Musing together at year twenty.(Women in German )

The two editors pool their reflections at Year 20 of the Yearbook, addressing, variously, questions of: Who am I to be editing the Yearbook? How does one go about co-writing an essay? What can a glance at the twenty volumes tell us about how the Yearbook started and what it has become? What is its job? How well is it doing its job? What ideas might we entertain to make it more responsive to our needs in this new century? The editors' questions and answers diverge and come together, but both heartily endorse these sentiments: happy birthday, Yearbook!. L'chaim, Women in German! (R-EBJ and MG)

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Marjorie: I have often wondered what, exactly, lies behind the finished product of a piece of writing with multiple authors: too often, nobody is saying who wrote what. The preface to last year's Yearbook, for instance, by "The Coeditors," was actually written entirely by Ruth-Ellen. For that matter, so was this year's preface. When she and I first began talking about writing a piece together for this year's volume, I began to wonder again how that would work. And as we started running ideas past each other, I became uneasy, because they weren't meshing well. Ruth-Ellen was looking toward where the Yearbook lies in the grand scheme of things, and I was inclined toward a modest close-up. If we couldn't find a topic that both of us could endorse enthusiastically, the chances that the piece would end up being genuinely co-written were poor. But also the ways that each of us writes did not look easy to yoke together: her leaping from peak to peak of abstraction, me sniffing at the wildflowers on the valley floor. Over the years, though, I have absorbed enough of the spirit of Women in German to understand that whatever the nature of the gifts that we bring to the table, we should bring them and lay them out there, which is to say: this piece needed two distinct voices. And so our plan was hatched, with Ruth-Ellen offering her thoughts in her voice, me doing the same, and then together weaving a frame for the two. An important influence on our plan was our recent memory of the lovely work that Elizabeth R. Baer and Hester Baer did in the piece that they wrote together for the last volume of the Yearbook, "Postmemory Envy?" (19: 75-98). First we will offer my reflections, then Ruth-Ellen's, on the Yearbook at twenty. That will be followed by her response to my thoughts, and mine to hers, and then a concluding paragraph by Ruth-Ellen.

My career trajectory began in my graduate training in Berkeley at a time (1966-71--major culture wars) when, if anybody knew that critical theory was soon about to hit hard on how we conducted our discipline, nobody there mentioned it--unlike, say, Stanford in the same era and the same place. I do remember one lone class in the "theory" of tragedy, by one Professor David George, but he decided to leave the academy in about the second week of the semester, just after we had all signed on for our seminar projects (mine on Schopenhauer). The path he broke was reclaimed by the seeds of entrenchment. So it was that I managed to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree in German from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 without knowing even that I was practicing New Criticism, much less that there were other options. I think it goes without saying that there was also no mentoring there for me.

In 1971, I went to Queens College of the City University of New York as an ABD Instructor, and in the eleven years that I spent teaching there, I got wind of the changing discipline. I was busy, and hoped that I could ignore it. But as it became more difficult to place the articles that I was writing, I reconsidered (still, of course, without mentoring: at Queens College, one of my colleagues referred to my abject ABD self as "the highest-paid graduate student in the country"; I was later denied tenure, and later than that, the entire City University of New York lost a class-action suit on behalf of women, amounting to some $7 million). Very belatedly, I realized that I could not ignore what was happening in my discipline, and (revelation) across disciplines, and even to the concept of discipline, and so I began to try to teach myself, embarking on an ambitious reading project. It started with Jonathan Culler on structuralist poetics and then on deconstruction, and proceeded through such stalwarts as Terry Eagleton, Gerald Graft, and Robert Scholes, with anthologies and textbooks by Vincent Leitch, Toril Moi, Rick Rylance, Naomi Schor, Elaine Showalter, Jane Tompkins, etc. My project later became collaborative, with monthly meetings of "The Smart Ladies"--a reading group of four or five of my feminist colleagues (at my next, and clearly final, place of employment, the California State University at Sacramento, where I began teaching in 1983, and where, again, no mentoring was available for new faculty). We Smart Ladies delved into whatever struck our fancy over the dozen years of our collaboration: Butler, Case, Cixous, Derrida, Ebert, Foucault, Freud, Gallop, Gayle Greene, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Marianne Hirsch, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, McClintock, Modleski, Phelan, Rubin, Sedgwick, Spivak, Michael Warner, among many others.

Early on in this new theory venture of mine, I declared it time for me to try my hand at writing a new kind of article, one incorporating theory in some yet-to-be specified way. After much sifting through my assembled materials, ! settled on feminist theory, and set out as if on a lab experiment to figure out how to apply some principles of feminist theory to the practice of criticism, with Heinrich von Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile" ("Das Erdbeben in Chili") as the guinea pig. Readers, it worked. When it came time to circulate the resulting article, "Birth as Metaphor in Kleist's 'Das Erdbeben in Chili,'" for publication, I continued to venture into new territory, deciding to submit it to a venue that I had been only vaguely aware of, the Women in German Yearbook--and to attend their annual conference for the first time.

Both ventures were a new experience. I was encouraged ever so warmly by then-editors Jeanette Clausen and Sara Friedrichsmeyer to revise and resubmit my article. Since I was accustomed to either rejection or acceptance, this gray area made me uneasy and somewhat testy: why should I spend great energy revising an article that still might not be accepted, when I might place it as is with another publication? When I met the editors shortly thereafter at the 1991 conference in Great Barrington, MA, I broached with them the subject of possibly reconsidering their policies. They were polite, but did not change their policies. I grudgingly revised and resubmitted, and the article appeared in volume 8 of the Yearbook. Now, thirteen years later, I embrace those policies as at the heart of the whole Women in German undertaking--and the slumber-party-like conferences as embodying the same ethos. I have not missed one conference since.