the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)Devoney LooserMichael Sprinker and FeminismIt would be misleading to claim that Michael Sprinker lived his life as an academic feminist. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was a professor from 1984 until his death in 1999, Sprinker was not involved with the Women's Studies Program. He rarely made feminist theory central to his courses, at least while I was enrolled in the doctoral program in English from 1989 to 1993. I never heard him mention his colleague Michael Kimmel—a professor in the Department of Sociology known for his work with the National Organization of Men Against Sexism—whose office was several hundred feet away from the Stony Brook Humanities Building. Yet Sprinker's intellectual influence on feminist graduate students in English and Comparative Studies at Stony Brook was immense. To begin to describe that influence is what I hope to contribute in this essay. Richard Ohmann has written, "the personal turn has I think been more beneficial than not. It is in any case irreversible. I hope we can keep alive in it the social and the political, from which it has historically been inseparable, and without which it is at best incomplete and isolating" (354). This eloquent recasting of the feminist slogan "the personal is political" resonates as I consider Sprinker and feminism. In what follows, I draw on the personal in order to tell a story that is a kind of tribute, as well as (I would like to believe) a historically and politically meaningful narrative about graduate study in the humanities in the 1990s. I have never met Ohmann but felt I came to know him by reputation. Michael Sprinker clearly revered him, and those of us who were Michael's graduate students relished stories of his own mentors. These narratives of Michael's generally had more energy than sense. It wasn't the punch line you waited for (when there was one, it was inevitably disappointing) but the excitement he worked up in the telling. In the spring of 1991, he spent a semester at Wesleyan University at the Center for the Humanities and regaled us with anecdotes of "Dick" Ohmann. Michael seemed larger than life at times, so Dick was naturally cast as extra large, especially if you could imagine figures of that stature playing raucous late-night poker. Michael's stories were elaborate verbal tableaus of Marxist critics sitting in smoke-filled rooms, trying to take each other's money. These poker narratives were decidedly male-centered ones of bravado and bluffing. If there were women at these gatherings, Michael didn’t mention them. I hadn’t even imagined the possibility of a woman present on poker nights, until some months later when the rumor circulated that Michael would be briefly returning to Stony Brook. A group of English department men (professors, instructors, and graduate students) were being recruited to play poker at the home of a department couple—he an instructor and she a graduate student. As this news made the rounds, a few male graduate students joked about the woman of the couple being there to serve the sandwiches. To these guys, I suspect, the joke was in keeping with the macho ethos the poker games (and Michael) were thought to perpetuate. And in a sense, they were not far off. The most outward features of Michael's academic persona were of the Robert Conrad-esque "I dare you to knock this battery off my shoulder" variety. Michael was famously pugilistic. Before he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the fall of 1991, he was notorious for involvement in threatened and actual fistfights—whether in the student union or in faculty meetings. He was not above suggesting that graduate seminar debates be turned into opportunities to "take it outside." He had a tendency to cultivate and celebrate spaces from which women were implicitly or explicitly excluded, growing out of the poker games, the macho drinking and smoking, and the fighting. It was irritating as hell, and he seemed largely unapologetic about it. He didn't always "know better" either. One of the first times I heard Michael speak was at a department colloquium in the spring of 1990. The event was staged as a Foucault vs. Althusser showdown, and we half expected it to end in a shootout or a duel. The question and answer session did not disappoint our expectations, though from an unanticipated angle. A feminist colleague asked Michael a question about identity politics, and he began his answer to her with his characteristic tag, "Well, dear . . . " She did not suffer his foolish paternalism gladly. Her protestation "I am not your 'dear'! I am not your 'dear'!" still rings in my ears. The feminist colleague was his friend and departmental ally, and Michael seemed contrite. I never heard him use such labels again, in a public forum at any rate. But Michael frequently addressed women he knew as "dear." (Men—especially his graduate students—endured the appellations "lad" and "ace.") These anecdotes may suggest that titling an essay "Michael Sprinker and Feminism" is as an exercise in contrast, rather than one of affiliation. The evidence available from his CV is not much more compelling in establishing connections. If his single-authored publications alone were scoured for proof of his feminism, his involvement could only be deemed minimal. Scanning the titles of his published works, one finds that the words "feminism" or "feminist" never appear. The names of only two women writers and no feminist theorists are listed on his vita (Rev. of Comic; "Wuthering"). The word "gender" appears once ("Homeboys"). His Proust book offers as its epigraph the Dire Straits lyric, "Get your money for nothing and your chicks for free," a choice several of us in his fall 1990 graduate seminar on Proust and James tried to talk him out of. Stopping with these details, however, would be a great disservice to him. Sprinker co-edited work with feminists (most notably E. Ann Kaplan) and edited a good deal of work by feminists or about feminism in this journal and for several book series. His book History of Ideology in Proust (1994) grapples with issues of gender and sexuality in a sustained way, relating them to ideologies of nationalism and religion, and demonstrates an engagement with the ideas of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Shari Benstock, among others. To my mind, however, his greater contribution involved directing or serving on dissertation committees for a significant number of feminist graduate students at SUNY-Stony Brook. A scan through Dissertation Abstracts locates twenty-four theses for which Michael Sprinker is designated as advisor—a list that is certainly incomplete. He directed many dissertations on feminist topics including the following: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and second wave feminist literary criticism (MacNabb); nineteenth-century American literature, using feminist revisions of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Frost); the "other" in Faulkner, using