This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara‘s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O'Hara‘s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O'Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O'Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisible.

The aesthetic definition of monstrosity underwent a change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from a concept of deformity to a notion of monstrosity as too much life. Scientific discourse between 1780 and 1830 was preoccupied with the idea of a living principle that could distinguish living matter from nonliving, and the physiologist John Hunter posited an even more speculative “principle of monstrosity” as an extension of the formative capacity. Such monstrosity did not remain on the level of theory but became the motivating force for a new kind of monster in the literature of the Romantic period. Keats's Lamia emerges here as the consummate Romantic monster—a vision of life conceived beyond the material fact of organization. Viewed in this light, Lamia, no mere narrative swerve from Keats's epic ambitions, is a brilliant if tragic response to the question of what it means to “[d]ie into life.”

Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge. Struggling with the implications and possibilities of Victorian energy physics even as that science came into being, Tennyson anticipates not only the laws of thermodynamics but also many of the ways these ideas suffuse Victorian thought, from widespread anxieties regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy. In Memoriam at once evokes the roots of physical theory in Romantic elegy and suggests the elegiac structure and function of Victorian physical discourse; like In Memoriam, the laws of thermodynamics effect a reconciliation between the dissipation we observe and the conservation we crave. Moreover, as Tennyson reconceives waste as transformation in the natural world, In Memoriam also reveals a surprising relation between energy physics and another emergent science, evolutionary biology.

This essay challenges two established critical assumptions about late Victorian literary decadence: first, that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Decadence is instead shown to be the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the “failures” of the subject that so frequently mark the end of accounts of decadence such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collins's Heart and Science, and Machen's The Great God Pan represent the triumph of a historically specific experimental ethos that valued the transcendence of conventional epistemology over the discovery of useful knowledge.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that i have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I amhardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will-with luck-come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I amdoing-which is never an easy thing to do.

One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature. Another colleague buttonholed me at about the same time to tell me he could no longer imagine teaching literature in any context other than cultural studies-that is, in a setting in which the literary text was at most an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoretical theme, no different from any other cultural manifestation. No wonder undergraduates demonstrate dwindling interest in taking a major in literature. For a host of reasons, they come to the university less interested in studying literature than previous generations of students were, only to encounter on their arrival professors who are more than occasionally apathetic toward or suspicious of literary texts. Student disenchantment can only grow in such circumstances.

What do we tell our students? the question implies a range of assumptions, most obviously the simple hope that such a conversation might even take place. Imagine a student dropping by during office hours or approaching us after class to ask for our thoughts on the choice of a major. Or consider a different scenario: the faculty member struggling to find the right tone in order to strike up a conversation with a student about his or her academic plans. Certainly such discussions take place, certainly teachers and students talk about educational goals, and certainly a teacher's advice can at times be important for a student. Yet all this reassurance cannot disguise the fragility of the situation. For it is equally certain that the question overstates the frequency, significance, and ramifications of these sorts of exchanges. Parental pressure plays a larger role in the real decision making than does a teacher's advice. (Perhaps there is a journal somewhere for parents of college students with a discussion on “Choosing the Right Major: What DoWe Tell Our Children?”) Many of us have spoken with students who plea their interest in selecting a literature major but find themselves compelled by their parents to choose something allegedly more practical. I for one have rarely met students passionate about a major in business but whose families heartlessly forced them to study literature.

If the value of the study of literature were self-evident, there would be no need to pose this question. That such is not the case is clear from the virulence of the debates about higher education in the humanities that have roiled the profession and areas beyond. Professors of literature have had a lot to say to one another about this question but not, perhaps, as much to say to their students. Yet faculty members implicitly answer this question all the time, in the courses they teach, especially in introductory, or “gateway,” courses. I will address the question, then, as concretely as possible, by way of the introductory course for the English major my colleagues and I have designed together and discussed repeatedly over the past two decades at Wesleyan University. In so doing, I will argue that the value of studying literature is precisely that it poses value as a question, not an answer.

Sometimes a question has been answered in so many creative ways that we overlook the assumptions underlying such responses. When students ask, “What can I do with a degree in literature?” the answers suggest that instructors hear a second, unasked part of the question: “-besides a career in teaching.” That PMLA has reserved space to address a related question-“Why major in literature-what do we tell our students?”-suggests a professional interest not merely in the careers available to literature majors but more broadly in testing what MLA members say about our profession. One answer is that literature majors, like other majors in the liberal arts and humanities, have a wide selection of career choices. The knowledge students gain from modern and classical languages, history, social and political sciences, philosophy, and literature serves graduates by giving them a breadth of experiences and ideas, by developing creative thinking, and by providing skills in communication that make BAs and MAs attractive to employers in business, technology, industry, government, and research, to name a few. But these options omit the one career, sometimes considered a clichéd choice, often left unsaid: literature majors make-or ought to make-excellent teachers.

