Literary Theorist to University President: An Interview with Steven Knapp

Abstract

Literary Theorist to University President:An Interview with Steven Knapp Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Those in literary studies will know Steven Knapp from his 1982 essay "Against Theory," which he co-wrote with Walter Benn Michaels. Though focused on the question of intention in interpretation, it was taken as a challenge to doing theory in general and drew a stream of responses over the next decade. Knapp also wrote two books dealing with literary issues such as personification and literary value, but in the 1990s he began working in administration as a dean, provost, and, from 2007 to 2017, president of George Washington University. Oftentimes administration, especially upper administration, is opaque to scholars and critics, so this interview aims to shed light on what chief officers actually do. In addition, Knapp discusses "Against Theory" and his transit through some of the central locations of theory in the 1970s and 1980s: Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. Born in 1951, Knapp attended Yale (BA, 1973), taking courses with Harold Bloom and other influential critics, and Cornell (PhD, 1981), studying with M. H. Abrams, Neil Hertz, and others there. His first professorial job was at Berkeley (1978–94), where he encountered Michaels, Frances Ferguson, Joel Fineman, and Stephen Greenblatt, who started the journal Representations in the 1980s and forged the New Historicism. "Against Theory" is sometimes taken as marking the shift from an emphasis on theoretical speculation to one on cultural and historical context, but Knapp's critical work has not been New Historicist. His first book, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (1985), sorts through the problematic relation of the literal and the figurative and the status of allegory in literary history, and his second, Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (1993), takes up some of the issues of "Against Theory," the role of authorial intention interpretation and the distinctiveness of literature. First published in Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), "Against Theory" prompted a cycle of responses, the first round of which, with rejoinders from Knapp and Michaels, is collected in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 1985). A sequel, "Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction" [End Page 473] (Critical Inquiry 14 [1987]), enjoined a series of responses in law and philosophy as well as literature. Although he had served on various committees and as vice-chair of graduate studies in the English department at Berkeley, Knapp had not served in a full-time administrative position until he moved to Hopkins as dean of Arts and Sciences in 1994, stepping up to provost in 1996 through 2007, when he was appointed president of George Washington. After completing his second term he returned to teaching English, though in February 2020 he again answered the call to administration, becoming president of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (encompassing Art, Natural History, the Science Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum). Though with less time for his own scholarship, he has pursued an interest in religion and belief, resulting in Philip Clayton and Knapp, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith (2011), which spurred a series of responses and a reply, collected in Confronting the Predicament of Belief: The Quest for God in Radical Uncertainty, edited by James W. Walters, Clayton, and Knapp (2020). This interview took place on March 9, 2022, at the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Catherine Evans, a PhD student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. jeffrey j. williams: You've gone from being an English professor to a university president, and now are president of the Carnegie Museums. I don't think that people have a good idea of what university presidents really do. We see them at graduation and sometimes they're quoted in press releases, but can you say what university presidents do, in your experience? steven knapp: First of all, I must say it's rather varied, because the institutional structures vary so much. I happened to have been a dean and provost at a very decentralized private university, Johns Hopkins University, after having been a faculty member and in various vice-chair positions at a...