ACTA's Must-Reads

I’m no Theory-head, but these dim-witted attacks on Theory are so, like, last century. Let’s begin with RR’s defense of New Criticism as an approach to literature that allows the reader to see the sublime depths of art. In fact, we could unravel this argument through Beardsley. Take the intentional fallacy. New Critics rightly asked readers to deal with the text at hand, but by bracketing off all discussion of authorial intention, they were the first and still strongest supporters of the Death of the Author. As Michaels and Knapp demonstrate in “Against Theory,” interpretation that fails to view meaning as the author’s intention basically falls into the other New Critical fallacy: the affective fallacy. New Critics, by unwittingly severing meaning from intention, make meaning a function of how a critic experiences a work of art. They ask not whether a strain of meaning in a poem was put there by the author, but whether they can find it in the text. So while Beardsley wished to attack intentional and affective readings, Knapp and Michaels show that without intention, New Critics ultimately read for affect. But unlike reader-response critics, New Critics sought to project their experience of the text onto “the text itself.”

Not only did New Critics bracket off a huge area of art’s power – authorial intention and affect – they too often reduced artistic complexity to tired declarations of “irony” or “ambiguity.” It’s like coming to a fork in the road and squinting to make the diverging roads look as one. In fact, the Yale critics – Hartmann, Bloom, De Man, Miller – all founded their versions of “deconstruction” not through French theory, not through Derrida, but through an extreme version of the New Criticism with which they all matured as critics. But rather than stop at a point of condensed meaning and declare “ambiguity!,” the Yale critics pulled on all the various threads of meaning in a text and followed them where they led. While the New Critics assumed that all art forms a unity, the Yale critics saw art as a tense fusion of sometimes straining meanings. It wouldn’t be pushing it to see the Yale critics as the true heirs to New Criticism, unlike those second and third generation formalists whose readings became so predictable, so tired.

And while De Man’s Nazi-sympathizing past is deeply troubling, let’s not forget that the New Critics – and their forefathers, the Fugitives – were often unrepentant anti-Semites (T.S. Eliot) and Southern racists. De Man at least left his Nazism behind in Europe, forging intellectual ties with some of the brightest Jewish thinkers of his day (including Derrida and Levinas). In any case, all of this is mere name-calling, a childish variation on the genetic fallacy. Why do conservatives get so bothered when a lefty critic rightly sees certain artists as racist or sexist, but then have no problem undermining De Man via his wartime sympathies? The double standard is horrifying.

Then let’s take RR’s thesis: Theory rose to power because critics were afraid of the sublime power of art. Well, as I’ve already said, any critic who severs art from intention and affect is already running from art’s power, so the New Critics are as guilty of this as anyone. But of course, theory did not rise because of art. Theory – Foucault, Lacan, Derrida – is not art criticism, not aesthetic philosophy, not hermeneutic method. Foucault was an historiographer; Lacan a psychoanalyst; Derrida a philosopher. Furthermore, Derrida, for instance, harshly criticized both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian historicism. So the real target of RR’s attack is not Theory but the construction of something called “Theory” in the American literature departments of the 70s and 80s. Furthermore, RR’s thesis is simply a variation on Freud’s idea of psychological defense, of how the mind reacts to overwhelming and dangerous experiences. In this sense, RR is more Lacanian than New Critical: he isn’t closely reading theoretical critics; he’s psychoanalyzing them. (Check out his use of badly translated Freudian jargon: abreaction!)