Recently, a gifted undergraduate came to me with some urgent questions: Should he major in literature? And if he did, what practical benefits might he realize? I asked one question: “Are you in love?” By this I meant, “Are you in love with literature?” Then I inquired, “Does your heart skip a beat when you encounter your love? Do you ache when the two of you are separated? Do you resent anything that intrudes on you and your love?”

Not being an evangelist, i wasn't sure how to respond to the question “Why major in literature-what do we tell our students?” In over twenty years of teaching and advising, I have never sought to persuade students to major in any field. Occasionally, when a woman advisee who came to Brown to major in physics or engineering has decided to shift to literature, I have tried to talk about the difficulties women face in the sciences, the science classroom's chilly climate, and gender competition to persuade her to stick it out and become the engineer or physicist she wanted to be. But proselytize? Never.

The progression from language instruction or composition to the higher discipline of literature is no longer the only or even preferred path everywhere. For example, MIT stresses that its literature program goes beyond the traditional:

Language rustles. its particularity can be heard and even described. When Roland Barthes first suggested this metaphor for the ways in which language is detectable per se, he offered a structuralist rejection of the mimetic and hermeneutic models of literature. Nearly forty years later, his insistence on the detectability of language suggests a defense of literary study that is profoundly humanistic. Barthes's literature, with its special discursive density, answers the claim that literature programs, which perhaps were never seen as fully practical, have betrayed the public trust through aloof hermeticism since the advent of poststructuralism in the 1970s. The case for majoring in literature either has too fine a historical pedigree or goes too much against the grain of the current institutional and political emphasis on utility and accountability in education. Thus, the imperial Roman rhetorician Plutarch felt the need to write a defense of literary education in “How a Young Man Should Hear Lectures on Poetry.” Indeed, despite the successful closing of the commercial theaters in 1642 by the Puritan London City Council, new plays continued to be encouraged, written, and performed in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge without interruption. Even Glavrepertkom, instead of silencing Soviet literature, policed it and honed it into a distinctively effective system of ideological dissemination, albeit with the censorship of such luminaries as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My essay, with its claim that our students should continue to concentrate in literature, has thus already been written and enacted, even under strict surveillance of extremist governments. In the face of so many arguments for applied literary studies as one of “the basics,” for the integration of the literary into the pedagogical, there is in the academy a sense that a literary education is at best supplemental. It is a pleasing option to consider, budgets permitting, after writing and analytic reasoning have been addressed. A case for majoring in literature can and must be made, and it can avoid the cultural globalism of E. D. Hirsch's arguments for an exclusionary “cultural literacy.” It can also avoid taking refuge in Harold Bloom's justifications for a canon, which are centered on an Emersonian view of Shakespeare's necessity, lest “we cease to think” (41).

In the aftermath of what has come to be known as Nine One One, literary texts became the last resort of consolation in a vast desert of mindless media commentary and aggressive but ultimately futile political rhetoric. The Philadelphia Inquirer promptly published email messages exchanged by four University of Pennsylvania students trying to grapple with the tragic enormity of the historical moment. For these students “[t]he old world died on Tuesday [11 Sept. 2001],” and they had to learn to live in a new reality. To make sense of this not-so-brave new world, they sought for answers in “books and literature” (“Facing”). Mass-circulated email carried messages of consolation in literary format across the cyber globe. W. H. Auden's “September 1, 1939” was reprinted in all the major newspapers and forwarded to countless e-mail accounts. The conservative columnist George F. Will quoted liberally from the closing lines of Albert Camus's The Plague. “Today's president, his rhetorical rheostat turned way up, vows that the current military campaign 'will rid the world of evil,'” observed Will with undisguised sarcasm. He countered the president's naiveté by citing Camus's allegory of the plague as the permanence of evil in the world. In the final paragraph of the novel, Camus's narrator, Dr. Rieux, muses that the plague bacillus never dies but lies dormant until its time comes to unleash its terror on an unsuspecting world once again. By invoking The Plague, Will wanted to remind his fellow Americans “who are mild in temperament and amnesiac in tendency” that for America “there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years.” The banality of this conclusion contrasts sharply with the profundity of Camus's final lines.