Literary criticism

Resistance to Theory, Middlemarch Style

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Dorothea: “And then I should know what to do, when I get older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here–now–in England. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.”

J. Hillis Miller: “The discontinuity of a repetition blasts a detached monad, crystallized into immobility, out of the homogeneous course of history, in order to take possession of of it in a present which is no present. It is the cessation of happening in a metaleptic assumption of the past, preserving and annulling it at the same time. This repetition disarticulates the backbone of logic and frees both history and fiction, for the moment, before the spider-web is re-woven, from the illusory continuities of origin leading to aim leading to end.”

Dorothea: “What could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain?”

J. Hillis Miller: “The set of assumptions common to both Western ideas of history and Western ideas of fiction are not–it is a point of importance–a collection of diverse attributes, the distinctive features which happen to be there. They are on the contrary a true system, in the sense that each implies all the others.”

Dorothea (putting out her hand entreatingly): “Please not to call it by any name. You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life.”

J. Hillis Miller: “Nevertheless, for those who have eyes to see it, Middlemarch is an example of a work of fiction which not only exposes the metaphysical system of history but also proposes an alternative consonant with those of Nietzsche and Benjamin.”

Narrator: “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

J. Hillis Miller: “!”

Seriously, though, although Hillis Miller’s essay* (which I acknowledge is very smart, taken on its own terms) is more than 30 years old now, I think it illustrates a tendency that continues in some professional criticism to set aside the overt and often pressing social, ethical, political, or aesthetic interests of the text itself in favour of fairly esoteric theoretical and metacritical questions, or questions that seek out a text’s ‘unconscious’ effects or meanings. Without insisting that these questions are unworthy ones for inquiry and scholarship, I would suggest that in some respects they serve the majority of readers (and texts) less well than critical approaches that engage us with what the text actually takes itself to be about (in Denis Donoghue‘s terms, we don’t allow the text to have its theme–though in this case, Middlemarch works well for Hillis Miller’s purposes because it is “always already” self-conscious about and thematizing his themes of history, narrative, and (mis)interpretation).** For one thing, the results are likely to preserve the differences between texts more than approaches like Hillis Miller’s (any novel that becomes grist for his argument here would end up sounding pretty much the same, deconstructing the oppositions, undoing metaphysics, etc.). In his essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics,” in this collection, Lawrence Buell notes the “longstanding reluctance on the part of many if not most literary scholars to allow the central disciplinary referent or value to be located in anything but language.” I think there’s some truth in that generalization, and that this reluctance leads us into conversations of the sort I’ve pasted together above, a “missing of each others’ mental tracks,” as George Eliot says about Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage, because we talk past, or about, rather than with, our primary sources.

But mostly I just wanted to have a little fun…

*”Narrative and History,” ELH 41:3 (Autumn 1974), 455-73.

**I realize that it remains an open and controversial question whether or how professional / academic critics should have the interests of non-specialist readers in mind. Over at Crooked Timber recently there was a long thread in the comments about professional philosophers which seemed to touch on some of the same issues that come up when literary critics think about this. In both cases, of course it’s not an either/or question–specialist and non-specialist discourses can and do coexist.

“An Actual Literary Critic”?

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Thanks to Dan Green for pointing us to this thoughtful piece on James Wood. Though I have read only some of Wood’s extensive critical output, I have certainly been impressed at both his compelling close reading and his commitment to taking literature and its forms and effects seriously; as I mostly share his apparent prejudices in favour of realism, character, and moral seriousness, I don’t really mind what DG calls his ‘aesthetic conservatism’ (frankly, in these “everything’s a text” days, I find it refreshing) and I’m certainly in sympathy with the idea that whatever his prejudices, the ‘evangelical zeal’ he brings to his criticism raises the level of the debate for all of us. As usual, I find myself fretting when I read comments like this:

In a world in which it seems that every year there are fewer and fewer readers, perhaps any serious dialogue about what makes good literature good and bad literature bad is, after all, good. In an interview, Pulitzer-prize winning novelist of The Hours (and director of the program where I am pursuing an MFA in fiction) Michael Cunningham said that “in the scattershot climate of contemporary literary criticism,” he is thankful for “an actual literary critic.”

I guess that makes a lot of us ‘virtual’ literary critics? But I think I understand the standard Cunningham is invoking here. If you conceive of a critic as someone with a public role, a kind of intellectual and literary intermediary between writers and their broadest audience, there’s no doubt that most academic critics do not fit this model. Most histories of criticism acknowledge that ‘once upon a time’ the situation was different; here’s Brian McRae, for instance, from Addison and Steele are Dead:

For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given importance because of its impact upon morals and emotions. For the present-day academic critic, literature no longer is a public matter but rather is a professional matter, even more narrowly, a departmental matter.

