The Explanatory Critic: Harry Levin and Literary Criticism

Harry Levin figured centrally in the postwar “restart” of Comparative Literature, to borrow Gerald Gillespie’s apt term for the field’s mid-twentieth-century reinvention and expansion.¹ Charged with reorganizing Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature after World War II, Levin went on to advise students for over four decades. Only the third president of the American Comparative Literature Association, Levin became a presence within the field in myriad ways. Yet even amid expanding professional obligations, he came to personally know many leading writers and critics from within and beyond the United States, maintaining a connection to the larger nonacademic world of letters. When Levin wrote about the literary and critical dimensions of modernism, he did so not as a detached spectator but as someone who helped set its trajectory. Indeed, his book from 1982, Memories of the Moderns, confirmed his close and long-standing association with modernist writers and critics he had helped to bring within the twentieth-century humanities curriculum. Although she did not study with him, Marjorie Perloff has written that Levin informed her scholarly and professional aspirations. Looking through a Harvard catalog that listed Levin’s course, “Proust, Joyce, and Mann,” she experienced something of an epiphany: “That I decided was my kind of course.”² From that point on, she resolved, “Comp Lit was what I wanted to study.”

Levin was himself marked by developments within another field that gained traction in the middle of the twentieth century: American Studies. The collection notably brings to the fore the significant “Americanist” dimension of Levin’s contribution. Indeed, the collection directs attention to Levin’s relationship to American Studies, a mid-twentieth-century historicist project that drew much of its critical energies from the steadfast refusal of any single method, as Henry Nash Smith argued in his 1957 essay, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?”³ If Levin’s “Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science,” from 1967, is not quite a companion piece to Smith’s essay, it nevertheless reveals a shared sense that the postwar fortunes of Comparative Literature and American Studies depended on distance from the demand for a set “method.” For both fields, “history” and its attendant terms do not secure a ready-made or once-and-for-all method, much less found a science. Yet there is documentary evidence around which “decipherers” can gather. Acquiring professional standing as a comparatist as the historicist American Studies project was coming into postwar institutional form, Levin could not fail to notice—and be caught up in—a portentous development: “American literature, theretofore neglected by English departments, a vast and fertile territory was opened for cultivation just two generations ago. The ensuing rush and energetic settlement—abetted by nationalistic exercise—have reaped harvests of artistic enrichment and cultural selfawareness” (88). Reading the essays in the collection and taking stock of the range of American writers Levin addresses, one is obliged to ask how his impact on comparative literary studies was already shaped by his complex status as a quasi–American Studies scholar, and the ways the historicist arrangement of the field may have been a resource for comparative literature’s postwar reset. Levin endorsed the humanistic valuation of cultural memory, or what he once referred to as the “recallable past,” itself but a synonym for the “usable past” American Studies critics set out to recover and nurture (124).

One can spend quite some time thinking about Levin and his American Studies mentors and colleagues, including F. O. Matthiessen and Perry Miller. Yet more interesting is the work he undertook, including one of his more important early books, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (Knopf, 1958). Dedicated to Miller, The Power of Blackness was by Levin’s own estimation part of the ever-widening body of American Studies scholarship, a counterpart to R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), a study of innocence in American literature. Yet...