“Attentiveness,” claimed seventeenth-century philosopher Nicholas Malebranche, “is the natural prayer of the soul.” For more than forty years, Melvyn New has engaged literature with an attentiveness that Malebranche, author of the tellingly titled The Search After Truth, would have found admirable. This volume seeks both to celebrate Professor New’s achievements and to recommend his practice to present and future scholars.
A balance of passive receptivity and active scrutiny, attention, for Malebranche, encapsulates the rationalist’s simultaneously skeptical and faithful approach to the quest for knowledge. Professor New’s own search for truth has been similarly grounded in a humble awareness that it will never be found. He once instructed his graduate students in a class on Jewish philosophy to circle the name of every thinker in their course readings about whom they knew little or nothing. The resulting lists functioned not as dead ends, but as warnings; Professor New was inviting his students not to leave their studies, but to join Socrates who, in believing he knew nothing, knew the one thing needful to the life of a scholar. No one can avoid making pronouncements about texts and figures based on secondhand knowledge; the alternative to doing so, as Professor New is quick to point out, is silence. He has continuously challenged himself, his students, and the profession as a whole to proceed as carefully and thoughtfully as possible, always slightly abashed by how careless and thoughtless, despite our best efforts, we necessarily will be.
Professor New became, for those students not intimidated by his reputation for rigor, a model of intellectual life. Teaching his first graduate course at the University of Florida in the late 1960s, he drew a circle on the blackboard and asked how many points lie within the circle? An infinite number. And how many without? Again, an infinite number. The circle’s circumference demonstrated the separation of good readings from bad without limiting the number of either. Throughout his career, Professor New would insist on the necessity of integrity, both in his teaching and in his writing, and that it was false—even dangerous—to believe that one person’s view is as valid as another’s merely because it is held with equal conviction. “Insipid moral relativism” was one of his favorite phrases, frequently accompanied by a short quotation from Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” He insisted that his students produce coherent arguments that respected the text they were treating. A student poorly arguing the professor’s position would be disappointed in the reception accorded his paper, while a student bold enough to argue well an opposing position would receive surprisingly good treatment, and a counterargument.
Tracing the roots of a person’s intellectual development is an imprecise task, and many who experienced Professor New in a classroom might well believe that he was born to teach, but he himself would underscore his first-rate training. Growing up on Manhattan’s midtown east side, he was a feisty New York Giants baseball fan. Decades later he would joke that his life peaked with Bobby Thomson’s shot heard ’round the world in 1951. He attended Stuyvesant High School and (a true hometown boy) Columbia University where, he has admitted, bright students who could do math became chemistry majors and bright students who couldn’t do math became English majors. After serving a two-year stint as a naval officer, he returned in 1961 to literary studies as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of the noted and austere Pope scholar John M. Aden (“Black Jack,” as he was known among Vandy graduate students). Even though New became a full professor in 1976, only ten years after joining the Department of English at the University of Florida, he never lost interest in teaching lower-division courses, nor did he forget the burden put upon young scholars trying to juggle teaching and publishing, often at levels exceeding those of senior department members. Indeed, as chairperson from 1979 to 1988, one of his expressed concerns was the demanding workload facing new PhDs fortunate enough to have landed jobs, only to discover that they had arrived (as he put it in a memorable neologism) not in Camelot, but in “Teachalot.”1
The simultaneous breadth and depth of Professor New’s scholarly writings, which will be addressed below, found its corollary in the range of assigned reading in a self-designed series of courses. One course included works by Cervantes, Conrad, Chekhov, Colette, Camus, Coetzee, Cela, Calvino, (Stephen) Crane, and Celan; another class covered Poe, Pushkin, Proust, Peréz Galdós, Pirandello, Platonov, Paton, Pasternak, and Pynchon. Such “letter courses” (he constructed similar ones for several other letters as well) did more than simplify Professor New’s book orders; they also illustrated his conviction that, properly approached, any truly enduring work of literature may usefully be read alongside any other. From the outset of each course, Professor New thus staked out implicitly a subtle, and potentially enlightening, argument for his students to consider as the semester unfolded: those unable to find resonance between, say, Don Quixote and The Plague discovered something not about the insufficiencies of these texts, but about the importance of continuing to develop their own reading skills.
