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Edward Jayne
December, 1992

Having taught English at the college level for thirty years, I feel I am finally in the position to apply for a full professorship. My book Negative Poetics (hereafter cited as NP) has at last been published by the University of Iowa Press. and my 109-page manuscript "An Accidental Conspiracy" will be published soon in a collection of papers on constitutional law by the New Issues Press. I have also published a number of articles, and I am now looking into the possibility of combining some of these in a collection of essays to supplement NP. The two books would be symbiotic--neither would be entirely clear without understanding the other. In any case, with my teaching and publishing records, and with adequate experience in both department and university services, I am at last willing to take the leap and apply for a full professorship.

In 1962, I received my M.A. from U.C. at Berkeley with full encouragement to continue my work toward a Ph.D., but instead I began teaching at the junior college level to support my family--a wife, ex-wife, and four children. My understanding with Elaine, my second wife, was that I would top off my education with an M.A. to support our family and that we would begin having children as soon as I had obtained it. I had no intention of obtaining a Ph.D. or of publishing anything in literary criticism. After three quick junior college appointments, I accepted a position for three years as an instructor at Humboldt State University. Then, in 1968, I entered the Ph.D. program at S.U.N.Y. of Buffalo, just a year or two after its English Department began to enjoy a national reputation for its aggressive recruitment of authors and critical theoreticians. Afterwards, stateside, I taught at the Universities of Massachusetts and Minnesota, and, abroad, I taught for a year apiece at the Universities of Freiburg, Germany, and Santa Catarina, Brazil. In 1980 I joined the English Department at WMU, and in 1983 I received tenure and an associate professorship here. In the 1987-88 academic year, I taught as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Munich in Germany.

Buffalo whetted my apetite for publication, and I published ten articles and reviews during the 1970s while teaching at the Universities of Massachusetts and Minnesota. Six of these appeared in refereed journals--Genre, College English (2), American Studies (2), and Minnesota Review--but nothing was obviously cumulative in my work, at least in the opinion of others, so it seemed necessary to come up with a theme or central concept that would draw everything together in a book. In 1978-79, at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, I began the task of formulating such a thesis and filling out the necessary gaps in an ambitious manuscript titled then, as now, Negative Poetics. Since then, I have persistently--indeed, obsessively--worked toward NP's publication, trying to meet the standards of three successive publishers, the Indiana, Duke, and Iowa University Presses, the latter two with contracts in hand. I have revised every chapter of the book dozens of times, and I completely overhauled the manuscript for Indiana twice, for Duke at least four times, and for Iowa, again, twice. I received much praise from the presses, but also lots of suggestions--almost always fresh suggestions by supportive, even enthusiastic new readers with just a few new ideas of their own. For the better part of a decade my manuscript remained on the brink of being published, but without actually going to press. Finally this last May it was published. It hasn't been reviewed yet, and perhaps it will never will be, but I'm informed by people at Iowa that it is already more than half sold out.

In my final organization of NP, I have incorporated work that goes all the way back into the sixties. Perversely, for example, I include, as footnote 9 in chapter 6, the entire footnote that I used in a paper for a graduate seminar back in 1962. This paper so aggravated Ernest Tuveson, my Berkeley professor--because he was worried that I might be lured into following the example of Leslie Fiedler, "the joke of the profession"-- that I shifted to Buffalo at least partly to be able to work with Fiedler. Here the footnote that triggered Tuveson's displeasure stands. The first portion of chapter 8, on Barthes, is based on a research paper at Buffalo that was accepted for publication by Partisan Review, then was buried for seven years before finally being published by Minnesota Review and then republished, somewhat revised, by Contemporary Literary Criticism. Chapter 4, "Up Against the Mending Wall," began as my response to a psychoanalytic colloquium I organized and moderated with Holland, Lesser, Mannheim, and Leo Marx as participants (the only public meeting, as far as I know, that brought Holland and Lesser into a direct encounter with each other). After my effort failed to publish the entire colloquium in Hartford Studies, I submitted my article alone to College English, which almost immediately published it, and Richard Ohmann, the editor of CE, later disclosed that it provoked more controversy than anything previously published by CE while he was associated with the journal.

Chapter 2, on deception theory, began as a paper I delivered in Florianopolis, Brazil. I later delivered a paper on roughly the same theme before the national conference of English and American literature teachers in Rio de Janeiro, in which I addressed altogether approximately 600 secondary level teachers--most of Brasil's teachers on the subject. I talked of the difference between the overt Brazilian style of lying (the jeito and jeitinho--respectively, the trick and little trick) and North American lying as an artful but more perfidious reliance upon omissions. I argued that North American literature, like its rhetoric on most occasions, cannot be understood without coming to terms with its omissions, but that this seems a universal--if less pronounced--tendency of all literature--hence its value as fiction. My lecture was enthusiastically received, and its theoretical portions, combined with what I had said in my earlier talk, provided the basis for the paper I later gave at the 1981 MLA Convention with David Bleich and Gerald Graff as respondents.

