Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change: The Literary Intellectual as Pragmatic Humanist

Wess 123 Robert Wess Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change: The Literary Intellectual as Pragmatic Humanist In 1981 , in the New Left Review, Terry Eagleton compared Frank Lentricchia 's After the New Criticism with Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious and decided that he preferred the former, despite its shortcomings , to the latter: Lentricchia's book declares at the outset that it will not encompass the work of American Marxian intellectuals Uke Jameson and Edward Said, and the reservation, while formally acceptable, is perhaps symptomatic of a political unclarity. Yet paradoxically Lentricchia's is the more political book—not in its positions, to be sure, which remain somewhat negative and ambiguous, but in its possible effects . . . Lentricchia 's text, altogether more acerbic and polemical (Frye is a "great" critic for Jameson, but a formalist pest for Lentricchia), belongs in a full sense to the "class-struggle at the level of theory," even if it does not fully recognize itself as such. Lentricchia is out, not to produce new critical readings, but to knock the stuffing out of bourgeois criticism; it is not surprising that one of his victims has already threatened, absurdly, to sue.1 One suspects that this judgment reflects Eagleton's intuition at the time that "at the level of theory" there was an affinity between the project he had embarked on with his Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), and Lentricchia's, an affinity that may be identified by a term currently enjoying a revival: "pragmatism."2 If so, Eagleton has been proven right by Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change.* In this book, Lentricchia answers questions posed but finally unanswered by After the New Criticism, perhaps going even farther in the pragmatist direction than Eagleton would wish to go himself. In so doing Lentricchia clarifies one significant trend in the broad range of current Marxian discourse. Criticism and Social Change may be viewed as the programmatic counterpart to After the New Criticism. Readers coming to Lentricchia for the first time might profitably read this new book first. Its opening chapter, "Provocations," poses the question that preoccupies Lentricchia throughout the book, "Can a literary intellectual. . .do radical work as a literary inteUectual?" (2). Lentricchia's affirmative answer makes engag- 124 the minnesota review ing reading. Even those who differ with Lentricchia at each step of the way can benefit from working out the grounds of their differences, since he addresses one of the fundamental questions literary intellectuals too rarely dare to ask. Lentricchia conducts his challenging inquiry within the framework of an agon that he stages between Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke, two figures seldom linked either as allies or as antagonists. Burke may not even be familiar with de Man's work, though one can't be sure about that—despite the fact that he is nearing 90, he remains intellectually active . De Man, on the other hand, was both familiar with and vitally interested in Burke. He knew Burke's work already in the late 1940s, linking it to that of Gaston Bachelard, and an essay on Burke was among the projects left incomplete at the time of his death. If it had been realized , this piece would have appeared with the essays recently collected in the posthumously book The Resistance to Theory.* It's important to bear in mind, of course, that Burke is an intellectual who has been constantly on the move in a preternaturaUy long career now entering its eighth decade (his first publication, to the best of my knowledge, appeared in 1916), and that de Man, although his career was shorter, did not stand still either. It's therefore possible to use texts from different phases of their careers to stage different agons. In reading Lentricchia 's particular staging, one must try to define the strategy that informs it. In doing so one would be putting into practice one ofthe important lessons that Criticism and Social Change teaches. The one de Man text Lentricchia considers in detail—he devotes a number of pages to it—is "Literary History and Literary Modernity," the penultimate essay in the original edition of Blindness and Insight. WhUe this is one of...