the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)

Michael Bernard-Donals

A Legacy of Teaching

for Michael Sprinker

At the start of the spring semester of 1986, I walked into a seminar room at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and sat down at a table that was already crowded with other graduate students in literature, students who at the time seemed much older and were certainly smarter than I. At the head of the table was a pile of books and a spiral-bound Mead notebook. The books, I noticed, had titles on their spines in English, French, and German, and this made me wonder whether I'd wandered into the wrong room. Pro-seminar in Critical Theory? I checked my notes to be sure and found that I was in the right place and that this was the right class. A man walked into the classroom and sat down behind the books, made a few offhanded remarks to some of the young men who were sitting along the classroom's back wall, and opened the notebook. After the room quieted a bit, Michael Sprinker looked down at the notebook and started to read his closely written notes. We were off.

What followed were weeks of exhilarating and high-flying discussions of aesthetics, historical materialist theory, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the prose of William James; Louis Althusser's rise and fall as a political theorist and philosopher; imagined arguments between Aristotle, his interpreters from the University of Chicago, and a group from Yale led by Paul de Man who seemed to be doing for literary theory what the early soviets did for Marxism in post-revolutionary Russia; and real arguments among seminar participants who were unconvinced that Marxism was a science or that Sprinker knew what he was talking about. (On this last score, Michael always had the upper hand.) I think I caught about half of what was going on in that seminar, and I came home each evening with my head and right hand aching: I could barely keep the ideas straight, and I never stopped writing during the three-hour seminar. And I recall more than once thinking I ought simply to quit right then and there, because those four guys sitting at the back of the classroom seemed not only to catch it all, but were also willing to ask Michael pointed questions, to call him out, to engage in the Hegelian and Kantian and Marxian high-wire act that was choreographed so perfectly by Michael and seemed so perilously close to crashing down. How could I possibly do the same? But those students—Jeff Williams, Jim Paxson, Dean Casale, Ivo Kamps—brought out the best in Michael, and I wondered when I'd manage to understand this difficult material well enough to catch it adeptly and toss it back the way they did during those evenings in the spring of 1986.

I persevered, made it through that first difficult year of graduate school, and found that I was entranced by theory. Not just theory, but Michael's understanding of theory: it wasn't a tool, a stick to beat literature with, but was itself a language, a conceptual understanding of the materiality of the world and of texts and the relations of individuals, and while it didn't unlock the "meaning" of these texts or the world of things and beings, it made the question of "meaning" more meaningful, more problematic, and helped me and other seminar participants see that language was a force that had profound ethical and political implications. In short, Michael's great revelation was that theory was to language and being what science was to physical phenomena and objects, and that historical materialism more than any other theoretical lens treated language and its material circumstances scientifically (that is to say, rigorously in its understanding of context and structure, and through the formation of hypothesis and through the testing of those hypotheses). While I didn't sit at the back of the classroom, a year later I was one of those older students—maybe not as smart as Jeff, Dean, Jim and Ivo—who seemed to get it, and who had questions, and who probed and picked and advanced notions and saw as many of them crash and burn as the ones that made sense. Eventually I asked Michael to serve as my dissertation director, and he has served as a mentor even to this day: now instead of asking him for advice, I try to imagine what he might say, what wiseass crack he'd make (followed by an incisive survey of the situation), and what losses he'd advise me to cut and what solution would be, in the end, the most just.

I want here simply to explain Michael's lasting impression on me. That explanation has to do with the fact that he was first and foremost a teacher. Yes, he was as acute a theorist and critical mind as I've ever seen, then or now. And yes, dissertation advisers have an impact upon their students, for good and for ill. But this doesn't explain why I think of him when I teach at least as often as when I write.

Michael himself was not the sort of teacher whose methods in the classroom would have brought him notice from scholars of pedagogy. In fact, those methods didn't change during the time I was in graduate school: he read his notes in class, like a lecturer delivering a paper at MLA, and while he took questions and arguments happily, they didn't divert him from his march through the notes in the spiral-bound Mead. And he took some of those questions or arguments personally: I never saw him do this, but I've been told that he came pretty damn close to popping an over-garrulous interlocutor in the head once or twice.

