Cultural Criticism or Textual Theory?

SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 463 His varied writings bear an unvarying stamp: they are responsible, adult and decent.... Without having scholarship or an academic background he yet gives the impression of knowing a surprising amount about books and authors because what he knows is live information, not card-index rubbish, his knowledge functions. '" [H]is style is refreshing, that of the man whose first aim is to say something which he has quite clear in his head ... He is evidently a live mind working through literature, life and ideas. Even more to the point, she observes that, though he is and probably always will be a critic of literature who, while not a Communist, has nevertheless corresponding preoccupations, ... the great thing is, he has a special kind of honesty, he corrects any astygmatic tendency in himself because in literature as in politics he has taken up a stand which gives him freedom.... If the revolution here were to happen that he wants and prophesies, the advent ofreal Socialism, he would be the only man ofletters we have whom we can imagine surviving the flood undisturbed. Obviously by now there is an alternative tradition of intellectualacademic prose that goes back to Hegel and numbers Heidegger and Derrida among its luminaries, and one must live with itif one's interested in what's being said (though my own patience ends decidedly this side of Fredric Jameson). But it seems to me a bad tradition none the less, in that it offers far more opportunities for obscurantism, mystification, and authoritarianism. Orwell seems to me still essentially right when he says, 'If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.' And if one aspires to heights and depths beyond Orwell's reach, one would do well to bear in mind that, apart from the fustian Zarathustra, it isn't the prose of Nietzsche that's become passee. What is passee, almost certainly, is the prose of a lot of those very professional philosophers for whom, in the absence of the proper linguistic signals, Nietzsche was during his lifetime, and for a good while afterwards, merely a basement tinkerer and putterer. GRAHAM GOOD Cultural Criticism or Textual Theory? Gradually and unevenly, 'theory' is coming to a position of dominance in Canadian departments of English (and also other departments of literature, especially French). The traditionalists are tiring (or retiring); 464 GRAHAM GOOD some are belatedly converting, others negotiating a wary truce with doctrines that filled them with indignation fifteen years ago. Then, they hoped that 'theory' was simply a passing fad they could afford to wait out; now, they accept that it's here to stay, at least for some time. So now, instead of Tillyard and Willey, Wimsatt and Brooks, the authorities to cite are Freud and Nietzsche, Foucault and Bourdieu, Lacan and Derrida. We've moved from 'background' to 'foregrounding,' from 'order' to 'subversion,' from 'work' to 'text' - in sum, from Bate to Barthes. The new-model English professor is much more sophisticated, more European , more philosophical, more radical- yet also somehow more professional - than the 1960 version. Bold talk about 'subversion' and 'transgression ' is combined with marked deference to academic authority, professional structures, and big-name theoreticians. A new figure - the Theorist - has emerged alongside the traditional Scholar and has largely ousted the Scholar's old antagonist, the urban Intellectual. A cluster of assumptions and styles I am calling 'textual theory' has taken over much of the ground once occupied by the kind of general, free-ranging cultural criticism produced by people who identified themselves as 'intellectuals' - a kind of criticism that urgently needs reviving now against the growing hegemony of 'theory.' 'Theory' is the latest instalment in the ongoing attempt to professionalize the university study of literature. This process goes back to the late nineteenth century, as Gerald Graff shows in Professing Literature. In this period the prestigious model (more for the United States than for Britain or Canada) was the German university, with its emphasis on research, graduate seminars, and the PH D. But...