PARTISAN REVIEW
great prestige among their colleagues, and are as welcome at meet–
ings of the Modem Language Association as they are in the pages
of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Even regional differences no longer
exist. The Southern Agrarians have gone east and west to professor–
ships of increasing importance.
The Marxism of the thirties had little real influence on the
teaching of literature in the colleges. A few Marxist studies were
written, some "social backgrounds" courses were added, and American
Civilization Programs became popular. But developments in the
forties have more than reversed the trend. Great Books courses are
almost universal, and in these the work of the past is studied out
of social context and, so far as is possible, by absolute humanist and
literary standards. In the freshman courses, where the Brooks and
Warren textbooks or imitations of them prevail, the preoccupation
is with close analysis of texts, with the imaginative relationship of
elements within the work of art, and with freedom, through ambiguity
and irony, from any worldly certainty except an aesthetic one. This
is good immediate experience for freshmen, and it corrects the exces–
sive biographical detail and influence-tracing of earlier teaching. But
it is based on a theory of literature which rejects literature's historical,
social and psychological character in a fashion quite inconsistent with
the actualities of literary experience.
The academics are interested in contemporary literature as such
for the ways it can be placed within the vast hierarchy of world
art
and for the slight changes it may make in the relationships
within that hierarchy. They do not give contemporary literature
superior relevance because it is formed out of ideas and actions and
feelings in which we are very specially implicated at the moment
as social beings. They do not acknowledge its developmental role
as part of the historic process as it brings together conscious and
unconscious elements, personal and social elements, in imaginatively
graspable relationships which inevitably affect social attitudes and
behavior. They are opposed to psychological identification with action
or character, or to discussion of characters in novels and plays as if
they existed as social types in history instead of considering strictly
their aesthetic function in the particular work of art. These doctrines
deny vital elements which have been part of the literary experience
in all the great national cultures, and which, as part of the conscious
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