Old Trees, Wild Rivers: CI at Fifty

This kind of writing always gives me the creeps. Rather than seize the day (my favorite genre) it is haunted by the passage of time and the burden of the past. It marks an occasion of dubious significance, perhaps even an overdue date, or (worst of all) a deadline. Is it really fifty years? So what? And what does that mean? Is this the time for elegiac expressions, nostalgic, sentimentalizing, melancholy, tired, irrelevant? Has Critical Inquiry grown old? No, actually. That was me. I got old, but CI did not. Thanks to its longstanding policy of bringing young people into the editorial group, the journal is as young as ever. In fact the founding generation in 1973–74 (all full professors) was probably the oldest group that ever ran it. I got old and irrelevant, not to say irreverent, so they asked me to say something from beyond the grave. So what should I talk about? If I try reciting the history of the journal, I will be forced to name names, and that will take upmy entire word allotment. I was advised to limit the length of this to a thousand words, a tenth of what I would need to chronicle the wild ride of Critical Inquiry through the rise of new disciplines and methods, new topics and questions in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. But I must not even start naming the numerous intellectual movements that have rustled through the leaves of this journal and fertilized its roots, or that would take up my entire word allotment as well. And besides, it’s all there, accessible online. Look it up. So what is there to say, then? Some lines of the late John Prine immediately came to mind when I received this invitation: