Specialized materials.

Hall, Donald E.

Continuing the discussion that I began several years ago in this review column, I want to glance at yet another ongoing series that may be of interest to this journal's readers. Unlike previously discussed series, this one, however, does not center on monographs devoted to individual theorists or critical movements. Instead, it is comprised of volumes theft examine current critical topics within an interdisciplinary framework. Blackwell's "Manifestos" series is a somewhat diffusely conceived but certainly very interesting attempt to offer internationally known theorists and critics the opportunity to make major polemical statements in their areas of expertise. It is laudable because it allows its participants the freedom to "have their say" without much restraint, though certainly the lack of a heavy editorial hand, or even clear editorial vision, does mean that volumes can vary widely in their polish and clarity of purpose.

The series has published two or three entries per year since it began in 2000, with a total of eight to date. Unlike other series reviewed here, it does not have an assigned editor with an academic affiliation, rather it is edited out of Blackwell's own acquisitions office and has the briefest series mission statement that I have ever seen. The two-sentence series overview promises that in it "major critics [will] make timely interventions [that] address important concepts and subjects," ones that are "written accessibly and with verve and spirit, ... [and that] follow no uniform prescription but set out to engage and challenge the broadest range of readers." Some succeed admirably, others do not.

The first volume published, Terry Eagleton's The Idea of Culture (2000), is perhaps the one most in need of a bit more editorial intervention. As its title suggests, its discussion ranges widely over the concept of "culture," addressing changing definitions of the term from the Renaissance to the present. Victorian Poetry's readers will appreciate its attention to Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin in its discussion of nineteenth-century theorizations of aesthetic and cultural value. However, when one encounters the term "manifesto" printed boldly across a volume cover (as is the case with all series entries here), one at least expects a clear thesis or set of bold, polemical assertions. Eagleton's meandering book is finally held together by his rejection of postmodern identity politics, which he considers socially fragmenting, and an argument for Raymond Williams' notion of a "common culture" of "affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfillment, [and] intellectual enjoyment" (p. 131). While I find these swipes at identity politics overly broad and even insensitive, my larger criticism is that the book's purpose remains unclear for over a hundred pages. A "manifesto" should not be diffuse or opaque in intent.

Happily, the next series entry, Marjorie Perloff's 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002), does not evince these problems; indeed, it is one of the series' best volumes. Again, there is much here that will interest readers of Victorian Poetry as Perloff not only glances back on occasion to the nineteenth century but offers detailed and lovely close readings of numerous turn-of-the-century writers. Her purpose is crystal clear, as she argues for the timeliness, indeed the payoff, of modernist principles in the new poetics of the late twentieth and now twenty-first century. Of all of the volumes in the series, this one has one of the clearest and best realized interdisciplinary scopes. Perloff's superb discussion of the "conceptual poetics" of Marcel Duchamp spans the greater part of the twentieth century in its probing of interconnections between the visual and the literary. Her final chapter references that discussion, as well as the work of Eliot and Pound, in a tour-de-force examination of Steve McCaffery's art and poetry from the 1990s and its relationship to modernist theory. This is a volume that could be assigned in genre-based seminars or those devoted to twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Perloff is perhaps the best close reader of poetry writing today.

Valentine Cunningham's Reading After Theory' (2002) is also manifesto-like in its clarity of purpose and precision. Cunningham is at his best when he examines the dynamism and excitement of theory's heyday in the 1980s. He applauds the energy of most of the identity political movements that Eagleton, in his volume, finds so fragmenting and limiting. However, Cunningham traces what he identifies as an "arc" and that means, of course, that he needs to decry a dramatic decline to mirror the advances he applauds early in his volume. Unfortunately, he takes aim at queer theory generally and a prominent Victorianist, William Cohen, in particular. There is no denying the fact that cultural studies, and certainly queer studies, can be highly speculative and risk-taking. That is both its strength and weakness. Cohen's Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (1996) is a fun and useful overview of a barely suppressed, and often explicitly expressed, hysteria over sexual abnormality during the Victorian era. For Cunningham, however, it represents everything that is wrong with current theory-based readings. Indeed, Cunningham, in his final paragraph, asks for a return to "a rational, proper, moral even, respect for the primacy of text over all theorizing about text" (p. 169), a request that I find very uncomfortable given the fact that propriety and morality can encode a myriad of oppressive social power relationships. However, I do respect the fact that Cunningham's book is clearly designed as a manifesto, as its cover promises.

