Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 10:54:28 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Literary criticism


At 10:06 AM 3/19/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>What have you got against Cleanth Brooks?
>
>Aside from the reactionary southern agrarian politics, which I can bracket
>if not fully overlook, I think there are severe limits to that kind of
>formalist analysis that fetishizes a text as existing purely in itself. I'm
>all for rigorous close reading, but it's not enough - you have to consider
>how any work of art, high or low, fits into a tradition and a hierarchy,
>and how it relates to the society in which it was produced and the
>societies that have subsequently made use of it. So I guess in the final
>analysis you can't overlook the reactionary politics of Brooks & his New
>Critical comrades: in divorcing The Well-Wrought Urn from those who wrought
>and use it, you're trying to perpetuate (or recover) an elitist society,
>with the professional critic taking the place of the gentleman aesthete.
>
>Doug

Of course, one of the interesting features of the Trotskyist movement is
how it became strongly identified with the new criticism aesthetic in the
pages of the Partisan Review. People such as editor Dwight Macdonald were
sympathetic to Trotskyism and on cultural matters took up the cudgel
against Stalinist proletarian art. In the ensuing dialectic, those literary
theories that adhered to a formalist and avant-garde stance found their way
into the pages of the Partisan Review, including a number of the "new
critics" and defenders of abstract expressionism such as Columbia
University's Meyer Shapiro, a long-time Trotskyist intellectual. (One of
the people who traveled in Shapiro's circles was Whittaker Chambers, who
eventually opted for Stalinism, with typically mixed feelings.)

After the Cold War began, many of these Trotskyist intellectuals dropped
any allegiance to socialism but retained a close identification with the
modernist aesthetic. This was the intellectual climate of the early 1960s
that I was introduced to at Bard College. It went hand-in-hand with the
logical positivism and Talcott Parsons sociology and "value free" social
science. This intellectual system was either explicitly or implicitly
anticommunist, which it rejected as "ideology."

The radicalization of the 1960s has provided a space on campus for
countervailing tendencies, including both Marxism and various feminist or
gay scholarships. What is not so clear to me is what sort of literary
criticism would manage to avoid the "text in itself" sterility of new
criticism and the ham-fisted tendency of some leftist criticism toward
class reductionism. You don't get so much of this in the left press, where
novels or poems are rarely paid attention to. You get it more in the sort
of silly film criticism that Irwin Silber used to write for the Guardian,
where movies like Rambo were routinely exposed for being
counter-revolutionary. (Yawn.)

I suppose if I was teaching a course in American Literature today, I'd
follow the same sort of analysis that I sketched at in my discussion of
Moby Dick. It seems ludicrous to treat this great work of literature solely
as a treatment of metaphysical themes of good-versus-evil. Melville was
very much concerned with the social reality of whaling, as the extensive
discussion of the actual work on shipboard reveals.


Louis Proyect



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