Julia Kristeva and postmodern theorists (Kwasny); sexual politics in Asian American literature of the 1970s (Sakurai); and gender in contemporary plays and performances by women (Hurley). According to these calculations, then, one fifth of the dissertations Michael directed were feminist in focus, though additional projects certainly considered feminist theory and/or sex and gender. What this list does not count is the number of feminist graduate students on whose committees he served as a member. The English Department does not collect such data, but if the feminist graduate students who were my peers are a reliable indicator, a majority of us chose to work with him. Why might a feminist graduate student have elected to work with Michael as director or, as in my case, as a committee member? I think it was in part because he encouraged students to develop their own ideas about critical theory and about literature, despite his own strong views. He did not insist that each project he directed be Althusserian or Marxist in its approach. Michael had a reputation for being tough, but the payoff was that he was enormously generous with his time and took graduate student work very seriously. His single-spaced, typewritten comments—on everything from dissertation proposals to individual chapters—were meticulous, on large- and small-scale issues. He tried to keep his students on schedule, down to making suggestions about the month in which he thought we would be ready for our general or special field oral exams. He regularly phoned us (especially prior to the widespread emergence of e-mail) to offer encouragement and feedback. When he was on leave, he made frequent flights back to Stony Brook to participate in examinations and defenses. Moreover, even if he did not approach his own scholarship from an explicitly feminist perspective, it was clear that he knew a great deal about emerging work in feminist theory and women's literature. If he didn't know it, he never let on; perhaps he took the opportunity, through our projects, to familiarize himself with such texts. But maybe the reason so many of us worked with him is even more straightforwardly simple. There were a lot of us interested in feminist theory during those years, and he could not turn down a graduate student who asked for his help. Michael was a generous mentor to graduate students regardless of their critical and theoretical perspectives. He made sure to find professional opportunities for us. When he believed a student to be ready, he invited her or him to review a book for minnesota review, and he chose the book carefully. My first publication was an mr review of an anthology of poems and stories on women and work. A scan through those years of mr will show that almost without exception, as Michael's students advanced to candidacy, he invited them to review a book. This might seem small patronage to some, but he also engaged us in conversations about our completed reviews, yet another step in leading us to consider ourselves as professionals. (Of course, the unusual contributor's notes he wrote were not entirely professional, but that is another story.) Along with several other faculty members, Michael faithfully attended sessions at our annual graduate student conference. At the time, this seemed normal faculty behavior, though now I understand it as unusual dedication. He would ask us tough questions, which we never looked forward to. One of his favorite words was “wrong,” and he often managed to stretch it into two syllables. I didn't always grasp that these questions, too, were "teachable moments," trying to prepare us for future professional interactions, as well as further evidence of how seriously Michael took the project in which he saw all of us as engaged. Michael's "work" ("fighting the good fight," as he would say) extended from his research and publications, to the classroom, to demonstrations and activism, to the conference panel, to the bar, and the dinner table. In this sense, he was rarely not working. Parts of "fighting the good fight" seemed purely pleasurable for him. For instance, he relished teasing graduate students by asking them when they were going to renounce their class backgrounds. For my part, I enjoyed teasing (he would say "needling") him about when he was going to renounce his patriarchal background. A month before he was diagnosed with cancer, during a heated argument with me at a department party, Michael acknowledged under duress that he "had a sexist wrinkle in his personality." It was probably a comment made to shut me up. I doubt, if I had ever asked him about it afterward, that he would have remembered or wanted to own up to having said it. Alongside his sexist wrinkle, however, he had others—just as evident—that I would label feminist or at the least, to use Kimmel's term, "pro-feminist." My last conversation with Michael happened while he was at Clifford Siskin's house. I had faxed Cliff the reader's reports from press that ended up publishing my book on British women writers and historiography and then phoned for feedback. Cliff gave me his sound advice. Telling me that Michael had also read the report and had additional thoughts to offer, Cliff put him on the phone. It had been more than five years since I'd defended my dissertation, yet both of them made time for my anxious queries about how to negotiate this process. Some months later, in a series of e-mail messages exchanged with Michael, his encouragement continued. "I'd say that barring any unforeseen glitches, your book will now go smoothly through the commissioning and publication process," he wrote on 7 July 1999. He was right, and the contract arrived some weeks after his death in August. He had, at that point, offered me assistance with scholarly problems and professional dilemmas for nearly a decade. And I was one among dozens and dozens of such students and former students. Michael Sprinker's feminist legacy is not without its contradictions, but it continues to have an impact on many of us. His combative approach to the world of ideas, to collegiality in general, did not sit well with his adversaries and sometimes not even with his friends. In the fall of 1991, at a conference banquet dinner, I overheard him at a nearby table, lecturing female graduate students in a characteristically loud and intimidating tone. The whole room probably overheard him. A senior feminist colleague got up from an adjacent table, approached him, and said calmly, "Michael, be a good boy." Though Michael himself sometimes got reminders that he should "be a good boy," he never tried to encourage his feminist students to be "good girls." He encouraged us to follow our scholarly, political, and professional visions and, when asked, did whatever he could to help us realize them. I, for one, strive to refashion the best aspects of his legacy in work with my students, whether feminist or not. Works Cited
Notes
Devoney Looser teaches in the English Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins, 2000). |