RR also gets the Death of the Author thesis completely wrong. When critics speak the “author function” rather than the author, they are doing the same thing that film critics did when they criticized the auteur idea. A film, as is obvious, is not made by the director only. It’s a collective effort, and each member of the crew puts an individual stamp on the finished product. These stamps are often at odds with one another. Now, a novel or a poem is not as obviously a collective effort. But the goal of bracketing off the individual author was to contextualize the work of art. For example, when The Scarlet Letter was written, there were countless other works of what could be called Puritan gothic. Hawthorne did not write in a vacuum, and while his novel is much better than these other novels, we have to understand what Hawthorne and his readers well-understood: that his novel was part of this discourse about the Puritan past in post-Jacksonian America. No one objects to this when it’s called “intellectual history” or “the history of ideas,” because these earlier disciplines still restricted themselves to a series of individual geniuses. But the new generation of historicists and theory-heads wanted to view the field of culture out of which a work of art arose in more complexity: what were the popular discourses circulating at the time? How does high art relate to the popular art and culture of the time? The politics and social tensions? The economics? In fact, what these critics often did by default was show, in rich detail, the genius of the author: how an author effected and was affected by the divergent ideas and cultural rhythms of his time. Thus, Greenblatt's work moves from Foucauldian New Historicism to best-selling Shakespeare biography. (And as I wrote earlier, the first critics to kill the author were the New Critics.)

Let’s also recall the limitations of the New Critics. Romantic art was almost entirely neglected during the reign of the New Critics. It took the Yale critics – along with historicists like M. H. Abrams -- to make Romantic poetry a viable field of study once again. The study of the novel also dwindled, because New Criticism didn’t have the same palette of formal angles from which to study fiction as it did poetry. It was the work of Russian formalists recovered by American structuralist and post-structuralist critics that breathed life into the study of the novel through the rise of narratology. In fact, one of the best close readings of a novel available is Roland Barthes breathtaking S/Z. Michael McKeon’s groundbreaking work on the history of the novel wouldn’t have been possible in the atmosphere of the New Criticism. Even the type of poetry valued by the New Critics was clearly defined by the limitations of the methodology: that is to say, the methodology of the New Critics defined what art was deemed best. If that’s not running from art’s power, I don’t know what is! The long, narrative poem was devalued in relation to the complex, but relatively brief and compact lyric meditation. Renaissance, Restoration, and modernist poetry was held up above the epic, the visionary (long Blake, Whitman), the poetic essay (of, say, Pope), and the experimental (Eliot over Pound, say).

I’m not saying that the New Criticism wasn’t a powerful and necessary approach to literature. I teach it today, and I use its techniques every time I read. But I also use old-fashioned rhetorical techniques; and structuralist ideas (of binary opposition); and deconstructionist ideas (of not forcing an artwork into a unified meaning); and dialectical materialist methods (Burke’s and Jameson’s ideas that artistic form relates at one level to social conflict); and old and new historicist ideas. Bad theory criticism was no worse than bad New Criticism parroting. Every paradigm ultimately begins producing repetitive, unexciting, uninspired criticism. For every Pater there were countless schoolboy copycats who thought that fawning and mooning over art was the best criticism. (Harold Bloom’s recent work is that of a Pater character actor.)

Finally, none of this tells us why some English departments no longer require – or never required in the first place – a Shakespeare class. The shift to Theory led to a huge increase in Shakespeare studies, which led to a huge increase in Renaissance studies and thus hires of Renaissance scholars running Shakespeare courses. So it’s not Theory’s fault. As I’ve written in the past, curricular changes are more about changes in funding. When departments have to compete for funding, and once competition is based on popularity and enrollment, departments often make their majors into McMajors: “Have it your way.” The student becomes a consumer, and departments sell curricula as commodities: marketing, spinning, appealing to base urges and not to intellectual needs. Another possible cause is the intellectual labor market. Despite a hard job market for mid-level scholars, the top scholars still have their pick of jobs. Departments compete for these top hires. And many professors would rather have total control over their teaching than be forced to teach the same required courses over and over again. Departments with strict curricula will be less competitive in appealing both to top students and top professors. The market mentality tends to get in the way of serious intellectual work.

Charitable of LT breezily to summarize the debacle that "English Studies" has become since the New Criticism; he, she, it (I'm trying to avoid the tendentious and forbidden "authorial/intentional fallacy"--apparently anathema to LT--his own words excepted, bien sur!) well and, I might add, UNINTENTIONALLY, illustrates how the explicatory (or better: exculpatory) critical/historical "cure" justifying the fads, fashions and follies of literary studies over the past forty or so years is really part of the disease mortally afflicting the humanities.