Of course, writers of this history vary in their attitudes, some celebrating, some accepting, and some deploring the development of today’s highly specialized, professionalized ‘discipline’ of literary criticism. But there’s no doubt that one result of it is that academic criticism has become largely uninteresting and irrelevant to a lot of readers. Most of the time we do write for a kind of ‘virtual’ world, hoping that some day someone will happen across our small contribution to some sub-field and find it valuable. I’ve been challenged before to explain why our scholarly work should be expected to appeal to non-specialists when the research of academics in other fields is not. I’m still thinking about this question, which I still believe is not adequately answered by pointing to current disciplinary norms or professional demands.

Mad as Hell–at Literary Critics?

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

This particularly virulent comment appeared quite promptly after excerpts from my previous post appeared at Footnoted (see also update below):

Lit crit should finally die the death it so much deserves. Lit departments have floundered for decades because they have forgotten the text. Instead, they have pandered to the politically correct idiots who can neither read with sense nor write with style. May they ALL be flushed down the toilet where they belong.

Hostility towards literary critics is an interesting subcategory of what Tim Burke discusses at intelligent length on his blog as “Anger at Academe“. Now, I started writing on this blog in part because of my own frustrations with some aspects of academic literary criticism; I have vented once or twice about particular examples of it, here and in print; and I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently looking at books, journals, and blogs that inquire into it from a variety of historical, theoretical, sociological, and what I might call ‘readerly’ perspectives. I think it’s not only fine but desirable for people both inside and outside ‘lit departments’ to ask questions about the nature and condition of our discipline. But I have been frequently surprised by just how angry or dismissive some people are–and not just anonymous “trolls” such as the Footnoted commenter, but also some prominent figures in contemporary literary culture, such as Cynthia Ozick, who in her essay “Literary Entrails,” writes the following:

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

(For some previous discussion of Ozick’s essay, see here.) As I noted in another earlier post, “Daniel Green of the blog The Reading Experience … writes about ‘academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict the miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons’…Ouch.” Francine Prose is another in this chorus, though her language about the academy (while equally dismissive) is at least somewhat more temperate.

An anonymous commenter on one of my own less temperate posts remarked that “The mere existence of theory-driven, ‘difficult’ literary criticism does not rob the amateur book lover of one micron of reading pleasure. ” I think s/he is is right about this, but some of the hostility directed at us does seem to come from a sense that academics have betrayed or spoiled something that these lovers of literature cherish. As some of the scholarly work I’ve been reading also suggests, there is a grain of truth to this (see, for instance, the quotation from John McGowan’s Democracy’s Children included in this post). And that leads me to wonder how far I agree with that same commenter when s/he asks why academic literary specialists should be expected to write for a general audience any more than “specialists in quantum mechanics” should be expected to “write up their research in such a way that fans of Stephen Hawking can understand it.” It does seem to me that there are important differences between literature and quantum mechanics as areas of study, though pinning them down at all (much less in an uncontroversial or tendentious way) may be challenging. I guess I’d start by pointing out that the texts we study in ‘lit departments’ typically originate as acts of communication aimed at readers or other forms of a general audience, not scholars, often with urgent purposes (whether aesthetic, social, political, or other). I realize that this does not at all render them inappropriate objects of study or theory–but it does mean that non-scholars have a different relationship with our primary materials than with subatomic particles. Does this justify such vitriolic response to our professional work? Not at all, but it may be the seed of at least a preliminary explanation for it, and some justification for making sure at least some of our work reaches beyond the academy.

Update: There’s more, and no better. And these are readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education website, not Guns and Ammo or something, though it appears that they visit the site only to fan the flames of their antipathies:

It is in academia where you DO NOT find down to earth people. It is academia the home of obnoxious, arrogants who can not read for pleasure but can destroy a good book or poem through stupid literary criticism.

Most academic critics are irrelevant because they publish enough for the world to know what they think and how they think.

