Quick Studies The Best of Lingua Franca edited by Alexander Star Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $18 “THERE IS NO METHOD,” T.S. Eliot once proclaimed, “except to be very intelligent”–to which the editors of Lingua Franca, the late lamented “Review of Academic Life,” added another requirement: “to be very hip.” It was an outlook that allowed the magazine to avoid the preachiness and predictability that characterized much intellectual journalism throughout the 1990s, but it came at a price. Lingua Franca was the brainchild of Jeffrey Kittay, a former professor of French literature at Yale. At first glance Kittay seemed an unlikely man for the job, too deeply entrenched in academia to observe it with a measure of objectivity and the requisite sense of the absurd. He’d taught at Yale when the vogue for deconstruction was at its peak and New Haven was a suburb of Paris. His first book, “The Emergence of Prose,” was coauthored with Wlad Godzich, a globe-trotting, multilingual savant who appears to have escaped from the pages of a David Lodge novel. But Kittay possessed two qualities that set him apart from many of his fellow academics: an entrepreneurial spirit and an independent income. He left the professoriate and in 1990 launched Lingua Franca. Presided over by a series of talented editors–Judith Shulevitz, Margaret Talbot, and Alexander Star–the magazine quickly established its signature style: a blend of reporting, gossip, and inspired silliness. Mainstream journalism typically treats ideas with an anxiety verging on desperation. Every subject has to be oversold; otherwise, who would pay attention? Hence the huffing and puffing with which the newsmagazines trumpet an endless succession of breakthroughs: “The Fossil Find That Changes Everything,” “The Radical New Psychology of Emotions,” and so on. Meanwhile, intellectual journalism–the sort of thing one finds in the pages of Commentary, the New Criterion, and Dissent, for example–suffers the recurring temptation of stuffy solemnity, ideological narrowness, and a cloying coterie atmosphere. Lingua Franca was fresher, funnier, less self-consciously responsible (for both good and ill). The magazine brimmed over with intellectual curiosity and wit, and its range of subjects was exhilarating: the totalitarian excesses of “copyright protection” (experienced firsthand by any poor soul who has tried to quote a few lines of T.S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson, not to mention the lyrics for Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”), the fiery reign of John Silber at Boston University, the intellectual pilgrimage of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the efforts of the financier Sir John Templeton to influence university teaching on science and religion, the battles over a Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress, and the experience of mostly leftish scholars studying the far reaches of the American right. All of those topics, it happens, could be found in a single issue–the December 1995 issue–along with a listing of “tenurings and hirings to tenure” for the academic year and a smorgasbord of short takes, including a hilarious report on a term-paper mill with offerings ranging from “Bob Dylan’s 1963 Speech to Emergency Civil Liberties Committee” (a “Neo-Aristotelian analysis of drunken singer-songwriter’s address on occasion of receiving the Tom Paine Award”) to “Dentistry and Nonverbal Communication.” Lingua Franca’s contributors didn’t all belong to the same club. The magazine’s default stance was a compound of the attitudes one would expect to find among, say, listeners to NPR, but the profile of MacIntyre, for instance, was by the Catholic editor and writer Paul Elie, and the non-liberal journalist Charlotte Allen was a regular contributor who wrote several cover stories for the magazine on religious topics. “One of the major virtues of liberal society in the past,” Richard Hofstadter concluded in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” “was that it made possible such a variety of styles of intellectual life. . . . What matters is the openness and generosity needed to comprehend the varieties of excellence.” It would be hard to find another magazine of the nineties that exhibited such openness and generosity more impressively than Lingua Franca. The magazine’s finest hour–and its claim to a footnote in the intellectual history of the twentieth century–came with the May/June 1996 issue, in which physicist Alan Sokal revealed the hoax he’d perpetrated in the journal Social Text. Sokal’s devastating parody, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” skewered a whole generation of postmodern poseurs–and put Lingua Franca in the news. Behind the scenes, the magazine was clearly influencing coverage of the academy and culture more generally. The Saturday “Arts & Ideas” section in the New York Times, launched in November 1997, bore traces of Lingua Franca, as did many stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Meanwhile, Kittay was expanding the franchise. In 1997, he started a new magazine, University Business, and three years later he acquired the “Arts & Letters Daily” website. There were spinoffs from Lingua Franca, too, including a guide to graduate school (“the ultimate insider’s map”), a book on the Sokal affair, and a short-lived, freestanding book review supplement. It was a shock, then, even amid the grim bulletins from the magazine industry in the fall of 2001, to hear that Lingua Franca was suspending publication after its November issue. Kittay was quoted as saying that a single unnamed investor, who had kept the enterprise afloat, had decided not to put any more money into it. (In August 2002, the Times reported that Kittay was trying to buy the magazine back from bankruptcy court, with hopes of resuming publication.) Evidently Lingua Franca had never paid for itself, despite the ads that packed every issue and the high regard in which it was held. Circulation had slid to around 12,000, which is almost three times that of the New Criterion but only half the circulation of Modern Ferret. Like many other mainstays of good journalism, including even a heavyweight like the Atlantic Monthly, Lingua Franca ultimately depended on a patron. THE NEWLY PUBLISHED BOOK “Quick Studies” is a collection of “the Best of Lingua Franca,” edited and introduced by Alexander Star. Star was still in his early twenties, a wunderkind from the New Republic’s stable, when Kittay tapped him to edit the magazine late in 1994, and he continued to the end. (In April of this year, he was hired to create a new “Ideas” section for the Boston Globe.) This anthology, alas, will not burnish the reputation of either Star or Lingua Franca. Magazines are rarely well served by such collections. Books are heavy. Magazines are light and miscellaneous even when their subjects are serious–and Lingua Franca’s subjects were often blessedly unserious to begin with. But the trouble with “Quick Studies” goes beyond the generic problems faced by all such anthologies. In his introduction, Star is trapped by institutional duty into writing a kind of official history of the magazine, with gestures toward a manifesto. The story that he tells–the way he frames the collection, and the pieces he chooses–fails to do justice to some of Lingua Franca’s real achievements and inadvertently highlights its one great flaw. No selection of articles, obviously, can begin to represent the variety of more than ten years of publication. But by organizing his selections into a handful of thematic categories (“The Reaction to Theory,” “The Political Professor,” and so on), Star has created a book that is much duller and more predictable than any issue of Lingua Franca. He also inadvertently draws attention to the limitations of the magazine’s hip posture. “From the beginning,” Star writes, “Lingua Franca refused to take sides in [the] Culture Wars.” And to show how this played out in practice, he cites Margaret Talbot’s essay “A Most Dangerous Method,” about the case of Jane Gallop, a flamboy
ant feminist literary theorist who was accused of sexual harassment by two lesbian graduate students. The essay offers an excruciatingly detailed view of a self-indulgent, narcissistic professor and the grad students who chose to enter her orbit–a more damning indictment of one influential current in the academy today than anything composed by Roger Kimball or Dinesh D’Souza, in part because it quotes the participants’ own words at such length. (“I don’t have a problem f–ing Jane Gallop as long as she practices safe sex,” the student who later filed the first complaint wrote in a paper delivered at a conference. “After all, she is merely an ‘other woman.’ I do have a problem f–ing my dissertation adviser.”) And yet Talbot keeps hedging, hedging, arriving finally at this astonishing conclusion: “There is something lost when we get too punctilious about defining teaching as a business relationship. And what’s lost isn’t trivial: it’s the glimpses of the professor as a whole person that many students thrive on; the sense that learning isn’t confined to the fifty-minute lecture; the passions of teachers like Jane Gallop.” This is the piece that Star singles out as the very paradigm of a Lingua Franca article. “Jane Gallop had, undoubtedly, acted unwisely and perhaps unforgivably,” he concludes. “But her incisive mind and frank acknowledgment of the emotional connections between teacher and student made her critics seem incurious and unthinking.” SUCH MOMENTS OCCUR whenever the desire to be hip–and the horror of being co-opted by tight-lipped moralizers–trumps the requirements of truth-telling, finding refuge in “ambiguity.” Another flagrant instance is Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay, “The Stand,” about the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s notorious testimony at the Colorado gay-rights trial, also singled out by Star as representative of the Lingua Franca method. The openness and generosity needed to comprehend varieties of intellectual excellence are qualities much to be desired. But they must rest on a solid foundation, a commitment to telling even unpalatable truths. At its best, as in the Sokal affair, Lingua Franca not only made us laugh but told the truth at the same time. John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.
