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'A Democratic and Fraternal Humanism': The Cant of Pessimism and Newton Arvin's Queer Socialism

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/alh/ajn064

1468-4365

Christopher Castiglia,

Academic Freedom and Politics

We are in the habit of assuming that the most serious and profound apprehension of reality is the Sense of Tragedy; but it may be that, in assuming this, we ourselves are mistaken. It may be that there are points of view from which the Tragic sense must be seen as serious and profound indeed, but limited and imperfectly philosophical. It may even be that there can exist a kind of complacency of pessimism as there is certainly a complacency of optimism; and that many of us in this age are guilty of it. We hug our negations, our doubts, our disbeliefs to our chests, as if our moral and intellectual dignity depended on them. What Newton Arvin wrote of his colleagues in the field of American literary studies in 1959 is equally true of many of its practitioners a half-century later. The language of tragedy, trauma, and cynical disbelief—what Arvin called “the cant of pessimism” (“The House of Pain” 38)—saturates literary criticism, to the point where it seems whole conferences comprise papers that use somber evocations of 9/11 or Abu Ghraib to preface timid textual analyses of antebellum fiction.