 

Academics and Literary Culture

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There’s a thoughtful piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review by Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (among other things). Wasserman presents a mix of good and bad news about the current state of book reviewing and contemporary literary culture more generally. It strikes me as interesting that his analysis, which considers demographic and economic factors in publishing and newspapers, anti-intellectualism in American culture broadly speaking and in newsrooms more particularly, changing technologies for reading and writing, and many other factors, says nothing in particular about the role of professional academic critics. Perhaps they are implicitly included here–but somehow I don’t think so:

It is through the work of novelists and poets that we understand how we imagine ourselves and contend with the often elusive forces—of which language itself is a foremost factor—that shape us as individuals and families, citizens and communities, and it is through our historians and scientists, journalists and essayists that we wrestle with how we have lived, how the present came to be, and what the future might bring.

And again, implicitly, perhaps both Mark Sarvas and Richard Schickel mean nods in our direction when they outline what they see as prerequisites for good reviewing, but again, somehow I don’t think so:

Mark Sarvas, among the more sophisticated of contemporary literary bloggers whose lively site, The Elegant Variation, offers a compelling daily diet of discriminating enthusiasms and thoughtful book chat, recognizes the problem. In a post last spring about the fate of newspaper reviews, he wrote: “There’s been an unspoken sense in this discussion that Book Review = Good. It doesn’t always—there are plenty of mediocre to lousy reviewers out there, alienating (or at least boring) readers…Too many reviews are dull, workmanlike book reports. And every newspaper covers the same dozen titles…There’s much talk about the thoughtful ‘literary criticism’ on offer in book reviews but you don’t get much of that literary criticism in 850 words, so can we stop kidding ourselves?” But neither does Sarvas find such criticism on the vast Democracy Wall of the Internet, which he is otherwise at pains to promote. He confesses that, for him, the criticism that counts is to be found in the pages of such indispensable publications as The New York Review of Books or the pages of the upstart Bookforum.

What Sarvas is reluctant to concede but is too intelligent to deny is what Richard Schickel, the film critic for Time magazine, eloquently affirmed in a blunt riposte, published in the Los Angeles Times in May, to the “hairy-chested populism” promoted by the boosters of blogging: “Criticism—and its humble cousin, reviewing—is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”

(Quite rightly, Wasserman banishes the false dichotomy some, including Schickel, have proposed between print and online reviewing: “Moreover, the debate over the means by which reviews are published—or, for that matter, the news more generally—is sterile. What counts is the nature and depth and authority of such coverage, as well as its availability to the widest possible audience. Whether readers find it on the Web or on the printed page matters not at all. Content rules.”)

Anyway, I’m wondering: Do academic critics have a part in the story Wasserman is telling? Should we? Is his omission a sign of our irrelevance to it, or his neglect of our relevance, or our failure to make our relevance visible and understood, or something else altogether?

Leslie Stephen, “Charlotte Bronte”

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Just a few choice bits from the latest essay I’ve been editing for my forthcoming anthology, Leslie Stephen’s piece on Charlotte Bronte from the Cornhill Magazine. First, an apt description of the uneasy balance required of either reviewer or critic between sympathy and analysis, charity and judgment:

Undoubtedly it is a very difficult task to be alternately witness and judge; to feel strongly, and yet to analyse coolly; to love every feature in a familiar face, and yet to decide calmly upon its intrinsic ugliness or beauty. To be an adequate critic is almost to be a contradiction in terms; to be susceptible to a force, and yet free from its influence; to be moving with the stream, and yet to be standing on the bank.

Stephen’s own analysis of CB does, I think, display something like the desired balance. Here, for example, he proposes a standard against which to measure her overall achievement:

Miss Brontë, as her warmest admirers would grant, was not and did not in the least affect to be a philosophical thinker. And because a great writer, to whom she has been gratuitously compared, is strong just where she is weak, her friends have an injudicious desire to make out that the matter is of no importance, and that her comparative poverty of thought is no injury to her work. There is no difficulty in following them so far as to admit that her work is none the worse for containing no theological or philosophical disquisitions, or for showing no familiarity with the technicalities of modern science and metaphysics. But the admission by no means follows that her work does not suffer very materially by the comparative narrowness of the circle of ideas in which her mind habitually revolved. Perhaps if she had been familiar with Hegel or Sir W. Hamilton, she would have intruded undigested lumps of metaphysics, and introduced vexatious allusions to the philosophy of identity or to the principle of the excluded middle. But it is possible, also, that her conceptions of life and the world would have been enriched and harmonised, and that, without giving us more scientific dogmas, her characters would have embodied more fully the dominating ideas of the time. There is no province of inquiry–historical, scientific, or philosophical–from which the artist may not derive useful material; the sole question is whether it has been properly assimilated and transformed by the action of the poetic imagination. By attempting to define how far Miss Brontë’s powers were in fact thus bounded, we shall approximately decide her place in the great hierarchy of imaginative thinkers.

