Jerome McGann
All the instruments agree that the day of its birth was a bright warm day. And all of us who learned to use Critical Inquiry during the next fifty years – to read it, to write for it – agree that it was a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps I’ve been asked to testify now to that truth universally acknowledged because I am one of the few persons still around who was also there when CI was founded.
Elizabeth Helsinger was there too, and she will have a store of memories to draw on. But Elizabeth came to Chicago in 1972, six years after I arrived and just as Shelly Sacks was beginning to lay final plans for founding the journal. So her memories might be slightly and, I’m sure, quite different from mine.
For instance, when the first issue of Critical Inquiry was published in late 1974 I was thinking about leaving the university (in 1975 I did). It was a move I seriously did not want to make but, for personal reasons, felt I might have to. My years at Chicago had radically altered how I thought about myself as an educator and a scholar, and I was – still am – deeply committed to what happened to me there. So the first issue of CI brought my love of the university into an unusually clear – an unusually critical – focus.
The issue featured Wayne Booth’s inquiry, commissioned by CI’s editor (Shelly Sacks), into “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing.” When the essay was sent to Burke for a “response”, he delivered what Shelly called a “counterblast.” I still remember Shelly’s exact word because it so wittily echoed Burke’s first collection of essays, Counter-Statement (1931). And I recall as well how happy he was in the event. For Shelly, Burke’s “counterblast” to Wayne’s critical inquiry completed an “exciting intellectual exchange” that he had hoped would be the hallmark of the new journal. More to his immediate point, it was, as he wrote in the journal’s first editorial note, a “significant commentary on how one great critic sees himself and on how he is seen by one of his most sensitive admirers.” The exchange for Shelly was a dramatic ( = very Burkean) demonstration of intellectual perplexities abounding. Here were two serious men committed to learning about ways of knowing and who wanted to let us know – happily for us, not so happily for them – that they had a lot yet to learn. For a reader even today, their exchange remains provocative and enlightening in the rich sense that Burke gave to the word “negative”.[1]
Although I’m inflecting that inaugural CI event in Burkean terms, in 1974 it seemed to me, as it still seems to me, echt University of Chicago. I see it that way because of two salient matters of fact that are also personal matters of fact. First of all – Wayne mentions it in his essay – Burke and the “Chicago School of Criticism” had long been in spirited intellectual disputes about what the Chicago School called “Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern.”[2] As a second generation Chicago School critic, Wayne’s essay was a move to reconcile some of the differences between Chicago and Burke. Second, the history of the relations between Burke and the Chicago School was much on my mind when I joined the UofC English faculty in 1966.
In 1961 I had written a long MA thesis at Syracuse University on the disputes between The Chicago School and the New Critics where I came down strongly on the side of New Criticism.[3] More to the point, my view was shaped almost entirely by Kenneth Burke, whose books were sacred texts for me, especially The Philosophy of Symbolic Form. Studies in Symbolic Action (1941). Four years as a PhD student at Yale (1962-66) when The Yale School was in serious liftoff, I had made Romanticism my chief scholastic interest. But it had not changed Burke’s importance for me or my views about the special formalism of the Chicago School. So when I arrived at UofC in 1966 the book most on my mind was Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action (1966), just being published by University of California Press.
During the next ten years at Chicago everything changed for me because I was plunged into the day-to-day context – the practical educational scene – that had shaped the approach of the Chicago School. This was the set of first year Common Core humanities courses I was required to teach and that many of the established faculty, not least Wayne and Shelly, had been running every year for many years. It was one thing to know about Chicago’s Common Core as a set of formal approaches to the study of Great Works of Culture. It was something else again to experience it as an ongoing project of undergraduate education.
When you were assigned to those courses, the first and most enduring thing you discovered was that you would be learning them, not teaching them. That discovery was, I’m sure, what made so many on the Chicago faculty choose to/want to run them again themselves every year. Knowledge was not what an instructor came to these courses to deliver or what a student would be taking away. Trials of learning, the courses were designed to give and take habits of attention and ways of knowing as always also ways of unknowing.
Truly, what else was even possible in a ten-week seminar that took up a sequence of works like the following: Genesis; The Peloponnesian War; Orestia; War and Peace; Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution. The next year the texts might swap out Genesis for the Gospel of Matthew; and/or Thucydides for Herodotus, Aeschylus for Plato, The Russian Revolution for The Education of Henry Adams (War and Peace was de rigeur). And in later years (after 1968) the last unit in the course often took up more current works like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. That was Hum II. Hum I was different though no less designed to make positive knowledge and academic expertise secondary concerns. In 1966 I was assigned a Hum I section where we were to wrangle major works of art, music and literature that appeared between 1848 and 1918. But the object in Hum II would be the same in Hum I: to try to think about what you were doing accurately and to try to discuss what you were doing clearly.
Was the “content” of those courses important? Yes, but rather in the way that Rilke let us know an archaic torso of Apollo might be important for an educational project like the Common Core. An archaic torso like War and Peace or The Peloponnesian War were there to watch and watch over your helpless seeing and to take the measure of your cultural longings: “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht”. That’s why, each year and each term, these courses would turn out, as Gertrude Stein might say, “beginning again and again”. Because each year, each term, we would be called to reprise the event of the previous years in, so to say, a new key or new arrangements. We reprised: that’s to say, everyone in those classes, where the distinction between instructor and instructed was constantly being turned around. When you graduated or, like myself, left Chicago, what many of us came away with was the ethos of the Common Core.
CI was born from that splendid educational ethos.
Jerome McGann is professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and has published many articles in the journal.
[1] Burke’s “dramatic” schema for parsing symbolic action and his reflections on Language’s negative spaces (“motivated” and “spontaneous”) are pervasive. Part III of Language as Symbolic Action is probably the single best place to watch him “in action” – that is, to follow what he is doing in saying what he says. And while as a negative dialectician (like Nagarjuna) he never explicitly wrote that A = A iff A ≠ A, that seems to me the premise underlying all of his work.
[2] That was the title of the polemical set of essays collected and edited by Ronald S. Crane.
[3] Jerome McGann, “Neo-Aristotelian Versus New Critical: A Study in the Nature of Critical Disputes” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1961).
In the Moment 