This signaled to me, however, that he was intensely serious about what he was teaching, and in fact he did take personally the ethical and political implications of the work. During that seminar in the spring of 1986 he was teaching material from Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. Michael began it by asking Marx's question from the Introduction to the Grundrisse: what does art, particularly art from a period whose historical distance from the viewer would seem to stand in the way of knowledge, teach us? Put another way, how do cultural representations, realist and antirealist, present to the viewer or reader one's imaginary relations to lived life, the material conditions which are only partly visible to us and which exert real and most often insidious pressure on what we are and are not capable of doing? Michael's insistence that art was the locus of conflict between the ideological and the material, and that from this conflict emerged a "determinate absence" whose presence bore traces of that impossibly vexed condition, became a pressing matter. Art was not merely a representation, but also a presentation of the conditions of existence that are rendered invisible by aesthetic ideology. It was the task of theory, particularly Althusser's sense of theory as the production of scientific knowledge—"the explanation of the lived experience of ideology by concepts" (282)—to understand how art presented the conditions of lived experience that stood in the way of convention, despair, and—to use Raymond Williams' term—hope. Michael might not have put it just this way, but what I learned from sitting in that seminar was that a certain scientific and theoretical rigor, particularly when it came to matters of the aesthetic—a term that has been coopted by the right as a synonym for sanctioned representations, the canon, and literary criticism à la Louis Menand—provides an antidote for reification, cynicism, and the brave new global economy in which Ford sponsors the ABC-Disney television premiere of Schindler's List. At its best, theory underlabors for the work of science and other, more revolutionary practices that work to change our material circumstances. What I learned from Michael was that representation is no small matter to be left to literary critics; it is a matter of who has control over the ways we imagine and present our worlds, both to ourselves and to others.

He made these stakes clear in his remarks in class and in those he left on our seminar papers. I was floored when, a week after I'd turned it in, I received back from Michael a thoroughly marked essay that I'd written for his pro-seminar, half-heartedly, on (I hate to admit it now) Joyce's understanding of history in Ulysses. At the back of it he had stapled a full, single-spaced page of questions and comments, some quite pointed, a few cajoling, and all of them dead-on target. I don't remember (mercifully) the grade he gave me on that paper, but the gist of what he said was that I'd misconstrued history, and had managed to conflate aesthetic ideology with poetics (which in the case of Joyce is a pretty egregious error), and what I do remember quite clearly is the sentence with which he closed the essay: "If you can see your way clear to making these revisions, you'll have something original to add to Joyce scholarship." I never did get around to making those revision—that I couldn't see my way clear to making them was quite aptly put—but my sense is that Michael wasn’t just blowing sunshine up my shirt either. (He'd let me have it enough times that I could tell when he thought I was saying something altogether asinine.) He saw something in that essay, an idea or some sliver of an idea, that might have been original, and while there were so many problems with the paper that he wrote nearly five hundred words laying out precisely what they were, he also was willing to point out what was right with it. He did the same with other papers and, eventually, dissertation chapters: he read them, every single word right down to the goddamn commas and misused semicolons, not as a teacher but as a better-informed peer or colleague. He took us seriously, he engaged with us, he provided (from memory) author, title, and publisher of works we should have read or had misread, and took notes on the author, title and publishers of works we'd cited that he hadn’t had time to read. One of my clearest memories is of Michael asking me, a year before I’d finished my dissertation, for a copy of a book review I'd written on Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally. Because I naturally still thought of myself as Michael's student, I asked him what on earth he wanted to see my review for. He said to me matter-of-factly that I'd written something interesting and he wanted to cite it. Why not just say it yourself? I asked. "That's what scholarship is for: so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time." With that one answer I caught a glimmer of what made Michael such a good teacher: he was willing to learn from anyone who had something worthwhile to say, he gave credit where credit was due, and he was willing to pass what he'd learned on to anyone who was in turn willing to listen.

But if Michael was a strong teacher because of his commitment to the object of scrutiny and the dissemination of a finely-tuned critical and theoretical understanding of texts and their historical and ideological contexts, he was even stronger as a mentor of academics who saw their work with students as an engagement with agents of history. At one graduate-student sponsored conference at Stony Brook, Michael sat patiently through a panel on which three staunch Althusserians, dissertators from Syracuse, talked about the work of literature and of theory as the fomenting of revolution, through violence if necessary. They were smart papers, and Michael said so; but he put it this way: "If it were up to me, I'd hire all three of you guys, but it's not up to me, and so if you want to get your foot in the door so you can do the work you and I want to do, then you have to put things a little more delicately," examples of which he pointedly provided. (And pity the person on a dais who read a paper that was inane or whose implications were obvious. Michael had a tendency to call idiocies out for what they were, and sometimes wasn't willing to be gracious.) These weren't just lessons about politics waiting for its proper moment; they were lessons also in the contours of the academic marketplace, of how power functioned there, and about the patience necessary to wait out the deterioration of weak links. My experience at three large public universities bears this lesson out, but it's more than a lesson about picking your battles. It's also a lesson about learning the way an institution works and then putting as much pressure on it as it will bear, and then some, and then get the hell out of the way when it falls down so you can fight the next day.