I assume, though I stand ready to be corrected, that the “great writer” to whom he refers at the beginning of this passage is George Eliot (if anyone knows of any particularly forceful contemporary comparison of CB and GE, I’d be happy to be pointed in the right direction).[*see update below] Stephen concludes that CB’s place is “a very high one,” but he also has a standard for literary and novelistic greatness that includes linking one’s particular genius to broader philosophical and historical insights, and on his view, CB’s failure to make such a connection keeps her from reaching the very highest eminence. His main example here is his analysis of Paul Emanuel in Villette. Stephen considers M. Paul a great triumph, a wholly compelling and believable character, but he finds his “intense individuality” limits his literary significance:

He is a real human being who gave lectures at a particular date in a pension at Brussels. We are as much convinced of that fact as we are of the reality of Miss Brontë herself; but the fact is also a presumption that he is not one of those great typical, characters, the creation of which is the highest triumph of the dramatist or novelist. There is too much of the temporary and accidental–too little of the permanent and essential.

Seen from an intellectual point of view, placed in his due relation to the great currents of thought and feeling of the time, we should have been made to feel the pathetic and humorous aspects of M. Emanuel’s character, and he might have been equally a living individual and yet a type of some more general idea. The philosopher might ask, for example, what is the exact value of unselfish heroism guided by narrow theories or employed on unworthy tasks; and the philosophic humourist or artist might embody the answer in a portrait of M. Emanuel considered from a cosmic or a cosmopolitan point of view. From the lower standpoint accessible to Miss Brontë he is still most attractive; but we see only his relations to the little scholastic circle, and have no such perception as the greatest writers would give us of his relations to the universe, or, as the next order would give, of his relations to the great world without.

There is much to be said, of course, about the assumption that typicality is the mark of greatness, including about how far this standard is gendered. But not least because it is currently unfashionable to consider whether one kind of thing, one literary approach, is in fact better (higher, more significant, more admirable–choose your terms) than another, it is interesting to see a clear, temperate attempt to make just such an evaluative comparison. And Stephen is eloquent in his appreciation of CB:

We cannot sit at her feet as a great teacher, nor admit that her view of life is satisfactory or even intelligible. But we feel for her as for a fellow-sufferer who has at least felt with extraordinary keenness the sorrows and disappointments which torture most cruelly the most noble virtues, and has clung throughout her troubles to beliefs which must in some form or other be the guiding lights of all worthy actions. She is not in the highest rank amongst those who have fought their way to a clearer atmosphere, and can help us to clearer conceptions; but she is amongst the first of those who have felt the necessity of consolation, and therefore stimulated to more successful efforts.

I share something of Stephen’s prejudice in favour of those who “help us to clearer conceptions” (though fiction is often most celebrated today for its ability to confound and complicate moral and philosophical questions, there does seem some advantage to working through the fog to what Stephen calls “some more comprehensible and harmonious solution”). CB resolves some of her thornier problems by highly artificial means, as Stephen points out: “What would Jane Eyre have done, and what would our sympathies have been, had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at Thornfield? That is rather an awkward question.” Indeed. Overall, he sees her unable to sustain a consistent answer to what I think he rightly identifies as a persistent problem in her major novels (as in so many others from the time): “Where does the unlawful pressure of society upon the individual begin, and what are the demands which it may rightfully make upon our respect? . . . She is between the opposite poles of duty and happiness, and cannot see how to reconcile their claims, or even–for perhaps no one can solve that, or any other great problem exhaustively–how distinctly to state the question at issue.” Notoriously, her more philosophical contemporary would insist on the primacy of duty, a position that has cost her the devotion of many feminist readers today (Lee Edwards, for instance, who in her essay “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch,” famously declared that the novel could no longer be “one of the books of [her] life”).

One more passage, though for now I have no time to add commentary on it:

The specific peculiarity of Miss Brontë seems to be the power of revealing to us the potentiality of intense passions lurking behind the scenery of everyday life. Except in the most melodramatic–which is also the weakest–part of Jane Eyre, we have lives almost as uneventful as those of Miss Austen, and yet charged to the utmost with latent power. A parson at the head of a school-feast somehow shows himself as a “Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood;” a professor lecturing a governess on composition is revealed as a potential Napoleon; a mischievous schoolboy is obviously capable of developing into a Columbus or a Nelson; even the most commonplace natural objects, such as a row of beds in a dormitory, are associated and naturally associated with the most intense emotions. Miss Austen makes you feel that a tea-party in a country parsonage may be as amusing as the most brilliant meeting of cosmopolitan celebrities; and Miss Brontë that it may display characters capable of shaking empires and discovering new worlds. The whole machinery is in a state of the highest electric tension, though there is no display of thunder and lightning to amaze us.

