Happiness by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2023.a906518
ISSN2153-4578
Autores ResumoReviewed by: Happiness by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Paul Allen Miller (bio) HAPPINESS Jeffrey R. Di Leo Routledge https://www.routledge.com/Happiness/Leo/p/book/9781032015200 142 pages; Cloth $64.95 Jeffrey R. Di Leo is an impresario. From atop his various perches at symplokē, the journal he founded thirty years ago while a graduate student at Indiana University, which today is one of the foremost literary-theoretical journals in the world, to the American Book Review, in which as editor he engages scholars, writers, and poets across the nation, to the Society for Critical Exchange, which he directs and whose Winter Theory Institutes have become the stuff of legend, Di Leo has specialized in bringing together a wide variety of voices to produce important events, journal issues, and countless books that both survey the field and raise the level of our collective philosophical and theoretical conversations. In many ways, Di Leo has become a metonym for the vast and decentralized landscape that characterizes literary and cultural studies of a theoretical bent in the United States. While certainly important work is still being done in the traditional redoubts of Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley, gone are the days when the most important and most innovative books and essays were being written only in a few elite establishments, like New Haven or Duke in the eighties or Irvine in the nineties. Today the most important and cutting-edge theoretical developments are as likely to emerge from Greensboro, North Carolina, Normal, Illinois, Walla Walla, Washington, or Victoria, Texas, as they are from the salons of New York and Cambridge. There are no doubt many reasons for this phenomenon. The success of the theoretical revolution itself has meant that, while there are no longer a [End Page 163] few dominant figures as in the heyday of deconstruction, a certain level of theoretical and philosophical sophistication among today's literary and cultural scholars is simply assumed. The tightness of the academic job market has meant that even the most talented students do not have many choices in the jobs they take, so that what were once less prestigious schools now have access to the best and the brightest. And of course, the geographical dispersion of the United States has always meant that there could never really be the kind of concentration one experiences in Paris or Oxbridge. But while those factors cannot be discounted, the organizational brilliance and theoretical savvy of scholars and editors like Di Leo have been the sine qua non in this American Renaissance that has seen a thousand flowers bloom and a thousand schools of thought contend. Countless young literary scholars of the last thirty years owe Di Leo a debt, as does the profession as a whole. Di Leo's latest single-authored book is no exception. Happiness is an entry in Routledge's New Literary Theory series (edited by Andy Mousley and Jeff Wallace). While these are designed to be slender volumes, Di Leo, as we would expect, unfurls a wide-ranging and catholic survey that brings together thinkers, writers, and artists as diverse as Pharrell Williams and Alain Badiou, Aldous Huxley and Stéphane Mallarmé. We are offered informative discussions of positive psychology, psychoanalytic demystification, literary hedonism, and revolutionary metaphysical jouissance. Of course, in any volume there are inevitable lacunae, and I will finish by discussing a few of the more important ones, but these are not offered in the spirit of critique but of further conversation, one we would be only too happy to continue. But first, let us take a quick tour of Happiness and its environs. Happiness has four major parts. Chapter 1 looks at happiness as a commodity, taking us from the journalistic writings of the French philosopher Émile Chartier, writing under the pseudonym Alain, to Huxley's Brave New World's (1932) dystopian vision of a world administered for our happiness, to Pharrell's smash hit, to the queen of "happy," Oprah Winfrey. What all these disparate phenomena have in common, according to Di Leo, is a belief that happiness is something people want and that we should organize ourselves on a personal, economic, and governmental level to facilitate the pursuit of...
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