In a word, Michael had an incredible sense of the economy of the profession of literary studies. In part I think this sense had been developed through an analysis of the national and international economy that had brought us, in his lifetime, the Vietnam War, Reagan’s war against the poor and those with AIDS, and the dissolution of European colonialism and its replacement with the far broader and more incorrigible American version. The injustice of training a generation of bright and revolutionary scholars of culture and then ignoring the horrible conditions of the marketplace in which they would find themselves only a few years later was simply a small-scale version of the larger economy that trained workers for jobs that would be obsolete in less than a generation and whose entrepreneurs ignored labor in favor of capital when profits were high and then moved to a part-time work force when full-timers became too expensive. Because he was unwilling to let the institution give us its (essentially worthless) stamp of approval without helping us get a foot in the door, he also made it clear to us that we had to be smarter and more innovative than our better-pedigreed colleagues at institutions whose mission was training, in Andrew Ross's famous words, "the minds of the ruling class."

To do this, he helped us become visible in the profession at an early stage in our careers as academics. But this was far from the hyperprofessionalization that has been lamented and criticized in the academic marketplace and in the pages of this journal. We weren't just out there giving papers at conferences and sending essays to journals because it would add a line to our CV's. Instead, he kept an eye on our work—he was directing, at any given time, a half-dozen dissertations and sitting on another dozen and a half committees, so he knew the work well—and encouraged us to put the best of it in front of audiences at conferences and in print in journals. For years Michael saw the minnesota review as a place where strong graduate students, young academics and writers whose Marxist credentials and strong voices kept them out of the pages of PMLA and diacriticsm, could cut their teeth and gain an audience. Working for him as his editorial assistant during the lean years in the late 80s and early 90s when the journal was at Stony Brook, I read the work of Aram Veeser, Fred Pfeil, Paul Buhle, June Howard, Ann Kaplan and others, all in manuscript, and wrote the book review that would be my very first publication.

It was finding an audience for our work that was, I think, the hardest work Michael faced, and the one he seemed to take the greatest energy from. He saw our work as valuable, as having implications beyond the inward-looking and (to him) selfish critical and theoretical work being done by other academics, work that wouldn't resonate beyond the pages of a journal or beyond the sixteen weeks of a semester for some student or another. I cannot remember a time when his office in the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook wasn’t simply full of manuscripts: half a dozen on the table next to his desk, another two or three on the desk or the floor near it. There were the dissertations, but there were also the countless book manuscripts or proposals he'd solicited on behalf of Verso or Cambridge, or that he was reading for some other university press, manuscripts written sometimes by recognized scholars but most often by people like me, who were unproven and uncertain about their place in the academic marketplace, but who thought they might have something worthwhile to say. Michael sometimes lost friends over these manuscripts because he believed so strongly that this one or that one ought to be published in spite of some damn fool outside reader or, worse yet, some niche market that might or might not provide the press with a return on its investment.

Michael also cajoled us into submitting our work to journals, sometimes journals with which he had some clout but, at least in my case, sometimes to those that I thought I had no business trying to crack (boundary 2, for instance, or Critical Inquir, or Cultural Critique). He knew an editor here, or an assistant editor there, and while sometimes his interventions yielded no results—I've read some of those old essays, and trust me, it wasn’t Michael's fault they weren't published—his understanding of the way the process worked (blind review, revision, the vagaries of the readers who write reports, the odd taboo against multiple submissions) was gold to someone who was new to it. As with seminar papers, he read draft after draft of these essays and the occasional conference presentation, wondered just who in the world I thought my audience was, forced me to reread Aristotle so I'd get the nuance of the Greek just right ("observing the available means of persuasion" not "finding" them), and maybe more than anything else questioned my understanding of the work of science.

The evening I was called and offered my first job, the second person I told was Michael. (The first was my wife.) In no small measure I think I owe him every academic position I've held since graduate school, and I wonder how many of us who made our way through the program at Stony Brook—and some of us who never set foot on the concrete there at all—could say the same. Speaking for myself alone, I had absolutely no idea how the economy of the academic workplace functioned, and I was oblivious to the job statistics which, mirroring national trends in the late 80s and early 90s, saw full-time workers being replaced by low-wage part-timers and witnessed the huge growth of the information and service sector (in English studies this meant, sadly, the growth of adjunct positions and the astronomical growth of the subspecialty in rhetoric and composition which had not, at that point, gone much beyond the expressivism of the 70s and the weak social constructionism—change what you say and you change the world, à la Richard Rorty—that haunts the field still) at the expense of other parts of the profession. But Michael had his eye on the ball, and the advice he gave to his students and to those in the department and across the country at conferences was meant to make us aware that upon entering the job market we ran many risks.

