Lisa Ruddick

"These days nothing in English is 'cool' in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole. Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of 'hatred' in criticism. Also salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from 'critique' into 'critical barbarity,' giving 'cruel treatment' to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern. Rita Felski’s current work on the state of criticism has reenergized the conversation on the punitive attitudes encouraged by the hermeneutics of suspicion. And Susan Fraiman’s powerful analysis of the 'cool male' intellectual style favored in academia is concerned with many of the same patterns I consider here. I hope to show that the kind of thinking these scholars, among others, have criticized has survived the supposed death of theory. More, it encourages an intellectual sadism that the profession would do well to reflect on." http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool

"I've become aware of a key intellectual trick or error within much, though not all, current theory that works to get students to renounce their faith in their personal capacities -- faith, forexample, in their own intuitions, in their creativity, and in their sense that simply by virtue of being human they carry a precious capacity for autonomous judgments about what is real."

"[Literary scholars are] tired of the hermeneutics of suspicion and are casting about for new approaches. On the other hand, when I hear about exciting new developments in English, I do not always feel invigorated. I happen to have an interest in some of the rising approaches (in particular, cognitive studies). But no array of stimulating new work is going to repair collective morale unless the profession faces down its ambivalence about the 'old' work that keeps going on in classrooms."

... VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE MADNESS OF LANGUAGE, by Daniel Ferrer; translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. London and New York: Routledge Publishers, 1990, 169 pp. $37.50. READING GERTRUDE STEIN: BODY, TEXT, GNOSIS, by Lisa Ruddick. ...

... Michael North. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Carla L. Peterson. ... The same thing can be said of a last piece,Rebecca Mark's wonderful introduction to her edition of Stein's Lifting Belly. ...

... this response, I wish to thank Garrick Duckler, Susan Fisher, Jim Ketelaar, Janice Knight, Patrick Moriarty, Bruce Novak, Paige Reynolds, JP ... According to Gallop, to banish expressions of sexuality from the pedagogical relationship is to let students down by banishing good teach ...

In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism, I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name: socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition, and loss.