s appointment as the chief editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature as one amongst several other notable institutional events that helped to turn identity into the major conceptual category in contemporary literary criticism. In 1986, Bercovitch’s reminder that we acknowledge the “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History” 23 was still considered a visionary intervention, addressing a community of Americanists that had long been deeply entrenched in an academic field dominated by Matthiessen’s holistic notion of literary Americaness. Today, the paradigm shift proclaimed in “The Problem of Ideology” is well established: literature departments have diversity committees now to endorse the representation of cultural minorities; there are genderand ethnicity-specific teaching positions, revised academic curricula, and new literary anthologies. Historically, however, the example of Bercovitch remains central for understanding how the introduction and subsequent institutionalization of new reading “schemes” and “puzzle solving strategies” has generated the possibility of advertizing identity as an important label - even if the actual literature that this label helped to classify had little more in common than an overly abstract understanding of cultural difference. The Cambridge History project assembled a host of promising English professors under the auspices of Bercovitch, all institutionally trained in the late 1970s and early 1980s and thus equipped with the latest trends offered in the Anglo-American and continental theory world. All of them had internalized the lesson that the dominance of the New Critics had to be broken and they were simultaneously aware that the hegemony of the American 22 Gene Wise, “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 297. 23 Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12. 4 (1986): 631-653. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 161 nation-state needed to be challenged in the name of sub-national ethnic and religious minorities. As Janice Radway claimed a few years later in her address (and now variously anthologized text) as president of the American Studies Association at the ASA convention in Seattle in 1998: “America is not a unified, homogenous thing” 24 - and she proposes an alternative view in which the idea of America as a homogenous, coherent entity can be replaced by a hybrid space of de-centered, constantly shifting identities. This new view “suggests that […] territories and geographies need to be reconceived as spatially situated and intricately intertwined networks of social relationships that tie specific locales to particular histories.” 25 Radway’s address has become important because it functions as a retroactive consecration of three decades of revisionist literary criticism and theory and as a visionary plea for the future restructuring of the American Studies community from a transnational perspective. “What’s in a Name? ” provides an implicit affirmation of a particular institutional history in which the recent transnationalisms of the American Studies community could be read as the logical and historically necessary continuation of a left-leaning critical tradition that emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Radway alerts us to the fact that the revisionist interventions of the 1970s and 1980s have now legitimately become a discursive and institutional reality. As a key player in the field, her institutional authority helped to affirm identity as a theoretically challenging category in cultural and literary studies and as the necessary starting point for an academic political intervention, a very efficient puzzle-solving tool in the best sense of the term. V. Conclusion Academic puzzle-solving strategies, such as reading habits, remain fieldspecific in most of the cases. And yet it is a fact that N.Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston and many other identity writers have gained recognition by large numbers of people outside the university. They have received prizes whose cultural prestige notably evades the institutional arena of the academy, and the enormous sales figures of books, like Beloved, The Color Purple, House made of Dawn, and so many more depend primarily on the influence of an expanding middleclass readership, and not on departmental reading lists, syllabi, or course programs. 26 Is this a 24 Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? ,” The Futures of American Studies, eds. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke UP, 2002) 54. 25 Radway, “What’s in a Name? ,” 58. 26 In most prominent cases, such as the New York Times Book Review or the London Review of Books, sales figures cannot be accurately deduced from the featured best-seller lists. These lists, in the case of the New York Times, for example, are based on “sales of both print books and e-books” that “are reported confidentially to The New York Times.” See http: / / www.nytimes.com/ best-sellers-books/ . Other newspapers adhere to a similar policy, in order to protect authors and to avoid compromising the system itself. Based on the huge number of bookstores and other book retailers that bestseller lists 162 P hiliPP l öffler contradiction? The academic reception of many identity fictions is grounded in a set of rather complicated arguments about the legacies of postmodernism, while their non-academic reception depends on the rise of a rather broad and decidedly non-academic middle-class audience. This may seem like a contradiction at first sight, but the novels in question in fact accommodate both reader communities. The typical middle-class Oprah audience reads Toni Morrison, for example, as the result of an acquired taste standard which is defined by the seeming moral responsibility to keep oneself updated about one’s own problematic national history and the artistic excellence represented by the Nobel prize (or any other prestigious award). Both aspects are combined in public figures like Oprah, who navigate easily between daytime television and the higher spheres of culture that seems to be expressed by the structural and thematic difficulties of Morrison’s texts. 27 Likewise, Morrison is aware of the intricacies of her novels. She knows that a serious engagement of her work requires a border crossing from a typically non-academic Oprah context and day-time television to a heavily theory induced readership in English Departments. This necessity of border-crossing became conspicuous prominently as Morrison invited Oprah Winfrey and a group of selected guests to Princeton to discuss Paradise, a book that within the regular Oprah frame had not produced the expected results: it was not life changing, it was no revelation. Instead people claimed that the book was hardly accessible, and that they did not get it. The Princeton episode, then, is structured around a moment of initiation, whose power consists precisely in the denial of ultimate meaning and truth. Morrison insists on the ambiguity of Paradise - she is unclear about many aspects, such as the narrative structure, the non-identity of the colored woman mentioned at the beginning, or the underlying structure of the exodus narrative. And in that way she forces her audience into reading for difference, for ambiguity, and openness. Her insisting on a reading for difference thus conjoins two very different reader communities are based on, however, it is safe to speak of “large” or “enormous” sales as soon as a book appears in the New York Times Book Review or Publishers’ Weekly. Moreover, the economic success of a book is determined not by its sales prior to a list appearance but by the marketing machinery set off after it appeared as a bestseller, as Laura J. Miller explains: “Currently, once a book makes the Times list, the achievement is trumpeted in all further promotional material, the book is sought out by readers who habitually read best-seller lists, and it is given special treatment by retailers.” Laura J. Miller, “The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction,” Book History Vol.3, ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose (University Park: Penn State UP: 2000), 295. 