Update: Today as I was editing Walter Bagehot’s 1860 essay on George Eliot, I was reminded that there is a fair amount of comparison of CB and GE there, though not really addressing the specific grounds of philosophical thinking. A brief example:

[In George Eliot’s novels], there is nothing of the Rembrandt-like style of Miss Brontë: the light flows far more equally over her pictures; we find nothing of the irregular emphasis with which Currer Bell’s characters are delineated, or of the strong subjective colouring which tinges all her scenes. George Eliot’s imagination, like Miss Brontë’s, loves to go to the roots of character, and portrays best by broad direct strokes; but there the likeness between them, so far as there is any, ends. The reasons for the deeper method and for the directer style are probably very different in the two cases. Miss Brontë can scarcely be said to have had any large instinctive knowledge of human nature:–her own life and thoughts were exceptional,–cast in a strongly-marked but not very wide mould; her imagination was solitary; her experience was very limited; and her own personality tinged all she wrote. She “made out” the outward life and manner of her dramatis personæ by the sheer force of her own imagination; and as she always imagined the will and the affections as the substance and centre of her characters, those of her delineations which are successful at all are deep, and their manner broad.
George Eliot’s genius is exceedingly different. There is but little of Miss Austen in her, because she has studied in a very different and much simpler social world; but there is in the springs of her genius at least more of Miss Austen than of Miss Brontë. Her genial, broad delineations of human life have more perhaps of the case of Fielding than of Miss Austen, or of any of the manners-painters of the present day. For these imagine life only as it appeals in a certain dress and manner, which are, as we said, a kind of artificial medium for their art,–life as affected by drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, if any, of their capacity of catching the undertones and allusive complexity of this sort of society. But though she has observed the phases of a more natural and straightforward sphere of life, she draws her external life from observation, instead of imagining it, like Miss Brontë, out of the heart of the characters she wishes to paint.

Bagehot’s is a tremendously interesting essay. It contains, among other choice bits, his [in]famous remark about Maggie’s relationship with Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss being an “enthusiastic homage to physiological law, and seems to us as untrue to nature as it is unpleasant and indelicate”–a remark which is, in context, less prudish and more philosophically significant that it seems in its sound-bite form–but that’s a subject for another post altogether!

More on Professional vs. Public Criticism

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Brian McCrae accepts the decline of literary criticism as a public activity as a trade-off for the benefits of professionalization. In contrast, others continue to believe that criticism (including that of professional academic literary scholars) can and should be relevant and accessible to non-specialists. In Uncommon Readers, Christopher Knight points to Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, and George Steiner as examples of critics who insisted “that the scholar find a way to engage the larger educated public in conversation” (8); because, as a result, they often worked outside the forms of academic criticism, “professionals have been loath to recognize their contributions” (12). In Double Agent: The Critic and Society, Morris Dickstein posits the alienation between professional critics and a non-academic readership as a central problem in the discipline: “the main task for criticism today is to recapture the public space occupied by the independent man or woman of letters not only between the wars but throughout the nineteenth century. The first step,” he continues, “would be to treat criticism as a major form of public discourse” (6), making the critic a “mediator between art and its audience” (7). In his turn, Dickstein points to Helen Vendler, John Bayley, and Christopher Ricks as academics who have bridged the gap between professional and amateur readers, particularly through their literary journalism. But need an academic critic have a broad public in mind, any more than a specialist in any other field has an obligation to popularize his or her work? Or, ought literary journalism or other critical contributions not made through the formal routes of academic publishing to be given professional weight? It seems to me at this point that one’s answers to questions like this will turn on one’s idea of literature, once, as Dickstein argues in his more recent book The Mirror in the Roadway, conceived of primarily as a kind of imaginative negotiation with or refraction of the real world–a view now, Dickstein points out, that is “completely out of fashion . . . except among ordinary readers” (1).

Brian McCrea, Addison and Steele are Dead

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In parallel to my reading of ‘books about books’ aimed at non-specialist readers, I have been reading scholarly books that treat the development of English studies and/or academic criticism in historical as well as theoretical contexts. (Examples include John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Morris Dickstein’s Double Agent: The Critic and Society, and Geoffrey Hartman’s Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars. My notes on these have been largely maintained off-line, though my post on Denis Donoghue’s The Practice of Reading comes out of the same line of research.) All of these books (and many more like them, of course) make explicit that what now appear to be the “givens” of professional literary criticism and the discipline of English studies are highly contingent and far from exempt from scrutiny, evaluation, or (presumably) further development.

