Literature and the Conservative Ideal by Mark Zunac (review)

studies not only in Canada but anywhere, a claim to which this imperfect but important volume lends further support. Patrick F. O’Connell Gannon University Literature and the Conservative Ideal. By Mark Zunac, ed. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. ISBN 9781498512381. Pp. 207. $85.00. The papers that Mark Zunac has assembled in this book are, according to his preface, concerned with the way that ‘‘the conservative’s vision of society’’ appears in works of literature and literary scholarship. The society the conservative envisions is one in which faith, respect for the arts, tradition, and free inquiry produce moral decency in its members (9). The thesis of the book is that intellectual and artistic freedoms are central to the conservative ideal. This is an important point, and Zunac is to be commended for bringing together eight essays that illustrate it. Since universities are, or should be, bastions of free inquiry, the book opens with two pieces on the state of scholarship in American universities today. These pieces are not cheerful. Mark Bauerlein, of Emory University, offers a short memoir of his graduate studies. He claims that graduate students don’t have the breadth of knowledge they need because they devote their time to giving conference papers in order to pad their curricula vitae. Bauerlein blames economic forces: there are too many grad students and too few jobs. Alternatively, one could argue that there are too many graduate programs. The American free market in education is colliding with the goal of free inquiry. Mark Zunac argues in ‘‘The State of the Academy,’’ the essay that serves as Part 1 of the book, that free inquiry in the university is threatened by cultural movements that are relativistic and often intolerant. Free inquiry has degenerated into ‘‘postmodern skepticism,’’ a position that cannot contribute to a decent society because it cannot establish any grounds for values (24). The way the liberal arts are taught today, in Zunac’s view, frees the student from ‘‘convention and discomfort’’ but offers ‘‘little of the security brought about by a contemplative life animated by right and responsibility’’ (28). Zunac challenges conservatives in academic life to provide a ‘‘safe space’’ in which students can critique both tradition and contemporary ideologies. This collection shows that literature and literary scholarship help bring about that society not by advocating one program or another but by protecting intellectual life from programs and ideologies. Zunac groups the contributions by Thomas L. Jeffers and Thomas W. Stanford III, ‘‘Early Leavis: Who He Was and What He Is’’ and ‘‘Towards a Conservative Aesthetic: The American New Critics,’’ under the heading, ‘‘The Conservative Critical Tradition.’’ The reader might be surprised to find F. R. Leavis, one of the first academic advocates of the Modernist authors, and the modernistic school Book Reviews 349 of New Criticism presented as parts of a conservative tradition. Zunac’s point is that the true conservative tradition maintains that literary works must be studied on their own terms, not as reflections of historical, social, or economic movements. Both Leavis and the American New Critics supported that position, in Jeffers’s view. Leavis’s central claim about Modernism in literature, according to Jeffers, is that writers, especially poets, began to use literature as a means of conveying experience rather than as a substitute or even a retreat from experience. Jeffers sums up Leavis’s position: ‘‘More than ordinary people, poets are acutely aware of the societies they live in . . . and, having extraordinary verbal resources, they communicate that awareness to the rest of us’’ (51). It follows that the role of poetry is to present experience, not to promote doctrines or to provide imaginary worlds for readers to escape to. Consequently, literature must be independent of doctrinal demands. Needless to say, literature must also resist the temptations of the market. Thomas W. Stanford claims that the New Critics (He discusses Allan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks) likewise tried to free literature from its social and historical background. They understood, according to Stanford, that anchoring a work in a social context amounts to evaluating the work in terms of that context. The value of...