Twentieth-Century literature's

The winner of this year's prize is Rob Doggett's "Writing Out (of) Chaos: Constructions of History in Yeats's 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' and 'Meditations in Time of Civil War."' The judge was Michael Berube, Paterno Professor of English at Penn State University and editor of the forthcoming book Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.

Prize in Literary Criticism, 2001

Professor Berube writes:

I've long since lost track of how many manuscripts I read every year--for reviews and review essays, for journal and book refereeing, for tenure and promotion, occasionally for the simple (or complex) pleasure of reading the latest from a friend--but it's always with the hope of education or edification. I'm quite sure, though, that I've never sat down with a batch of essays and methodically read them all twice, once and then once more with feeling in the coffee shop, just in case.

But such were the essays that wound up as finalists for the Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism for 2001. Each one was ambitious, shrewd, densely and painstakingly argued--an edifying reading experience indeed, and a challenging one: for all five were thoroughly plausible candidates for the prize, and yet this was the only thing they had in common. J. Hillis Miller wrote eloquently in these pages, last year around this time, of the high quality of the essays before him, of the daunting task accomplished by every essayist who manages to combine "theoretical exigency" with "innovative 'close reading"' and "command of previous literature on the topic" in the space of 20 or 30 pages. And yet whereas in 2000 Professor Miller discerned a common thread linking the essays under consideration, only one year later I find no metacritical consensus on contemporary criticism to speak of--save for the obvious requirement that each essay combine theoretical exigency, innovative close reading, command of previous li terature on the topic, and some degree of sociopolitical smarts. In the space of 20 or 30 pages.

The essays that commanded my sustained attention ranged from one end of the century to the other, from the metropole to the periphery, from the canon to the apocrypha and back. The maturing and consolidation of feminism, of queer theory, and of postcolonial studies were evident throughout, but not a single essay evinced any version of the tiresome conviction that literary criticism must hereafter proceed by citing Figure X, whose definitive work on Y can now be extended to Z. By this, of course, I am heartened. Unpredictable essays make for slower reading and rereading, and in the age of academic efficiency and excellence triumphant, slow reading and rereading are precious luxuries we cannot not afford.

I did, however, manage to come to a decision at last, and I chose (and hereby choose, for you speech act theorists) "Writing Out (of) Chaos: Constructions of History in Yeats's 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' and 'Meditations in Time of Civil War.'" The essay announces its ambitions in the opening paragraph--to bring "postcolonial theory to bear on Yeats studies"--and yet does not proceed to do what I expected it to, namely, rehearse the geopolitical debate over whether and how Ireland (or anyplace else) can properly be called postcolonial, as a prologemenon to a fresh new anticolonial reading of Yeats, however strained this reading might be. Rather, the essay rereads Yeats's poetry in such a compelling way as to lead me to reread Yeat's poetry, to fish out my copy of the Collected Poems in order to follow, page by page and line by line, the way in which "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" "plays upon historiographic desire--the desire to use temporal markers as a means for constructing order in the present--by c ontinually frustrating that desire, revealing that the old, particularly nationalist and imperialist modes for ordering time must be cast aside before new histories of Ireland may be articulated in this transitional period." Our days are dragon-ridden, as the fourth stanza of the poem tells us, and it is thus no strain to see "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" as a repudiation of the Whiggish historiographic desire for the "fine thought.../That the worst rogues and rascals had died out." The creative spark

of the essay, however, lies in reading this moment of profound uncertainty this transitional period ("one in progress to this day," as the essay notes in its second paragraph), as symptomatic of the paradoxes of postcoloniality. On this reading, Yeats's refusal of the compensatory narratives and myths of the past, his insistence, rather, on images of incoherence and blind destruction (vengeance for Jacques Molay; that insolent fiend Robert Artisson), produces poetry that testifies adequately and passionately t o the incoherence of the present--a poetry that yields "a transitional Ireland ceaselessly replicat[ing] the initial wrongs of colonialism, a newly liberated Ireland struggling to become a truly postcolonial Ireland."

Postcolonial studies as deployed in this essay, then, give us a new lens through which to read the transitional Ireland of these two poems--and a new lens for reading these poems as meditations on the state of Ireland. Granting but not entirely giving in to the arguments of Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton that Yeatsian cultural nationalism turned to "an idealized version of Ireland's Ascendancy past," the essay gradually charts a careful course between the wholesale indictment of Yeats's Anglo-Irish conservatism and the defensive insistence on Yeats's resistance to the projects of British imperialism. And the goal, crucially, is not to claim Yeats or Ireland for postcolonialism, or to claim postcoloniality for "Meditations in Time of Civil War"; the goal is to understand a brilliant and politically volatile poet in every available facet of his brilliance and volatility as the turning gyres of history obscure some of those facets and reveal others. The essay quite simply delivers the Yeats it promises: "By shi fting our gaze to this transitional moment itself and to Yeats's engagement with these nationalist constructions of history as they are being formulated, we begin to perceive a more complicated Yeats whose poetic meditations on an Ireland gripped by war may not be so readily dismissed as romantic idealism or naive mythmaking."