McCrea’s Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism (1990) is certainly among the more lively and provocative books in this collection. As his title suggests, McCrea frames his consideration of English departments as professional and institutional spaces with arguments about what features in the work of Addison and Steele “render it useless to critics housed in English departments”–not, as he is quick to add, that “their works are without value, but rather, that they are not amenable to certain procedures that English professors must perform” (11). The opening sections of the book look first at the express intentions of Addison and Steele as critics and men of letters, particularly at their desire to be popular, widely read, accessible, un-mysterious. The short version of his story is that professional critics require difficult, complex, ambiguous texts to do their jobs (e.g. 146); the “techniques of simplicity” that characterize Addison and Steele propel them, as a result, out of the canon. (McCrea reports that the last PMLA essay on Addison or Steele appeared in 1957, and that Eighteenth-Century Studies, “the publication of choice for the best and brightest in the field,” published only two short pieces on them in 20 years.) (As an aside, I wonder if a similar argument could be made about Trollope, whose novels often seem difficult to handle using our usual critical tools.)

As he develops his argument, McCrea offers an interesting overview of the 19th-century and then 20th-century critical reception of Addison and Steele. He explains the Victorians’ admiration for these 18th-century predecessors largely in terms of the different understanding that prevailed about the relationship of literature, and thus of the literary critic, to life. Rightly, I’d say (based on my own work on 19th-century literary criticism), he sees as a central Victorian critical premise that literature and criticism are public activities, that their worth is to be discussed in terms of effects on readers; hence the significance attached, he argues, to sincerity as well as affect. Especially key to McCrea’s larger argument is his observation that the 19th-century writers were not “academicians” or “specialists in a field” (89):

For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given importance because of its impact upon morals and emotions. For the present-day academic critic, literature no longer is a public matter but rather is a professional matter, even more narrowly, a departmental matter. The study of literature has become a special and separate discipline–housed in colleges of arts and sciences along with other special and separate disciplines. The public has narrowed to a group of frequently recalcitrant students whose need for instruction in English composition–not in English literature–justifies the existence of the English department. (92)

As McCrea tells the story (which in its basic outlines is pretty similar to that told in other histories of criticism) this decline in the critic’s public role has had both significant costs (among them, the critical ‘death’ of Addison and Steele) and significant benefits. At times the book has a nostalgic, even elegaic sound:

People who want to become English professors do so because, at one point in their lives, they found reading a story, poem, or play to be an emotionally rewarding experience. They somehow, someway were touched by what they read. Yet it is precisely this emotional response that the would-be professor must give up. Of course, the professor can and should have those feelings in private, but publicly, as a teacher or publisher, the professor must talk about the text in nonemotional, largely technical terms. No one ever won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant by weeping copiously for Little Nell, and no one will get tenure in a major department by sharing his powerful feelings about Housman’s Shropshire Lad with the full professors. (147)

While we can all share a shudder at the very idea, to me one strength of McCrea’s discussion is his admission that marginalizing affect, pleasure, and aesthetic response is, in a way, to be untrue to literature, and that the professional insistence on doing so also, as a result, marginalizes our conversation, alienating us, as McCrea says, “from our students, our counterparts in other academic departments, our families [unless, he allows, they include other professional critics–otherwise, as he points out, even they are unlikely to actually read our books and articles], and, ultimately, any larger public” (164-5). (In Democracy’s Children, John McGowan makes a similar point: “There remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one’s allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw [at least partly] allegiance to literature itself” [65]).

But why, McCrea goes on to consider, should we expect such cross-over between our work–our professional lives and discourse–and our personal lives? McCrea’s answer to this question (we shouldn’t) puts the professionalization of English studies into the context of professionalization more generally, which he argues (drawing on sociological studies) was a key feature of American society during the last half of the 20th century. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of McCrea’s book, in fact, seems to me to be his insistence that, in this respect at least, ‘professing English’ is (or has now become) just another job, and indeed that its success at establishing itself professionally at once accounts for and has depended on its investment in theory and metacommentary: “The ultimate step in the aggrandizement of any professional group is for its members to get paid to talk about how they do what they do rather than doing it” (17). If one result is isolation from and (perceived) irrelevance to the broader public, including the reading public, the gains for criticism and even for literature are also, McCrea argues, substantial:

