Allen Tate
IS LlTE·RARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE? !
The questions that I propose to discuss in this essay will
fall into two main divisions. I shall undertake to discuss, first, the
teaching of literary criticism in the university. Since I am not able
to
define
literary criticism I shall be chiefly concerned with the idea
of a formal relation; that is to say, supposing we knew what criticism
is, what relation would it have to the humanities, of which it seems
to be a constituent part? In the second division I shall try to push
the discussion a little further, toward a question that has been acute
in our time: Is literary criticism possible at all? The answer to this
question ought logically to precede the discussion of a formal rela–
tion, for we ought to know what it is that we are trying to relate to
something else. But we shall never know this; we shall only find
that in teaching criticism we do not know what we are teaching, even
though criticism daily talks about a vast material that we are in the
habit of calling the humanities. The mere fact of this witnesses our
sense of a formal relation that ought to exist between two things of the
nature of which we are ignorant.
Literary cntIclsm as a member of the humanities I take
to be a problem of academic statesmanship inviting what we hope–
fully call "solutions" of both the theoretical and the practical sort.
Is literary criticism properly a branch of humanistic study? That
is
the theoretical question, to which I shall avoid the responsibility
1.
Part I of this essay was read at a symposium on the humanities at Vander–
bilt University, October 20, 1951; Part II, at the Conference on the Philosophical
Bases of Literary Criticism at H arvard University, July 23, 1951. Both parts have
been amplified.
