From Litcrit to Profcrti

526 T.H. ADAMOWSKI From Litcrit to Profcrit T.H. ADAMOWSKI Vincent B. Leitch. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties New York: Columbia University Press 1988. xviii, 458. us $45.00 Russell Jacoby. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe New York: Basic Books 1987. xiv, 290. us $18.95 Finally, History Fell a-dreaming And dreamed about Language - (And that brings us to critics-who-write-critiques-of-critical-criticism.) Kenneth Burke, 'Creation Myth' Vincent Leitch's book on American criticism of the last half-century sometimes seems a symptom of the ailment that is the subject of Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals. Leitch has written what will be called a valuable book - and it often is - for it provides an overview of American criticism from the perspective of someone under the influence of recent critical theory. The perspective helps readers to understand (although it doesn't, in principle, justify) the judgments Leitch makes ofthe relative important ofmodern American literary critics. J. Hillis Miller, for example, receives about twice the space accorded to Cleanth Brooks. Lionel Trilling's place in the story of American criticism seems not much greater than that ofWilliam Spanos. John Crowe Ransom (ofall people) must compete for space with (of all people) Paul Ricoeur. The huge advantage of reference Jacques Derrida receives over Emerson, James, and Pound (combined!) suggests that Leitch has less interest in tracing native influences on recent American criticism than (admittedly powerful) recent influences from abroad. At one point Leitch cites a remark made in 1962 by Alfred Kazin concerning the 'professional' literary criticism (I will call it 'profcrit,' for short) thatwas born in the 1940S and 1950S as the New Critics and the critics associated with Partisan Review began to establish themselves in the universities: 'Criticism should never be so professional that only professionals can read it. ... I have been staggered lately by the absolutely worthless essays in so many recent academic journals devoted to modem literature and criticism.' Kazin may have had in mind the relentless exegeses of North American university critics, their preference for baroque commentary on canonical texts, their often bizarre (and sometimes comical) deployments of 'methods' and'approaches,' and their adoption, in preference to any clear and distinct personal voice, of the anonymous voice of Criticism, Inc. During the last twenty years surveyed by Leitch little has changed, although the 'canon' has been 'opened' to permit even more elaborate forms of exegesis, subtle with theory, to be applied to works that satisfy (or that do not) this or that political or ideological preference of modern university criticism. Perhaps parti pris is the better term, for 'ideology' (understood as a failing from which one's UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 FROM LITCRIT TO PROFCRIT 527 political enemies suffer) should be retired for a few years. It has become the favourite cant term of second-raters. That it is so prominenttoday testifies only to the insufferable political smugness of profcrit (not 'political intrusion,' for politics and criticism are an old couple). The smugness is the residue of that lyrical decade, the 1960s, that mobilizes the sentimentality ofLeitch and so many others. Leitch calls Kazin's own 'nonprofessional' style of criticism a 'journalistic mode' (a favourite recent sneer at any prose not elephantine with a self-importance confused with 'rigour') and notes that it was favoured by 'almost all of the New York intellectuals. Increasingly this meant that they exerted little influence among university critics.' Better believe it! Influence could come only to those who wrote in the High Academic Style and could teach their students to do the same. Personal voice smacked too much of articles in the Nation. Not for nothing (as barefoot Marxists used to say) would 'voice' eventually become for the triumphant profcrit of the 1970S and 1980s the mark of a metaphysical flaw. Not for nothing would so many profcritics become tone deaf when it came to hearing the 'sound' of their rigor mortis prose. Leitch thinks it important to begin his survey of American criticism with the Marxists of the 1930s. To think that either this world-view or the one born...