A different take on the same phenomenon that Cunningham discusses is offered by Jean-Michel Rabate in The Future of Theory (2002). Rabate does not impose an arc-like trajectory on theory's relevance to literary and cultural criticism. While he offers cogent analysis of the rise of identity politics and the role that psychoanalytic (specifically Lacanian) theory played in the burgeoning interest in theory in the second half of the twentieth century, he never indulges in easy swipes at what he might consider the excesses of theory-driven critique. To be sure, he recognizes that potential, mentioning critics "who are so eager to display the extent of their erudition that one finishes their books still wondering what the thesis was" (p. 71). However, Rabate's own thesis is never obscure as he wishes to celebrate theory both as intellectual contemplation and as overt socio-political engagement. Indeed, his is perhaps the most manifesto-like conclusion that I read in the series, as he maps current theory's ten "main projects" (including hybridity studies, technological criticism, and ethical criticism) and isolates six important agendas for current and fixture work in theory (including confrontations between Eastern and Western thought, and new examinations of emerging bioethical controversies in light of redefinitions of the "human"). Unlike Cunningham's, his is a polemic without a trace of nostalgia, celebrating instead theory's continuing ability to remake itself to meet new aesthetic and political challenges.

Similarly provocative and supple is Graham Ward's True Religion (2003). Through on the surface this is the volume least involved with current literary theory, it is actually a volume that contains some of the most sustained readings of cultural texts in the entire series. Ward, a theologian, uses cultural representations of religion and conflict from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet through Baz Luhrmann's film version of that tragedy, to discuss increasing social fragmentation and heightened, spectacular violence in response to religious differences. He offers extraordinary readings of texts including religious theme parks and gothic cybergames. His more traditional literary references includes those to Dante, Donne, and Novalis. Ward's discussion concludes with a poignant reflection on the events of September 11, 2001, one that seems to echo an earlier prediction that "the uncompromising assertion of Christianity will be matched by similar assertions from other faiths, other theological practices" (p. 153). His is not an optimistic tome, but one that urges us to resist reifying simple religious narratives and violence-producing binaries. This is an important and timely book.

The latest book to be published in the series is John Storey's superb Inventing Popular Culture (2003). More than any other in the series, this volume is both engaging for the seasoned scholar but also wonderfully comprehensive for the student new to the field. Storey traces the concept of popular culture from medieval folk tales through twentieth-century theory, covering everyone from Matthew Arnold and Karl Marx through Stuart Hall and Fredric Jameson. His is a nuanced call for a response to popular culture that views consumers neither as simple dupes of ideology nor fully knowing respondents to prevailing belief systems. One of his manifesto's most important theses is succinctly stated but powerful:

 What is needed is a more inclusive, a more tolerant cultural
 studies, one in which political economy and ethnography and audience
 studies can see themselves as contributing to the same project,
 existing like two sides of the same sheet of paper, differently
 inscribed but inescapably bound together in a project of
 understanding and dismantling the relations between culture and
 power. (pp. 61-62)

That challenge echoes some of the concerns of Graham Ward's discussion also highlighted. Out of uncertainty, religious or literary critical, can come dogma and reversions to formulae. Storey urges us to approach popular culture as a set of texts among many others that allow us to understand how societies make meaning, reproduce themselves, and invest groups with different forms of power. Storey never denies the appropriateness or validity of aesthetic distinctions, but says that there are other important uses that the study of popular culture can serve. His volume, like the best of the other volumes in this Blackwell series, invites us to return to our scholarly work with a vigor that comes from a knowledge that our work can transform the world, or at the very least, complicate the way the world is seen by our students and colleagues. Given the malaise that Cunningham implies pervades academe today, this is an important series payoff indeed.