The so-called New Criticism took as its critical/analytical model the "authorless" short lyric poem (the supposed ne plus ultra of literary art), which could hardly serve well in analyses of the treatise or the essay--or the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, biography, history, roman a clef, etc., for that matter. And if we're to take the "text" in absolute and pure isolation from historical context, literary tradition, authorial biography, philology, bibliography and the like, then why not require students and faculty to read, study and teach works (note: not "texts", unless one is editing, glossing or translating) in their original languages and not in translation? It never fails to amuse me as a translator, editor, glossator and translation historian that most English professors and nearly all their student-acolytes trust fairly literal translations (especially of trendy 20th c. French, German, Italian or Russian works, but also classical works in Greek and Latin) to convey messages of radical linguistic indeterminacy. The sad truth is that most students and many English profs simply can't read these languages competently, but this doesn't shame them away from ignorantly pontificating about Theories of Everything Whatever as supposedly evidenced in a variety of translated works. Add to this the pathetic and buffoonish academic attempts at sway-dough-serious "critical analyses" of "pop culture" (i.e., cultural sewage) and you've a full-blown crisis (or all-consuming bonfire) in humanities education.

And it's no coincidence that most of the "theorists" LT exalts above were and are Marxist antinomians like Foucault, a truly vicious and malignant personality. Some of these "critics" trade in literary versions of sway-dough intellectual frauds (or freuds) like psycho-ANAL-ysis while others dabble in anti-scientific obscurantism (the theoretical physicists Sokal and Bricmont's Impostures Intellectuelles provides a convenient list cum analyses of these pathetic anti-scientific frauds and cult shamans, which just happens--mirabile dictu!--to coincide with a list of the "big-time" trendy critics LT touts above).

Jacques, you might want to read my initial post a bit closer. You'll see that I don't actually defend the truth value of Foucault or Lacan or Derrida. Instead, I question RR's simplistic narrative of disciplinary history (that is, his notion that Theory was a symptom of professors' inability to face the complexity of art, which only the New Critics truly could face).

My points were quite simple: New Critics themselves refused to face the complexity of art by restricting themselves to short, lyric poetry, by denying the importace of authorial intention and readerly affect, and by reducing hermeneutic complexity to "irony" or "ambiguity."

You'll actually see that I DEFEND authorial intention as a key to analysis. If you read Knapp and Michaels's essay "Against Theory," which I cited, you'll find a brilliant defense of meaning as intention. As Michaels and Knapp show, you can't deny affect and intention. Without intention, meaning is reduced to affect.

Our readings of literature should be informed by a variety of perspectives: biographical, historical, social, formal, philosophical, economic, aesthetic. To limit our readings "to the text only," is to deny the true complexity of art. And RR, by holding the New Critics up as the apotheosis of criticism, ultimately is guilty of what he accuses Theory-heads of: running from the sublimity of art.

After rereading the Rosenbaum essay, Linval, I can't say I'd disagree with anything he says, and especially concerning the thoroughly anti-literary and noxious influence of post-modernism and post-structuralism on criticism of the arts and in graduate schools in the States.

I haven't read the Michaels/Knapp essay for years (perhaps I shall again soon), but I remember it didn't seem to help me in the least in according my own experience of reading literature with its claims to elucidate the question of authorial intention. New Critics' works--Empson's, for example--did. As we wish to be understood, so do artists, though complexities abound in works as great and as subtle as Shakespeare's. Perhaps the difference here is in treating New Criticism as an epistemology (I don't) as opposed to a heuristic methodology (I do). Your paragraph on Eliot and De Man I utterly reject as calumny on Eliot and a sneaky defence of the pro-Nazi liar and bigamist, De Man. Barthes's reading of Balzac as well (bizarre and highly implausible); as for Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, they're clever frauds and fabulists, as stated above. Include them with phrenologists, astrologers and self-proclaimed wizards--don't burn them--just avoid giving them honourary degrees and move on (as Dante's Vergil has it, "Non ragiam di lor, ma guarda e passa"). I'd actually like to continue this discussion, but the fact is, I've much to do before my marriage in 50 hours.