The Importance of Being Earnest: Literary Critics in America

TheImportanceof BeingEarnest: Literary Criticsin America GeorgeH. Douglas. Edmund Wilson sAmerica. Lexington: TheUmversityPress of Kentucky, 1983.254 + ix pp. Leslie Fishbein. Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of 'TheMasses," 1911-1917.Chapel Hill: The University ofNorthCarolina Press, 1982.270 + xv pp. GregoryS. Jay. T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Litera,:1· Hist01y. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 256+ xiipp. EdwardSaid. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.327 + vi pp. FrederickC. Stern. F.0. Matthiessen: Christian Socialistas Critic. Chapel Hill: The University ofNorthCarolina Press, 1981.281 + xv pp. Stanley Fogel by a poet I do not mean one who writespoems, but a terrorist or provocateur who never writes.... Arrabal Everyso often a literary critic, living as he does in a culture that regards his pursuit as a frippery, as something remote from the so-called real world, gets thejitters. Either to himself, his students or his readers he launches an apologia pro vita sua. Although drawn to what Proust called the majestic beauty of something wonderfully unnecessary, an ideal the critic usually savors, he findshimself at some point on the defensive, his vocation appearing as elitist, arcane or jaded beside the hefty doings of his seemingly more engagecolleagues and non-university professional neighbors. The World, the Text and the Critic isEdward Said's cri de coeur, but it is only one of many recent confrontations ofcritics with their roles. The enunciation of one's credo occurs most frequently in a period of upheaval, one in which unestablished theories appear to be supplanting more traditional ones. One has only to think, for instance, of the apocalyptic titles of Geoffrey Hartman's recent work-The Fate of Reading, Criticism in the Wilderness and Saving the Text-to realize that critics do not feel that their operations are solely hermetic or scholastic enterprises. Augmented by such collections as the YaleFrench Studies issue called The PedagogicalImperative and Ihab and Sally Hassan's lnnovationRenovation, which push literary theory towarda redefinition of the university, and by books such as Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change, John Fekete's The Critical Twilight as well as portions of Vincent B. Leitch's Deconstructive Criticism, which broaden the Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17,Numberl, Spring 1986,109-118 110 Stanley Fogel arena to include society at large, literary criticism claims for itself a role far from the feckless pastime with which the discipline has, in common parlance, been saddled. Such an upheaval is surely one of the more salutary contributions of deconstruction. With the displacement of Northrop Frye, New Criticism and T.S. Eliot (finally) from the inner sanctum has come a critical mode that has altered the ordering of world, text and critic. Especially since criticism has flourished in the academy, there has been no shortage of justifications for the critic's mediating role between text and world; however, the perplexing status of text as a part of, yet apart from, the world has not heretofore had the usurpation proffered by Hartman, among others: "literary commentary may cross the line and become as demanding as literature: it is an unpredictable or unstable genre that cannot be subordinated, a priori, to its referential or commentating function."' Criticism has rarely been thought of as unpredictable or unstable; on the contrary, the scientific framework offered by Frye or the close,disinterested reading offered bythe New Critics stressed just the opposite. Criticism has always been regarded as a conservative entity, one which has formed and articulated the genre "literature," that is, until deconstruction has put "literature," "author," "oeuvre," "masterpiece" and "tradition," among many others, sous rature, under erasure. As Hartman maintains, "Only one thing is certain. There is no putting the djinn back into the bottle." 2 Such erosion of critical and, concomitantly, cultural staples should, it should be noted, perhaps be recognized as something different from some of the late 1960sand early 1970sAmerican formulations which had, as their bulwark, the reduction of the critic's status and putative power to form and dictate taste. As refreshing as was Louis Kampfs diatribe against the profession, in his year-end Presidential address to the Modern Language Association memorably entitled "'It's Alright Ma...