Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics

Curtis White is a rarity among writers of the sort of academic articles which generally fall until the title of "Cultural Studies" -- he is a able to write clear, insightful sentences and put them together to create coherent and compelling arguments. I read this book in one sitting, spellbound and exhilarated, and though it's only 118 pages, that same amount written by some more prominent cultural studier would take weeks to read, if it got read at all.White's perspective, though, is fascinating -- he seeks to link social politics and cultural politics, something which has been done by right-wing anti-intellectual culture warriors such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Bennett, but has seldom been accomplished by leftist academics, who generally wanted to divorce the social and cultural realms. Before reading this book, I was so disgusted with academic literary theory, so tired of its apparent irrelevance to anything other than doctoral dissertations, that I swore never to read anything with the words "literary" and "theory" together on any page for the rest of my life. Now, though I may not be rushing out to find the latest tract on post-post-structuralism, I'm also not closing my mind to the possibility that literary theory may have some value.The pieces collected in this book were published between 1984 and 1997, with the majority having been published in the mid-1990s. The questions White raises are consistent, however: what is the place of literature (particularly fiction) in our society, what is the function of academic literary scholarship for both the artist and society, and what do both literature and theory have to do with the world at large. White's bias is clearly in favor of innovative fiction, small press publishers, and social activism (broadly defined), and many of the joys in the book come from his iconoclastic clashings with various know-nothing pundits and overinflated egos. White is remarkably erudite, but seldom parades his erudition. His perspective is unique: he is not only a critic and an academic, but also a publisher and a novelist and memoirist himself. He deserves a larger audience, for the pleasures in his texts are many.