Rotarians no longer look to us for uplift, future presidents no longer turn to us to increase their ‘stock of ideas,’ nor do ex-presidents attend our funerals, undergraduates no longer found alumni associations around us, family members can no longer read our books, and plain English has disappeared from our journals. But professionalization has liberated us from a cruel Darwinian system in which one white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male emerged at the top while others struggled at the bottom, grading papers in impoverished anonymity. It has liberated us from the harsh economic realities of eighteenth-century literature . . . while [today’s critics] might wish to share Steele’s influence, I doubt they would want to share his life. He practiced criticism in a world in which there was no tenure, a world devoid of university presses, National Endowments for the Humanities, and endowed university chairs in literature. . . . (213)

In a society in which no one outside the classroom reads Pope, professors can earn handsome incomes by being Pope experts. The five top Pope experts compete with each other, but probably not with the Tennyson experts, and certainly not with the Chaucer experts. The quest for autonomy has cost us Addison and Steele, has cost us the ability to treat literature as a public, moral, emotional phenomenon. But it has left us with a part of literature, with a canon of works complicated in their technique and tone, and with a classroom in which we have a chance to teach those works, to keep them (and whatever value they hold) alive. (215)

Provocative, as I said, not least in reversing the oft-heard line that (undergraduate) teaching is the price professors pay for the opportunity to do their research and as much as declaring that, to the contrary, academic criticism is the price they pay to preserve literature and its values.

Evaluating East Lynne

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Working through Ellen Wood’s 1861 best-seller East Lynne with my sensation fiction seminar yesterday, I decided to come clean with my students: for all that I find many aspects of the novel interesting, even fascinating, and certainly worth our time in class, I also think that as a novel–that is, as an aesthetic artefact, an artistic production–East Lynne is second-rate at best. But, as I also told them, it’s challenging to justify this judgment. There’s no universal standard for greatness in novel-writing, after all, no ready measure of skill or accomplishment. G. H. Lewes praised Jane Austen for her perfect “mastery over the means to her end”; we need such a flexible notion of greatness in a genre that accommodates both Dickens and George Eliot, both Virginia Woolf and, say, George Orwell among its acknowledged geniuses. 200 years of novel criticism have taught us to be eclectic in our tastes and adaptable in our reading practices, to be wary of defining great traditions. And yet is it really so out of order to ask “but it is any good?” How could we answer this question, absent some template for first-rate fiction? (For the record, the class has been enjoying the novel, and it certainly has its defenders!) The only strategy I could think of was comparative. Since we obviously could not do point-by-point comparisons between entire novels, and because my primary interest was in the quality of the writing, rather than broader issues of theme, plot, or characterization, I put together some short passages for us to consider. Of course it’s an imperfect exercise, but I tried to be fair. The passage from Wood is both key to the novel and (I think) representative of her tone and style; the same (I think) is true of the other samples. All use intrusive (and moralistic) narration; all describe “fallen” women. Here they are:

How fared it with Lady Isabel? Just as it must be expected to fare, and does fare, when a high-principled gentlewoman falls from her pedestal. Never had she experienced a moment’s calm, or peace, or happiness, since the fatal night of quitting her home. She had taken a blind leap in a moment of wild passion, when, instead of the garden of roses it had been her persuader’s pleasure to promise her she would fall into, but which, in truth, she had barely glanced at, for that had not been her moving motive, she had found herself plunged into a yawning abyss of horror, from which there was never more any escape–never more, never more. The very instant–the very night of her departure, she awoke to what she had done. The guilt, whose aspect had been shunned in the prospective, assumed at once its true frightful color, the blackness of darkness; and a lively remorse, a never-dying anguish, took possession of her soul forever. Oh, reader, believe me! Lady–wife–mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees, and pray to be enabled to bear them–pray for patience–pray for strength to resist the demon that would tempt you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you do rush on to it, will be found worse than death. (Ellen Wood, East Lynne)

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard, unloving, despairing soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?
God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery! (George Eliot, Adam Bede)

What were her thoughts when he left her? She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about—dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself?—she thought—not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs? The French maid found her in this position—sitting in the midst of her miserable ruins with clasped hands and dry eyes. The woman was her accomplice and in Steyne’s pay. “Mon Dieu, madame, what has happened?” she asked.
What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure? (Thackeray, Vanity Fair)

The discussion that followed was certainly lively. Perhaps rather than recapitulating it, I’ll stop this post here and see if anyone out there would like to comment on how the passages compare.

