History and Change: An Interview with Ralph Cohen
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When he founded New Literary History, Ralph Cohen was an established scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, with books including The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism and The Unfolding of "The Seasons."1 Though working in a traditional period, he focused on theoretical issues, notably the permutations of criticism dealing with Thomson's poetry. He also had an abiding interest in philosophy as well as literature, writing his dissertation on David Hume and editing Essential Works of David Hume.2 Among the central concerns throughout his career have been genre and historical change.
Born in New York City in 1917, Cohen attended City College of New York for his BA (1937) and, after serving in the army during World War II, Columbia University for graduate work (MA, 1946; PhD, 1952). He taught at CCNY from 1947 to 1950 and UCLA from 1950 to 1967, moving to the University of Virginia in 1967. He founded New Literary History shortly after arriving there, with funding from the president celebrating the 150th anniversary of the university. He was Director of the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (1988–94) and is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus.
Alongside editing NLH, Cohen has published a string of edited collections: New Directions in Literary History, which drew on the first few issues of NLH; Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics; The Future of Literary Theory, which gathered new essays from twenty-five wellknown critics ranging from Hélène Cixous to Hayden White; Studies in Historical Change; and History and…. He was also coauthor of Literature and History.3
This interview took place on May 28 and 29, 2009, in Ralph Cohen's office at the University of Virginia. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of the minnesota review from 1992 to 2010 and Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, and was transcribed by Jess Wilton, a PhD student in English at Carnegie Mellon. [End Page 919]
You've edited New Literary History for forty years now and I certainly want to ask you about that, but first I want to hark back to what brought you to the point of starting NLH. You went to City College, graduating in 1937. That's a storied period in the history of City College, noted in memoirs by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, among others. What was it like to be at City College in the 1930s?
That was also the period when Kazin was there. I met him in my second year or so—he was two years ahead of me—and he was a voracious reader. I would often meet him in the library.
The teachers that seemed to me most interesting were the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen—his book Reason and Nature had become a major philosophical text—and Ernest Mossner, who was in the English department and whose biography of David Hume sparked my interest in Hume. I was at that time interested in the relation between literature and philosophy and took courses that were rather unusual for an English major.
Several of the memoirs mention Morris Cohen, and they also talk about the cafeteria as the center for vibrant and contentious discussion. Who would have thought a bunch of New Yorkers might be contentious?
That was part of the education. One of the experiences of CCNY was the brightness of the students who studied there, and there was always lunchtime to get together and talk about the classes we were sharing. I think this affected my future views of what education ought to be and how students are capable of contributing to whatever class they're in, so that it's not really the teacher who is teaching you, but your colleagues.
This was also during the Depression and a charged political time. Did you take more to the literary and philosophical than the political, or were you interested in politics separate from the literary?
I never wanted to be part of a political movement. I never wanted to be...
