486
PARTISAN REVIEW
Joyce, and the other earlier great of the avant-g.arde; a state of af–
fairs for which the editors were not quite to blame perhaps, since the
late thirties and early forties, relatively sterile periods, had to live by
exhibiting the corpse of their more creative parent, the twenties.
The
Southern Review
was rapidly becoming a review written by English
teachers for English teachers-not that I have anything against Eng–
lish teachers, some of my best friends, etc.... But being determines
thought, and you cannot live in the midst of an English faculty (with
the peculiar qualities of professional American scholars) without be–
coming infected, especially under the urgency of academic advance–
ment, with the point of view of your colleagues, who for their part
have stakes in preserving their own form of bureaucratic specializa–
tion expressed by PMLA. Much of the critical writing by the academic
avant-garde in recent years has tended to difTer from the PMLA con–
tributions of their colleagues, not so much in fundamental interest or
temper, as in mere choice of subject-Eliot and the late Yeats instead
of, say, Shelley and Browning. The consciousness of what has been
called "the new criticism," which is one of the distinct products of
the little magazine in its late stage, is born out of this same state of
being, and reveals only too clearly the stamp of its academic origin.
Although it has produced several brilliant readings of isolated works,
its critical impulse remains all too obviously pedagogical, concerned
with deploying the process of reading itself, v,rhich criticism had
hitherto taken for granted as already digested by the critic. Though
such criticism is, in part, a struggle against a society where reading
has become a passive and passing indulgence requiring only one–
twentieth of even the normal brain's capacity, it also represent'> a
defeat and an acquiescence by the critic in his own alienation as he
retires from the struggle of modern life into a corner with his text.
The new type of literary provincialism that has appearect on the
American scene now invariably wears an academic cap and gown.
The connection with the university seems to augur that there
may be, now and in the near future, more money available for
literary reviews. In a surplus economy, such as ours normally is, some
crumbs are bound to fall from the table of the rich capitalist feast,
even for an intelligent purpose. But what a miserable pittance they
are if one stops to think of the hare-brained, degraded, and useless
schemes into which money is daily poured, as down a drain, in our
society! And, of course, a new problem arises from the dangerous
. contagion of the point of view of the money's source. The genteel
tradition is not an isolated episode of our history, conquered and
