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PAUL DEMAN
SPACECRITICS
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD. By Hillis Miller. Hllrvord University
Press. $7.50.
THE WIDENING GYRE. By Joseph Fronk. Rutgers University Press. $6.00.
Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively
stagnant. This doesn't mean that nQ ,outstanding individual wQrks have
been pr,oduced, ,or that nQ gifted and ,original neWCQmers have appeared
,on the scene. It
is
frQm a methQd,oIQgical P,oint ,of view that nQ striking
inn,ovati,ons have taken place; the assumpti,ons ,on which literary criticism
has been living, in the universities and in the j,ournals, have nQt been
fundamentally challenged. This in itself
is
nQt necessarily distressing;
it may well be that the develQpments that occured earlier, in the course
,of the thirties, were SQ rich and varied that it tQQk m,ore than twenty
years tQ refine and expl,oit them tQ the full. Yet, a certain paralysis
seems tQ have set in, especially in cQmparisQn with recent EurQpean
effervescence. New Criticism has turned intQ the fruitful and didactically
effective discipline ,of cl,ose reading, replacing phil,oI,ogy and c,onventi,onal
literary history as a pr,opedeutic, but unable itself tQ lead tQ larger under–
takings. Marxist and psych,oanalytical criticism have sh,own little vitality;
alth,ough their existence has been knQwn f,or quite a while, the impact ,of
writers such as Lukacs, Benjamin and m,ore lately Ad,ornD has hardly
been felt here. Even w,orks that appear ,on first reading
tD
,open up
new perspectives, such as NDrthrDp Frye'S
Anatomy of Criticism,
turn
,out at clDser examinatiDn
tD
be merely a s,omewhat artificial synthesis
,of
well-established earlier apprDaches, a cDmbinati,on ,of archetypal and
f,ormalist criticism less interesting than were, in their days, the essays ,of
T. S. Eli,ot. The newc,omer wh,o tries
tD
find stimulati,on and guidance
in the w,ork ,of his elders may well be ,oVerCDme by a feeling ,of weariness
that drives him
to
,other sh,ores Dr,
if
he is timid, tQ an even m,ore rem,ote
return tD traditi,onalliterary hist,ory.
T,o this sDmewhat gl,o,omy picture, ,one sh,ould n,ot DpP,oSe an image
,of brilliant liveliness and enthusiasm in EurDpe. .The fact that certain
recent devel,opments in France and Germany seem endDwed with a kind
,of rev,oluti,onary freshness is due, t,o nD small degree,
to
the incredible
inertia that surrounds them; if ,one speaks ,of a twenty-year-I,ong stagna–
ti,on in the United States, ,one shDuld speak ,of a century-,old stagnati,on
in m,ost Eur,opean academic instituti,ons. And
if
,one can regret that
American criticism has nDt been sufficiently aware ,of certain theoretical