Meta-Criticism: A Complaint!

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Often when I make good faith efforts to re-kindle my interest in and appreciation for academic criticism, I experience what I’ve come to think of as a “Reverse Godfather”: just when I think I’m back in, they keep pushing me out! In today’s episode, I was doing some catch-up on new releases in Victorian studies, with an eye to my upcoming course on sensation fiction, so [a new book on sensation fiction] caught my attention. Happily for me (I thought) its introduction is freely available online, so I start reading along, only to find my interest slipping away and my attention wandering as [the author] develops an argument that turns out to be every bit as much about criticism as about Victorian novels. In fact, for long stretches of the introduction she offers criticism of criticism of criticism–that is, she examines and critiques the premises and procedures of review essays on recent work in Victorian studies. Is it just me, or does this sound like a variation on navel-gazing in which the object of said gaze is just someone else’s navel? [The author] describes the book’s project overall as “literary criticism that reads itself reading the Victorians.” I’m sorry, but the thought of reading literary criticism reading itself reading the Victorians is just not appealing. I’m going to go read an actual book instead.

Follow-up: This little piece got a lot more attention than any other post I’ve put up here. I’ve been feeling uneasy, as a result, because it was meant more as an outburst of frustration with a genre (academic literary criticism) than an attack on [this] book in particular, but this distinction is blurred in my original post. As I said in a comment on Dan Green’s “The Reading Experience,” as an academic book, [this one] seems better than most (at least the introduction does, which is as far as I’ve read at this point). For starters, it makes an original argument and is clearly written. My impatience is with the layers of self-conscious meta-commentary that are now required in academic criticism: it can feel like you are looking at literature through bubble-wrap. [The author] has to do something like this to succeed professionally (though perhaps she’s fine with that, and would not do otherwise even if she had the choice). But at the same time such an approach pretty much guarantees that the book won’t be of much interest to anyone outside the profession. It is this double-bind that frustrates me the most and that has motivated me to engage in the meta-critical project I myself have underway, as I try to rethink how and why we write about books. (July 24, 2007)

Final follow-up: I continue to regret having singled out a particular critic in this post and it occurred to me belatedly that I could at least edit out the specific references. I can’t change the peevish tone of the post, but I hope there’s evidence elsewhere on this blog of my better self. I’m not done thinking about genres of criticism, but (though for different reasons) I agree with the last anonymous comment–“Enough!”–at least with this post as its starting point. (August 7, 2007)

Criticism as ‘Coduction’

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I have remarked a couple of times that Wayne Booth‘s idea of ‘coduction’ seems to me to capture something important about the way thoughtful literary criticism unfolds. I was reminded of this yet again reading Dan Green’s lastest posting on the ethics of book reviewing, in which he proposes that any review that aspires to the status of criticism must take into account what other reviewers have said. As discussed in my previous post, one distinction between reviewing and criticism is that the critic may be aiming at explication rather than evaluation, while the main expectation most of us have of a review is that it will culminate in and justify a judgment. I think Booth would argue that criticism is always at least implicitly judgmental. In any case, here’s some of what he says about the process by which “we arrive at our sense of value in narratives”:

Even in my first intuition of ‘this new one,’ whether a story or a person, I see it against a backdrop of my long personal history of untraceably complex experiences of other stories and persons. Thus my initial acquaintance is comparative even when I do not think of comparisons. If I then converse with others about their impressions–if, that is, I move toward a public ‘criticism’–the primary intuition (with its implicit acknowledgment of value) can be altered in at least three ways: it can become conscious and more consciously comparative…; it can become less dependent on my private experience…; and it can be related to principles and norms…. Every appraisal of a narrative is implicitly a comparison between the always complex experience we have had in its presence and what we have known before. (The Company We Keep, pp. 70-71)

It’s not that the ‘primary intuition’ (especially of a reader with an already rich ‘personal history’ of literature and criticism) is invalid; it’s that putting that intuition into dialogue with other ideas enriches it and complicates it, and makes it better–more “serious,” to use Green’s word.

Just as a bit of an aside, this idea that criticism is not finite or absolute but always in process, part of an ongoing conversation, is what makes a medium such as a blog seem appropriate for it. Conventional academic publishing inhibits any real exchange of views, first because its pace is so unbelievably slow that by the time anything you write appears in print you can barely remember what you said or why you said it, and second because you have to at least sound as if you think what you’ve said is definitive. Hardly anybody reads most academic criticism, either, even within the academy (half the time it seems the real audience is the person who reads only the title, on your cv…).