In 1990, about the time the job market in English studies began its most recent collapse, the chair of our department sent a memo to graduate students that cited the most recent statistics provided by the MLA on jobs advertised in English and the foreign languages, statistics that were dire enough but which apparently caused some consternation among students and faculty alike: in a department that was trying desperately to become interdisciplinary and to find room for the theoretical work that was being done across the country and internationally, the traditionalists were trying to hold the line for the "literature is my religion" school of thought, and the MLA statistics showed a marked decline in "theory" jobs and a steady market for those in American and British literature. In typical fashion, Michael wrote a memo of his own, one that I've kept. Addressed to the graduate students, it first takes an atypically mild swipe at the crusty bastard who was chair at the time by suggesting that uninterpreted statistics are lies of the worst kind, and went on to provide a gloss on David Laurence's numbers, a gloss that has been substantiated over the last ten years. Yes, theory is slowing down as a field unto itself, and yes, American and British literature are the bread and butter of English departments. But he noted two other trends which were otherwise invisible in the numbers: that hybrid fields (postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies) which had literature at their core were a part of the growing categories of "other" and "combination of specialties" and that the fastest-growing subspecialty in English was the one devoted to writing (composition, rhetoric, technical writing). From this Michael deduced that graduate students working in theoretically-informed and hybrid courses of study ("an examination of the economy of slavery as it is imagined in late eighteenth-century French and British novels") would fare at least as well if not better than those doing traditional ones ("an examination of certain images in the work of Jane Austen"), and that students had to have a breadth of understanding of what made the field work—its epistemology—in order to function as a teacher and scholar in a modern English department.

It was that deduction of Michael's that led to my first job. The moment that cinched it is still clear in my mind: sitting in a dark hotel room in Chicago in December of 1990, after a long and undistinguished interview with a committee from a state university in the south, the white-haired department chair—who was clearly exasperated with me—asked whether my work as a theorist and my dissertation on Bakhtin didn't contradict my application for a job in composition and rhetoric: "don’t theory and composition work in opposite directions?" I don't know where it came from (though I suppose I had a picture in my mind of what Michael might say, beginning with "Oh for chrissakes") but I told him no, there's no contradiction there at all, and suggested to him that anyone who thought that there was didn't know much about either field. I suppose the answer really did come from Michael and the education he'd provided me. The graduate student who walked into the seminar room in Stony Brook five years earlier had no notion of what English studies looked like and certainly wasn't going to tell some department chair his business. But what I had learned in the years between Stony Brook and Chicago was that I began to understand that business, and if I didn't know it better than this particular department chair, I had a far better understanding of it than those students who hadn't run into Michael in a seminar, or at a conference, or through a reader's report.

If Michael Sprinker has left a legacy, it's important to understand all the aspects of it. He left an impressive body of work—books on Marxist aesthetics, on Proust, and on Hopkins; collections on Said, Althusser, and others; editorial work for Cambridge, for Verso, for the New Left Review and the minnesota review—and was instrumental in publishing the work of others. A legacy, though, is a living thing, something that goes beyond the notion of a bequest or a body of work, and I'd suggest that the most important aspect of Michael's legacy is his work as a teacher. What he taught us, among other things, was that theoretical work forced readers to reconsider the foundations of our enterprise—interpretation—and to see how that enterprise was complicit with the broader economy's organization of fields and of institutions that divide and atomize its workers (teachers and students alike) and that prevent the collective activity that would bind us together in solidarity. He taught us also that work in the academy had effects and consequences far outside its borders, and that by engaging in the rigorous work of philosophy—the heavy lifting that could at its best change paradigms, how we saw our circumstances—we could work the ground for others who came after us. But perhaps more than anything else, Michael left us a legacy of teaching itself, a legacy that has taken on a life of its own in Michael's students, who—like me—want to find a space in our profession for voices that would otherwise not be heard, for work that would otherwise remain undone, and who want to allow students to think against the grain and to find, in the work of teaching, real hope. It's not clear that I or any one of us can do for our students what Michael did for his. But I'll be damned if I don't try.

Michael Bernard-Donals is Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, where he teaches rhetorical and critical theory. His most recent book is Witnessing Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, (Wisconsin, 2003).