As a scholar, Professor New is best known, of course, for his work on Laurence Sterne. When he toiled over his dissertation in the 1960s, era of revolution and tumult, the world of Sterne criticism was very different from today. Sterne studies slowly had been emerging from the pall of religious heretic and leering sentimentalist cast over the author’s reputation by Victorian scholars, thanks largely to the diligence of Wilbur L. Cross and Lewis P. Curtis, who helped focus attention back on the value of Sterne’s texts themselves. By the mid-twentieth century, monographs on Sterne had begun to appear, and the moment was ripe for a thoughtful, formative perspective of the sort represented by Professor New’s first book, Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969). Here, he framed Tristram Shandy not as a novel or a parody of one, but as part of a satirical tradition hearkening back to Jonathan Swift and the Scriblerians, to Robert Burton, to Cervantes, and to Rabelais. Grounding his ideas squarely in close textual analysis, he provided an interpretation that has become foundational for many arguments today, even as Sterne has been treated as a protean author freely adaptable to the varied critical perspectives of Marxists, deconstructionists, and feminists alike.
In a recent conference paper, Professor New said that he “would rather write one good elucidating footnote than almost any other intellectual product I can think of.” Although meant partly in jest (his meticulous transcription of Sterne’s “Rabelaisian Fragment” from a holograph manuscript [1972] foreshadowed early on his abiding interest in textual editing), Professor New does offer a clue here as to why his stewardship as general editor of the Florida edition of the works of Laurence Sterne has met with such acclaim. Beginning with Tristram Shandy (1978, 1984), continuing with the Sermons (1996), A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal (2002), Letters (2009), and concluding with a volume of Miscellanies (forthcoming), these nine volumes represent a monumental achievement by any standard. The introductions to these editions and their extensive critical apparatus—appendixes and annotations to satisfy even the most demanding reader—reveal a deft scholarly hand focused intently on the primary tasks of editing, clarification and illumination, but one informed by a spirit of genuine delight-in-discovery. Cleanly and considerately presented in an approachable (and historically accurate) format, each volume works unobtrusively but thoroughly to orient, perhaps to reorient, readers to Sterne’s texts.
The connections Melvyn New has discovered between Sterne’s writings and their many intellectual influences form the basis not only for the remarkable annotations of the Florida edition but for a host of shorter, often equally eye-opening studies. He has pursued with tenacity Sterne’s references to obscure books such as The Microscope Made Easy (1970) and The History of Cold-Bathing (1997); his mention of the name Deventer in a footnote (1975); his interest in the Cambridge Platonist John Norris of Bemerton (1996); and his allusions to the solemn divine William Warburton (1982), against whom, Professor New proposes, Sterne measured his own (and his forebears’) exercise of exuberant wit.