Chapter 6, on Hawthorne, began as a paper I delivered at NEMLA in 1976-77, then in Florianopolis, Brazil, in a conference I organized with Fiedler as a guest critic, and finally as an article accepted but never published by Literature and Psychology. Chapter 3, on homeostasis, began as a paper I delivered at the APA in 1977; and chapter 5, on paranoid form, began as a paper I delivered at the MLA in 1976, then published in Genre in 1978.

What portions of NP came later, specifically written for the book alone? The all-important introduction, and chapters 1, 7, and 9--also the second half of chapter 8. But it is to be stressed that I repeatedly overhauled all of the other chapters to fit the critical theory I propose in my introduction, and that as early as the mid-seventies most of my work was undertaken with the view of its inclusion in a forthcoming book.

Negative Poetics is difficult to read, at least partly because it has been revised so many times. I actually sought one more revision to clean up after my copy editor, but the editorial staff at Iowa went into such an uproar that I backed down. In my opinion the final revision I submitted would have smoothed out the prose and produced a much better book. Nevertheless, NP does have a coherent organization as explained in my introduction, and its critical approach is what might be described as radically unique, for in fact I have created a field of my own. My introduction and the first two chapters establish a deceptionist theory that literature necessarily tells lies (as, in fact, it does); my third and fourth chapters explain literary deception in homeostatic terms as the pursuit of pleasure through benign self-deception; my fifth and sixth chapters compare literary illusion with paranoid delusion; my seventh chapter explains the affirmative flip-flop (described as the "Affirmative Fallacy") that affords literary illusion its value as denial (the simplest mode of lying), and then applies this flip-flop to current approaches to literary criticism as well, thus setting the stage for the eighth and ninth chapters. The first of these affords a metacritical psychohistory of the French critic Roland Barthes and the second reverses the affirmative prescriptions of three eminent "affirmist" critics--Lionel Trilling, Wayne Booth, and John Gardiner, thereby arriving at a dialectical perspective more exciting in my opinion than any of these three critics envisaged.

Though the deceptionist theory I propose establishes pretty much my own field of critical theory, I do take the trouble in Chapter 1 to locate it in a neglected critical tradition since the time of Plato--a tradition including Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Richards, Barthes, and George Steiner among many others. My use of both homeostasis and paranoia to define literary experience is also unique in literary criticism, and, as far as I know, my metacritical psychohistory of Barthes is the first such treatment of a critic's life work in literary terms, explaining Barthes as having made of himself a work of literature with a narrative outcome antithetical to his own critical priorities.

Can my book be judged on a comparable basis as having literary pretensions of its own--illusion as theory languishing in its closet, unable to declare itself? Very likely it can, despite its thick, even turgid dialectical complexity. I occasionally view NP as an irregular ode wrought as critical theory, with each chapter a stanza and with the dust jacket by my daughter Kristin perhaps the key to everything I am trying to say. By treating denial--both plain and in its guise as the Affirmative Fallacy--as the only genuine alternative to utter annihilation (see death in my index), I exaggerate the value of defiance, abrasiveness, and what might seem compulsive wrong-headedness, and with implications far too personal to be acknowledged except allusively. At this level, I, too, am probably lying, at least to myself.

While trying to publish NP over the last few years, I also worked up an ambitious article in constitutional history, "An Accidental Conspiracy," (hereafter cited as AC) an account of the origins of judicial review in American constitutional law. Here I break entirely new ground in constitutional history by trying to demonstrate--successfully, I think--that a small coterie of founding fathers at the 1787 Constitutional Convention shelved judicial review so it could be adopted once the 1788 state ratifying conventions had finished the task of ratifying the Constitution. In 1789, after this task had been completed, one of this group--Oliver Ellsworth--imposed judicial review in Section 25 of the Judiciary Act (its core a 307-word sentence, both more and less than poetry), offsetting the Bill of Rights and establishing judicial review as the keystone for a constitutional government in which federal sovereignty overshadows states rights.

This prehistory of judicial review seems an entirely separate project from my theory literary criticism presented in NP, since I explore judicial review strictly with the purpose of unravelling the intentions of our founding fathers as they themselves explained at the time. However, I use the same dialectic strategy of contrasting transitional gains with final results as I use in NP, for example, in deconstructing "Mending Wall," Hamlet, and the critical career of Barthes. In AC, I deconstruct constitutional history by demonstrating how all the best efforts to salvage a confederacy--truly a "united" states, as opposed to a central megastate--could later be revised to justify a level of centralization that the founding fathers had at first almost desperately sought to avoid. In AC I restrict my interpretation to constitutional theory, but my dialectical methodology is basically the same, and with results as radically new in the field of constitutional history as in literary theory. I was fully aware of this resemblance between NP and AC while shifting back and forth between the two manuscripts over the past five or six years, and I hope and expect that the similarities will be plain when AC is published this winter in a collection of papers upon the Constitution edited by Ralph Chandler and William Ritchie for the New Issues Press. In my opinion, AC is really the best example of my deconstructive explicative methodology--even better than my explications in NP. I deal with U.S. constitutional history as a literary text that possesses all of the dialectical appurtanences that I expect to find in a good work of fiction. And in fact it is a remarkable work of fiction as fleshed out by the nation-state it defines, the United States as we know it (or think we know it) today.

