Toward a Genealogy of Americanist Expressionism

In a 1910 lecture titled “The New Criticism,” Joel Spingarn announced that he had divined the master-concept that had made possible all significant literary criticism of the past century.

But with the Romantic Movement there developed the new idea which coördinates all Criticism in the nineteenth century. Very early in the century, Mme. de Staël and others formulated the idea that Literature is an “expression of society.” Victor Cousin founded the school of art for art’s sake, enunciating “the fundamental rule, that expression is the supreme law of art.” Later, Sainte-Beuve developed and illustrated his theory that Literature is an expression of personality. Still later, under the influence of natural science, Taine took a hint from Hegel and elaborated the idea that Literature is an expression of race, age, and environment. The extreme impressionists prefer to think of art as the exquisite expression of delicate and fluctuating sensations or impressions of life. But for all these critics and theorists, Literature is an expression of something, of experience or emotion, of the external or the internal, of the man himself or something outside the man; yet it is always conceived of as an art of expression.¹

Spingarn’s capsule history, a founding moment of the literary-critical school that would soon be called “expressionism,” imposes unity upon a century of literary and cultural study that had moved in numerous, often orthogonal theoretical directions. By bringing figures as diverse as Staël, Taine, and Sainte-Beuve under the same methodological umbrella, Spingarn sought to cut through the tangled web of intellectual history by uncovering a developing consensus that literature is expression before it is anything else. And in this he was largely successful; as Gerald Graff recognizes in Professing Literature, Spingarn was a “disciplinary reformer” whose “desire to clean up the disorderly conceptual situation of criticism anticipated the project I. A. Richards would shortly initiate at Cambridge.”² Nor was Spingarn the first American literary scholar who found expression indispensible for formulating the discipline’s goals. In the first number of the Transactions of the brand new Modern Language Association (later renamed PMLA), Theodore Hunt sought to vindicate the still-emerging field of modern philology by insisting that “because of what the English is in itself as a language and literature … all that is English must have ‘ample room and verge enough’ to give it its proper expression in the national history.”³ A few years later, Thomas Price would speak in his inaugural address as President of the MLA of “an intense eagerness for personal expression in literature” and argue that the challenge facing English professors was to channel that natural desire into a properly disciplined receptivity to what he called “form.”⁴ These scholars might not have gone quite as far as Spingarn in insisting that the concept of expression was identical with criticism’s very object of study and thus a disciplinary sine qua non, but together with Spingarn’s “The New Criticism,” they demonstrate that expression was crucial to the way the young profession formulated its aims, justified itself to outsiders (including potential majors), and differentiated itself from other kinds of inquiry.

The prominence of expression in the metacritical talk of these early literary scholars, notwithstanding their influence during a decisive period of the discipline’s history, is apt to strike us today as strangely atavistic. This is because, for most of the twentieth century, the major trends in literary theory were almost all resolutely hostile to the identification of literature with expression. This anti-expressionism dates back to the backlash against Spingarn himself. Despite or perhaps because of the fact that his thesis (“Literature is an expression of something …”) was so open-ended, placing so much emphasis upon the historical particularities of utterance and so little upon objective standards of evaluation, scholars like Irving Babbitt accused him of propagating the notion that modern society was “a universe with the lid off,” a domain gripped by a “primitivism” in which man was condemned to an “indeterminate vagabondage of imagination and emotion.”⁵ A few decades later, the New Critics [End...