PARTISAN REVIEW
45
English studies. Talk about the ultimate heresy of paraphrase or
claims that the mechanics of
topoi
gathering are merely procedural,
the necessary preparation for other and more important work-these
are only bits of conscience money that critics pay themselves and do
little to ameliorate the profound impressions made on the minds
of students and on teachers' minds by some of the insistent methods
of literary study. Much of the classroom study of literature appears
unfortunately destined to make all energies of response subservient to
structures, with emphasis on the coherence resulting from recurrence
of patterns, and with a corresponding deemphasis on any discordant
elements, except where these can be included as irony or as some as
yet unidentified sub-subgenre.
My attack is less on the so-called new criticism or on the "anat–
omy of criticism" or on relevance seekers than on classroom versions
of these and on the consequences, personal, political and literary,
that follow from the classroom.
As
for the "new criticism," it is
being treated, unfairly, as the villain of the piece anyway, despite
far too casual acknowledgments that it was needed at the time as an
antidote to anachronistic historical methods. Before it was fashioned
into an instrument, the new criticism was itself more complex and
liberating than it is now made out to be, especially as practiced
by Ransom (who had the misfortune to coin the title), by Tate,
by Warren and by Brooks (who took on the responsibility for trans–
lating extraordinarily supple critical formulations into a terminology
and method fit for pedagogical use). And besides, all
of
these men,
along with others of the Southern Agrarian movement, talked a
politics,
in
J'U Take My Stand
and elsewhere, with many of the
radical, indeed Marcusean overtones, that are the reverse of the
politics now ascribed to them. Their positive inclination, still im–
mensely beneficial, was to finagle students into the work and then
ask them to care about what was happening to its (and to their)
language. This inclination derived in part from the classical training
of the mostly Southern advocates of this kind of analysis, and derived,
too, from a taste for conversational piquancy, for what Frost
calls
"sentence sounds." It can be fancied that
this
taste developed easiest
in the rather close, familial, noncosmopolitan societies which these
critics also tend to favor as social organizations of life, groupings in
which one might learn to "read" as much through the ear as through
