My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

F RAM E L 0 C K 95
ence is not satisfied only by differences of "subject positions". To be sure,
a course of differences must include a broad range of subject positions
(including ones not easily definable by prevailing categories); but, to avoid
frame lock, it also needs to include radical differences in forms, styles, and
genres of expression and nonexpression. Insofar as narratives of personal
or group experience are given primacy over other formal and aesthetic
modalities, difference is not only enriched but also suppressed.
My modest proposal no doubt hopelessly complicates an already difficult
task because it places virtually no limits on the number or types of possible
works that might be studied. I find this a more stimulating starting
point than determining a convenient frame that makes the task easier and
more rationalizable. For example, I find myself surprisingly impatient with
the obviously well-intentioned idea that an English department should
require its undergraduate majors to take survey courses that cover canonically
and historically significant (including previously neglected) works
of English literature, along with a companion course in major trends in
literary theory. In many such curricular proposals, and in the related "multicultural"
anthologies published in recent years, the choice of literary
authors is made with a commitment to diversity in mind. In contrast, there
is rarely a similar commitment to diversity among the authors to be studied
in theoretical and methodological courses. Furthermore, the new literature
curriculums and anthologies are generally restricted to English language
works, while it is hard to imagine a comparable anthology or core
course in literary theory restricted only to works written in English. A
number of problematic assumptions are at work here. In the first place,
there is the idea that theory is a quasi-scientific form of knowledge that is
able to transcend-largely, if not totally-its particular subject positions,
and, as a result, is not dependent for its value on the fact that it represents a
particular subject position. The corollary to this is that literary works do
have their value in representing subject positions, and, as a result, are infinitely
substitutable: in effect literature becomes a series of possible examples,
anyone of which is expendable. The problem is analogous to the disturbing
practice of universities doing all their affirmative action hiring in
the infinitely elastic or "soft" humanities rather than doing such hiring
equally in the "uncompromisable" social and natural sciences.
What is English? While poetry may be said to be untranslatable in a
way that philosophical works are not, philosophy also may be untranslatable
in certain ways. Or rather, some philosophy (call it theory) and some
literature (call it sociological) pose few translation problems. In this
respect, it is revealing that some of the new anthologies that purport to
represent cultural diverSity-The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women,
edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and The Heath Anthology of Amer-