The Intellectual as Performer
Session Organizer: Peter Rawlings
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
rawlings2000@aol.com
Lionel Trilling and the Art of Intellectual Performance
Lionel Trilling distanced himself from the New York Intellectuals and was often seen by his contemporary (and continuing) critics as occupying the high cultural ground at a prestigious, and even elitist, institution, the University of Columbia. This paper seeks, however, to identify at the levels of both theory and practice the extent to which Trilling was radically committed to a performative paradigm. It begins by examining Trilling’s own fiction and the degree to which aspects of both his short stories and the one novel (The Middle of the Journey) are proleptic of future strategies in the criticism. Trilling’s critical reputation was made at a time when New Criticism and the Chicago School dominated the terrain. His commitment to rhetoric, to the wily arts of a persuasive style bordering on coercion at least, and to the genre of the essay (in which much of his most celebrated work appeared), and his choice of authors and texts will come under close scrutiny in this paper. After the initial attention to early fiction, the move will be to the complex cultural work of the “Prefaces” to The Experience of Literature (which appeared in 1967) and the little-known pieces written for The Griffin, the magazine of The Reader’s Subscription in the 1950’s.
Peter Rawlings
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
rawlings2000@aol.com
Reinhold Niebuhr, Intellectual Juggler
In 1956 Time magazine voted Reinhold Niebuhr one of the three most prominent intellectuals in America, alongside Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. Best known as a neo-orthodox Protestant in the 1940s and a liberal anticommunist in the 1950s, Niebuhr was deeply committed as a public intellectual (even though he was sceptical of the label 'intellectual'), and attempted to position himself between different social and political vantage points in order to resist academic specialization. His first biographer June Bingham described Niebuhr as a skilled juggler who tried to keep as many intellectual balls in the air as possible, and only occasionally risked 'all the juggler's balls ... tumbling down on his head'. This art of intellectual juggler was one of Niebuhr's greatest strengths, but also his Achilles heel. A major influence on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jimmy Carter, since his death in 1971 Niebuhr has been largely consigned to history, with critics judging him to have little relevance to contemporary issues of race, gender and internationalism. Even recent religious studies have relegated him to a thinker belonging to the white Protestant hegemony of mid-century and a knee-jerk cold warrior. This paper reassesses Niebuhr's role as public intellectual, arguing that his mode of performance as an intellectual juggler was one of his chief qualities as a thinker. The paper will conclude by suggesting some of the reasons why Niebuhr should not be neglected as a thinker today.
Martin Halliwell
University of Leicester
mrh17@leicester.ac.uk
Norman Mailer’s Bad Behavior
Mailer's antics of the 1960s and 1970s--his coverage of the March on the Pentagon, his attacks on second wave feminists--make him an obvious choice for a panel on intellectual performance. In this paper I will argue that Mailer's masculinist, libidinal acting out finds its origins (at least in part) in a particular strain of Cold War liberalism. After his early involvement with the Waldorf Peace Conference and Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign, Mailer was marginally associated with the New York Intellectuals. In the early 1950s, these former leftists turned "anti-Stalinists" invested their liberal pluralism with the danger and glamour of outsider views. They fetishized struggle and agonized over the burdens of freedom, despite the ultimate stability of pluralist thought. Lionel Trilling's contribution to the discourse of anti-Stalinism was to shift the pluralist drama of multiple dialectics to the individual psyche. Mailer's 1957 essay, "The White Negro," represents a baroque expression of anti-Stalinist liberal thought in which the white male intellectual appropriates blackness, in which Freud gives way to Reich, and in which the masculinist implications of Trilling's psychomachia achieve their fullest expression.
Geraldine Murphy
City College, CUNY
gmurphy1066@yahoo.com
Improvising over the Changes: Improvisation as Intellectual and Aesthetic Practice in the Work of LeRoi Jones/Amira Baraka
This paper will consider the poems and jazz criticism of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka as he transitioned from Jones, the bohemian/Beat influenced writer, to Baraka, Black Nationalist intellectual in the middle of the 1960s. During this period Jones/Baraka began to perform a philosophical attitude born from jazz improvisation. This intellectual style announced the contingent relationship between the private processes of African American identification and public hope for social and political equality. In this piece I argue that Jones/Baraka’s aesthetics and philosophies have always been fueled by the hope to connect his private philosophical changes to his socio-political hopes. The way that Jones/Baraka makes this connection is to perform it “publicly” in his poems and jazz criticism. In the poems of this period Jones/Baraka unmasks himself to reveal a chaotic, ever changing identity rather than an essentialized, stereotype of “Negroness.” Jones/Baraka uses his music criticism to performing his theories; his intellectual improvisation becomes a model for political analysis and social action. Whatever his aesthetic or ideological limitations might be, Jones/Baraka’s improvisational performances are ultimately the ones that have most influenced the styles of contemporary African American intellectual work and kinds of critical perspectives that have been developed to theorize American and African American cultural production.
Walton Muyumba
University of North Texas
wmuyumba@yahoo.com