27 For an instructive discussion of Morrison’s therapeutic value in contemporary American reader communities, see Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011), 43- 70. For the competing Morrison audiences, see Michael Perry, “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jamie Harker (Albany: State U of New York P, 2008) 119-140. See also Günter Leypoldt’s essay in this volume. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 163 and corresponding uses of literature: the hermeneutical resistance in the world of Oprah is presented as the ticket into the major leagues of reading in Morrison’s Princeton world. Even though academic reading branches out into other fields of cultural production, the reason why the label identity fiction works as a genre description has as much do with external projections of authenticity and epistemological desire, that is, the wish to really know what a text means, as it has with the uses of these text within academic contexts of reading. 28 Understood as an overarching genre label, identity fiction hinges on an institutionally sanctioned practice of reading; identity fiction make sense, because scholars in the literary studies world are familiar with and correctly apply the relevant puzzle-solving strategies. They know when and how to use terms and phrases, such as “hybridity,” “subversion of traditional modes of signification”, or “liminal space of subaltern identity”. At the same time, this sense of coherence has relatively little to do with the ideal meaning of the individual novels that scholars read, even though the question of meaning remains an important theoretical problem. Scholars do not have to be willing to engage in a discussion of what Beloved truly means or what The House on Mango Street’s real message is to produce a convincing, innovative reading of these texts. Reading practices are reflections of a discipline’s relative state of self-administration; they provide no indication of how close scholars are to the best reading possible, and they also never only represent a general political climate or social system. One might still wonder whether it was really only a peculiar coincidence that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and Derrida came to Johns Hopkins in 1966. Can one legitimately keep theory production and social history distinct from one another? In order to account for the simultaneity of both developments, the upheavals in US social history during the 1960s, on the one hand, and the formation of identity fiction, on the other, it seems useful to acknowledge their historical proximity, the fact that there is a very conspicuous temporal overlapping between the two fields. Precisely because this proximity seems so seductive it is also necessary to focus attention on the fact that - despite this historical proximity - the turns in social history will never exactly reproduce the turns in the history of reading. 29 The history of reading and the history of social politics are distinct from one another because they follow different rules of practice. And yet these histories seem 28 The reciprocity between a form-centered hermeneutics of literature and an institutional history of different reading contexts is explained with great clarity in the “Introduction” to Stanley Fish’s Is there a Text in this Class? . See Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980) 1-19. 29 As Amy Hungerford has argued for the appropriation of 1989 as a condition for the final success of identity literature and as a period marker: “Political watersheds are one thing, but cultural or aesthetic ones quite another, and it was not immediately clear - nor was it clear now - that, to borrow a turn of phrase from Virginia Woolf, literature changed, even if the world did, on 9 November 1989.[…] On the American scene, pluralism defined the moment; in the international scene, sectarianism; in both cases, identities seemed to be at stake. But if, in Bosnia, your identity could get you 164 P hiliPP l öffler to be connected so intimately because different types of practices may occur - and in fact often do occur - in socially, politically, and institutionally adjacent fields. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Arac, Jonathan. “Reckoning with New Literary History,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009): 703-711. Aubry, Timothy. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12. 4 (1986): 631-653. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Social Practice. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1977. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Readers in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet”. 1844. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Mary Oliver. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. 287-306. Fish, Stanley. Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston.” American Literary History 3.4 (Winter 1991): 782-791. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9.4 (June 1983): 685-723. Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Gutman Amy, ed. Multiculturalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 1830. Vol. 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit”. 1774. Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787. Ed. Jürgen Brummack und Martin Bollacher. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. 9-108. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary”. American Literary History 20.1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 410-419. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Macksey, Richard, ed. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. killed, in America it seemed, your identity could get you published.” Amy Hungerford, “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20.1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 410. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 165 Marable, Manning, ed. The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies. Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Miller, Laura J. “The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History Vol.3, ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose. University Park: Penn State UP, 2000: 295-304. Perry, Michael. “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey.” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jamie Harker. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008: 119-140. PMLA Forum: What was African-American Literature? . PMLA 128.2 (Spring 2013): 386-408. Radway, Janice. “What’s in a Name? ,” The Futures of American Studies. Ed. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 45-75. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5.2 (Summer 2002): 243-263. Ruland, Richard, ed. The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature from Bradford to Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1976. Schatzki, Theodore. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: Penn State UP, 2002. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Warren, Kenneth. What was African-American Literature? . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Wise, Gene. “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 293-337. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Theory Journal.” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009): 683-702.