Now that NP is published and AC is on the brink of being published this winter, I have launched into two articles that further elaborate some of my ideas in NP. In the first of these articles, "Metaphoric Hypersignification; Metonymic Designification" (hereafter cited as MHMD), I propose a theory of metaphor based on short-term memory experiments I conducted over a decade ago at the University of Minnesota. I summarized my results in an article published by Style in 1984 and drew upon these findings in chaps. 3 and 4 of NP. Now in MHMD I focus on the interaction between metaphor and metonymy with much greater thoroughness, demonstrating how the figurative similarities between metaphor and closure impose a dialectic that packages most literary experience. At the suggestion of Paul Sims, the marketing manager of the University of Iowa Press, I have submitted MHMD to Applied Psycholinguistics for their consideration as an article.

In the second of these articles, "The American Cycloid: A Kondratieff Model of U.S. Cultural History" (hereafter cited as ACY), I explore the possibilities of explaining our cultural and literary history based on the 52-year Kondratieff cycle, as tangentially suggested (if without being specifically mentioned) in chaps. 7 and 9 of NP. Again, the model is entirely original--nobody else has yet tried to make such a connection. I have recently submitted ACY to a variety of specialists, and I am awaiting their responses. Brian Berry, a Kondratieff theoretician, has already replied, and his letter is most encouraging. I also sent a copy of ACY to Berndt Ostendorf, the director of the American Studies program at the University of Munich, and Berndt has asked if Amerika Studium/American Studies can have first crack at publishing it, so right now it is in the hands of AS's editorial readers, and I hope and expect that AS, pending its readers' assent, will save me the burden of submitting it to other publications.

My next major project is to publish a collection of essays that combines these two spinoffs, MHMD and ACY, with AC and the four or five articles I have already published that were crucial to the evolution of my dialectic critical approach but that were excluded from NP for one reason or another. These rejected chapters (or "outtakes") include my articles on Steinbeck, New Criticism, and short-term memory experiments as well as my brief manifesto published in College English, "Defense of the Homophobic Imagination." I would also want to include my treatment of the current debate on academic reform, "Academic Jeremiad," published in Change, and my long dissertation chapter on I.A. Richards that Richards himself very generously praised as the best explanation of his theories that he had seen (a copy of his letter is included among the recommendations in my portfolio). I could likewise work up another couple of explications--perhaps more thorough (hence more interesting) treatments of Hamlet and "Dover Beach" than what I did in NP. All of this should somehow be brought together as a loosely knit collection of papers that supplements NP--that both explains and is explained by it. A dialectical introduction would be needed to connect everything, and it might take a few years to publish such a collection, but I think it would make sense as a sequel to NP.

My record of presentations is more inclusive than might be indicated either by my discussion of my publications record here or by my summary of my teaching experience elsewhere in my file. The most important of my presentations are listed by reverse chronology in my summary vita sheet also included in my file.

My service record at WMU has been modest, but I have initiated and carried through a couple of projects that I am still proud of. As a member of the AAUP fringe benefits committee, I initiated the investigation of faculty dependent tuition deferment plans, and, when a joint faculty/administration committee was established to explore this possibility more thoroughly, I took an active role as a member of this committee and finally drafted the first half of its report and revised the portions of the report by others to harmonize with what I myself had drafted. Almost immediately, based on this report, President Haenicke liberalized our tuition deferment plan at WMU, though not to the extent that I wanted.

While on the fringe benefits committee, I also wrote a long report challenging the value of the cafeteria-style organization of fringe benefits, and my report is still used occasionally to dampen the effort to stir up new support for such a plan.

As a member of the WMU Planning Board, I initiated the move to build a student complex in the basement of Barnhard Center and both to upgrade and add a salad bar to the cafeteria on the first floor. To do this, I created an ad hoc committee of freshmen (from my English 110 class that semester) able to join me in touring three other campuses to compare facilities, and then I drafted a report that ultimately led President Haenicke to expand his plans for overhauling Barnhard Center.

I also played an active role on the Library and College of Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committees. Off campus, I played a central role in establishing the Kal Haven Trail, as explained in my lecture before the Kal Haven Executive Committee last year, a copy of which is included in the miscellaneous portion of my department file.

The courses I have taught at WMU have been relatively few compared to my record at other schools. Right now I am locked into teaching basically three courses: (a) English 112, a big lower-division lecture course for non-majors upon our western cultural tradition from Gilgamesh to Updike and Atwood; (b) English 310, the literary and cultural history of England, and (c) English 615, a graduate seminar upon current trends in critical theory--one of the most intellectually demanding courses offered by the department (if it weren't, I would be failing at my task). In a sense 112 and 615 provide the base and apex for our department's hierarchy of curriculum requirements, and I thoroughly enjoy teaching both of them.