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PARTISAN REVIEW
can create and develop a hierarchy of studies that can lead not merely
to further studies but to truth, one may doubt that the accelerating
decline of modern culture will be checked.
Without quite knowing what literary criticism is, let us assume
again that we are teaching it within the humanities division, usually
in the English Department, either because it ought to be there or
be–
cause nobody else wants it. For convenience we may think of the
common relations between the work of the imagination and the
teaching activity under four heads, which I shall put in the form of
rhetorical questions:
(1) Can a given work, say
Clarissa Harlowe
or
Kublai Khan,
be "taught," in such a way as to make it understood, without
criticism?
(2) Can the work
be
taught first, and the criticism then ap–
plied as a mode of understanding?
(3) Can the criticism be presented first and held in readiness
for the act of understanding which could thus be simultaneous with
the act of reading the novel or the poem?
(4) Is the purpose of teaching imaginative works to provide
materials upon which the critical faculty may exercise itself in its
drive toward the making of critical systems, which then perpetuate
themselves without much reference to literature?
These four versions of the relation by no means exhaust its
pos–
sible variations. The slippery ambiguity of the word criticism itself
ought by now to be plain. But for the purposes of this localized dis–
cussion, which I am limiting for the moment to the question of
how to teach, we may think of criticism as three familiar kinds of
discourse about works of literature. (We must bear in mind not
only our failure to know what criticism is, but another, more dif–
ficult failure resulting from it: the failure to know what literature is.)
The three kinds of critical discourse are as follows: ( 1) acts of
evaluation of literature (whatever these may be); (2) the communi–
cation of insights; and (3) the rhetorical study of the language of the
imaginative work.
I am not assuming, I am merely pretending that anyone of the
three activities is to be found in its purity. To the extent that they
may be separated, we must conclude that the two first, acts of
evaluation and the communication of insights, cannot be taught, and