Professor New’s various commentaries and collections have earned prominent places on the shelves of Sterneans. His entry on Sterne in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985) provides a condensed and entertaining overview, while, with its broad textual and critical scope, Approaches to Teaching “Tristram Shandy” (1989) offers at once a valuable pedagogical tool and a road map, as it were, for scholars first attempting to make their way through this notoriously challenging text. In a similar mold is his Twayne series study, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits (1994), where he playfully and purposefully adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s own comments on Sterne’s text as invitations to readers interested in attempting a similarly “free-spirited” engagement. Whatever his audience, he has never strayed far from his grounding sense, memorably stated in his introduction to Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne (1998), that “[w]hen one begins to confront the human paradox of knowing that truth is unreachable but thinking and speaking and acting as though knowledge moves us toward our goals, one has begun to understand what I believe is the primary crux of Sterne’s great fictions.”2
Professor New’s analytical adherence to careful consideration of the text reasonably led him to examine Sterne the priest’s adherence to his text: the scriptures. He recognized that, as Sterne’s primary writing activity during most of his professional life, sermon composition played an important role in the creation of his fictions (1976). Furthermore, while most twentieth-century critics had rejected the notion of Sterne’s religious piety—those who considered the sermons at all insisted on reading them as deistic essays, or worse, as hypocritical mouthings of faith—Professor New presented Sterne as a sincere and reasonably orthodox clergyman of the eighteenth-century Anglican faith. This is a point he would make, in various contexts, over and over again (1992, 1993, and especially in his Notes to the Sermons [1996]). For instance, by dovetailing Sterne with another Anglican divine-cum-satirist, Jonathan Swift, he connects Sterne to an actual (as opposed to a conjectural) literary tradition. After first comparing the two as fellow preachers with similar theological beliefs (1969), he explores the ways that Swift in A Tale of a Tub and Sterne in “Slawkenbergius’s Tale” extend their mainstream Anglican perspectives to express concern about the “public danger” of “zeal, dogma, and demagoguery” (1993).3
Someone who, in a consideration of the processes of human cognition in reading, argues in a deliberate anachronism for the influence of Proust on Sterne (1988) is not likely to be bothered by novel approaches to literary interpretation. Indeed, Melvyn New has never shied away from assuming unique, sometimes unfashionable positions in the critical discussion of Sterne, even if those positions turn out to be provocative. In one essay, he not only attempts to “rescue Sterne . . . from [the] charge of phallocentrism” leveled by a feminist critic (1990) but also tries “to suggest that he [Sterne] already understood its dangers and was, in his life and writings, exploring ways to rescue himself”; in another, he confronts readerly biases in a playful discussion of how critics and teachers reinforce buried “prejudices and preconceptions” that eventually taint the reading of Sterne by forcing his work into a novelistic, as opposed to a satirical, mold (1991).4 Perhaps his best-known resistive reading reassesses Tristram Shandy as a narrative of “determinateness” (1992) that, rather than adumbrating a postmodern idea of the impossibility of knowing, actually speaks to the genuine and persistent human urge to find truth, which has spawned both the ridiculous and sublime throughout history. But a similarly oppositional approach is evident in his examination of the artwork provided by avant-garde artist John Baldessari for the high-end Arion Press edition of Tristram Shandy (1995), where sustained ekphrasis and close textual analysis lead Professor New to ponder whether the ostensibly progressive work of the face-obliterating artist might best be read as “an exercise of authorial power with vengeance.”5
Not all of Professor New’s gauntlets have been thrown down in the service of Sterne. In a study of the role of Providence in eighteenth-century fiction, for instance, he challenged the prevailing critical understanding of the frequency with which “startling coincidences and accidents” surface in novels by the likes of Defoe and Fielding (1976). Where other influential scholars had read such moments as illustrative of “the Christian concept of an active and concerned Providence who interposes in human affairs,”6 he suggests that the authors of these fictional works were protesting too much—the abundance of such “providential” moments, he argues, reflects instead the degree to which human experience, the very stuff of novels, was ceasing to fit easily into a convenient theological framework. Much the same impulse was evident in a 1995 panel he organized for the conference of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, where he confronted the pervasive influence of postmodernism on eighteenth-century scholarship, not by rejecting modern philosophy out of hand but by introducing participants to the ideas of a then little-mentioned twentieth-century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who, in acknowledging his indebtedness to Plato, Descartes, and Malebranche, offered something demonstrably relevant to the discussion of an era that did the same. This panel resulted in an essay in which Professor New proffers a Levinasian reading of Sterne’s semiautobiographical writings (2001) and in two significant collections on Levinas and eighteenth-century theory for which he served as editor (1999 and 2001).
