Re-Reading English, and: The World, the Text, and the Critic (review)

146 the minnesota review Re-Reading English. Peter Widdowson, ed. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. 246 pp. $7.95 (cloth); $3.95 (paper). Edward W. Said. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. 327 pp. $20 (cloth). "Faculty at War," the title of an inflammatory review of Re-Reading English that set off months of epistolary brawUng in the columns of the London Review ofBooks (Vol. 4, No. 11 and following), gives a misleading but not entirely useless idea of what these volumes aim at. Both attack—the word is not too strong—Uterary studies in their present form. Yet within that field, each chooses unexpected targets that cannot be confidently labeUed "left" or "right." In each there is the fresh, urgent lucidity that sometimes comes of taking sides in a situation of risk. But the situation in which they intervene is not the intra-faculty war between Anglo-Saxon "common sense" and Continental "theory." Instead, they take the unusual risk ofconfronting theory with its own practice, or with the lack thereof—with the daily business of criticism (Widdowson), with activity beyond as well as within the university (Said). What is most distinctive about these collections, ifnot about every essay they contain , is a dual, almost contradictory task: on the one hand, to shake loose what they diagnose as theory's (and in particular Marxism's) hasty accommodation to the premises and tact of literary study, and on the other hand, to pull theory down from the heights of abstraction to immediate practical responsibilities, to work toward a new poUtical common sense. First and foremost, Re-Reading English proposes that theory drop its aloofness and get down to occupying its workplace. "I recognize that the major advances beyond a povertystricken Uterary criticism have been made possible only by the production of a sustained theoretical critique," Peter Widdowson writes in his exceUent introduction, "but the result has been, in effect, that marxist criticism now means 'critical theory.' Here a danger emerges: marxist criticism (i.e. Theory) has vacated—or at least can too easily and opportunisticaUy be seen as having done so—the domain of the practice of the criticism of literature. In other words, it becomes (or is regarded as) 'something else,' . . . tending to leave the empirical field of study (Criticism) clear for the continuing operations of literary critical practice" (5-6). Despite the parenthetical hesitations, which seem to register some doubt as to whether the workplace is finally worth occupying, Widdowson demands of theory "a substantive replacement" (T) for the everyday processing of texts, with the partial submission to the status quo that such a substitution implies. Exercises in institutional self-consciousness appear to be one such replacement. Four of the volume's sixteen essays survey the history of educational institutions (including "alternative " institutions Uke the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and the Open University, Britain's national TV/correspondence school), and other essays touch upon topics Uke government education reports and the televising of Shakespeare, thus reminding us that where power is concerned, there are worse places to look than the State. Valuable questions are asked about the micropolitics of pedagogy: who is the implied speaker of exam questions? Why is a joint thesis unheard of? The aim of widening theory's social base can be felt everywhere. Like Methuen's "New Accents" series as a whole, the book offers intelligent exposition in ordinary language; there is little jargon and much conversational tone. If the essays are by and large too brief for searching or sustained discussion of complex issues—most are not much longer than this review—they invite the reader into theoretical territory by a number of unforbidding entrances, each of which keeps close to the concerns of students "reading EngUsh." The outrage directed at the book and its publisher suggests that this is a good deal more threatening than spinning one's theoretical wheels in a social vacuum. At the same time, most of the contributors are responding (some quite negatively) to an unprecedented distrust of the practical compromise that has thus far characterized Marxism 's sharing of the academic workplace. Trie argument is never entirely spelled out...