Mary Baine Campbell is a professor at Brandeis University, in the Department of English and American Literature, where she teaches medieval and Renaissance literatures, poetry, and women's studies. Her books include The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (1988), The World, the Flesh, and Angels (poetry, 1989), "'Are Sin, Disease and Death Real?'" (chapbook, 1993) and Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (1999), as well as a new collection of poetry, Trouble, which has not yet found a publisher. During the summer of 2000, Campbell made a libretto for a new opera by Martin Brody, based on Marie de France's lai about a werewolf and his philandering wife, the Bisclavret.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
It is embarrassing to have a style in public, because it means you are vulnerable, vulnerable to being "read." People do all kinds of things to avoid this, including pretending to be stylish in some new but store-bought way (following a "model"), which is a more fashionable version of the older habit of writing in an impersonal voice of Latinate neutrality and (thus) authority. Having a style means you are situated, if only in your sign-making self, and not divinely scientific. This is especially scary for people who don’t yet have some kind of institutional authority such as tenure or fame.
The world is largely bleak and life is short. Why be bleak ourselves? Why not create pleasures? If I think of the audience when I write, it is an audience of people who just wanna have fun. Though I do very much include learning about things besides me and my style in the notion of fun! (I once had a difficult midwifery with a graduate student, a poet, who was a marvelous stylist. Every sentence of her dissertation was beautiful, surprising, voiced. Every sentence said "pay no attention to that Modernist woman poet on my title page! Watch me Write!" )
Discovering your style is tantamount to discovering your mind, even your intellectual mission. It is hard, takes years, etc., like learning to play a musical instrument. Much that is in it isn’t ours in particular, but our various situations. No need to fake that, it will out itself if we take writing seriously, if we consider critical writing to be writing and not just self-advertisement or a strategy for advancement.
But to the practical side of this matter. My particular critical writing has, from grad school on, attracted admiration but signaled some askew relation to The Profession (the relation of a poet to it, as it happens). I did get a job at a university, and am now a full professor, and have published some books, so it didn't get seriously in my way as I wended it up the Ladder. On the other hand, I long ago gave up sending articles to journals unless I’m invited to. It may well be that times have changed or are at least changing, but there was a period in which one’s writing had to be instantly recognizable as signifying membership in a particular critical or theoretical school to be recognized as a contribution to scholarship, and there were stylistic methods of indicating that (especially the long footnote naming every important person in that posse who has ever written on the matter under discussion in your own sentence or paragraph. See Bourdieu.) I didn’t understand the outline of my mission in the written world yet, and wasn’t about to signal affiliations that weren’t real. I think, I hope, the new world of online journals will reduce the homogeneity of expectations.
Two great remarks from a critic and theorist of inimitable and thrilling style, Allen Grossman: 1) "Don’t worry, no one’s listening!" and 2) (addressed to a brilliant student whose dissertation chapter was oppressed by stylistic and expressive timidity) "Who are the Police?" In order not to be incarcerated, we have to stop being incarcerated, now. Open the door. If you find yourself driven out of academia because you have too much verve, emotional complexity and fire, than perhaps academia doesn’t exist at all.