Indeed, many of us could find a life’s work solely in those texts not written by Sterne for which Professor New has served as editor or coeditor, or about which he has written critically. In eighteenth-century studies, he has coedited Mary Astell and John Norris: Letters Concerning the Love of God (2005), and he is coediting the Cambridge edition of Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison. He has moved into the following two centuries as well, bringing forward the little-known nineteenth-century voice of an Anglo-Jewish lesbian novelist, poet, and essayist with his edition of The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy (1993) and offering compelling readings of Orwell (1975), Pynchon (1979), and Mann (in Telling New Lies [1992]). In fact, the title of this collection, taken from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“your wildeshaweshow moves swiftly sterneward”), is appropriate in several ways. Joyce playfully evokes a tradition of eighteenth-century and modern “Anglo-Irish” writers. Sterne, of course, was born in Ireland and Swift was the dean of St. Patrick’s. Professor New’s early work connected Sterne with Swift intellectually and aesthetically, but, additionally, the nexus between eighteenth-century and modern literature has been one of his abiding objects of study, in widely varying manifestations, throughout his career.
Whatever the venue, nothing Melvyn New has published is devoid of lively argumentative spirit and seriousness of purpose. One need only read through the reviews of scholarship on Sterne, Smollett, or others from any issue of the Scriblerian published in the past twenty years to appreciate how faithfully he has borne the mantle of Pope’s dictum: “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth.” His role as reviewer may seem to pale in comparison to his heavy lifting as a Sterne scholar and editor, yet perhaps it is in these briefest of commentaries that his core values shine through most brilliantly. While his relentlessly intelligent, and often acute, reviews have appeared in the gamut of top literary journals, his position as “gatekeeper” of Sterne scholarship for the Scriblerian is particularly noteworthy. There, through his scores of reviews, he has shaped a standard of scholarly assessment that values intellectual honesty above all else. In one characteristic critique (1996), Professor New comments that although “Sterne’s work is battered” by the essay under review, “what ought to concern us . . . is that a person whose livelihood depends on reading deeply and widely nonetheless allows herself to write in the style to which this essay has been sentenced.”7 Here and elsewhere, one finds Professor New putting into practice his simple and commendable goals as a reviewer, as he himself explains them in a reflective piece (2006): “to discriminate between good scholarship and bad; strong, coherent argumentation, and weak; perceptive commentary and obfuscating.”8
Through his persistence, insight, and ultimate faith in the value of human artistry, Professor New has transformed—and continues to transform—the landscape not only of Sterne studies, but of literary scholarship itself. He has accomplished the extraordinary, excelling in the large and small, ranging his discussions from punctuation to metacriticism to observations about the profession (sometimes all within the same study). The experience of having returned Sterne securely to the canon, though, has also provided Professor New with the humility of the long view in regard to the omniscience and permanence of any scholarship. He notes, “a lifetime spent with any author tends to convince us that no interpretation, no biography, no critical insight, no editorial practice can or will long endure the critical flux.”9 Nevertheless, one suspects that there always will be a place in literary studies for Melvyn New’s “free-spirited” brand of probing, informed, and attentive analysis.
NOTES
1. See Melvyn New, “Research versus Teaching: Once upon a Time in Teachalot,” ADE Bulletin 89 (Spring 1988): 56–59.
2. Melvyn New, “Introduction: Four Faces of Laurence Sterne,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 4.
3. Melvyn New, “Swift and Sterne: Two Tales, Several Sermons, and a Relationship Revisited,” in Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), 182.
4. Melvyn New, “Job’s Wife and Sterne’s Other Women,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 57, and “Swift as Ogre, Richardson as Dolt: Rescuing Sterne from the Eighteenth Century,” Shandean 3 (1991): 50.
5. Melvyn New, “William Hogarth and John Baldessari: Ornamenting Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” Word & Image 11, no. 2 (April–June 1995): 192.
6. Melvyn New, “‘The Grease of God’: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction,” PMLA 91 (1976): 235.
7. Melvyn New, “(W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy,” Scriblerian 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1996): 37.
8. Melvyn New, “Swimming Down the Gutter of Time with Sterne and The Scriblerian,” Scriblerian 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 52.
9. Melvyn New, “Attribution and Sponsorship: The Delicate Case of Sterne,”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4 (1996): 526.