PARTISAN REVIEW
47
history during the last twenty or thirty years. I doubt that most
of those now crying for "relevance" are going to be any less utilitarian
in
the selection of the works and writers they promote. The list
will
simply
be
different. Like the new critics, but for other reasons, they,
too, believe in "works" more than in "writing," in books rather than
in
those manifestations of energy one might call
ecriture.
To say that the implications of the classroom study of literature
are political, simply means that any concern for language and for
the structures of imagination is now in some sense inescapably so.
English studies is susceptible, though by no means so directly, to
the kind of analysis of methods to which the social sciences have
been subjected by C. Wright Mills and Noam Chomsky. Because
literary studies can't claim, as can history and sociology, a very direct
transmission of its findings into political consideration, any inquiry
into the politics lurking in its practices is necessarily both more tenta–
tive, however, and far more risky than even Chomsky's have proved
to be. It is nonetheless a necessary inquiry, though one must be on
guard against reductiveness or imputation of motive or self-righte–
ousness. The nature of the conditions I'm describing means that no
one is innocent and that all descriptions, in the effort to explore the
implications of a practice, must in some sense
be
unfair
to
the prac–
titioners. Those opposed to any political interpretation of English
studies can claim, quite understandably, that their intellectual con–
duct in class or in literary journals or as members of literary-aca–
demic organizations is susceptible to political interpretation only if
they have intended it to be. I hope I've suggested that they do have
an argument: I happen not to think it a very convincing or a very
self-inquiring one.
For that reason, I found the disagreement in 1968 about wheth–
er or not MLA should meet in 1969 in Chicago merely symptomatic
of a larger and persisting one: that we are now in a cultural situa–
tion wherein political meanings get expressed even in the effort to
evade them. Those who wish this were not so have the sympathy
of those who regret that it
is;
but those whose response
is
some
genteel pretention that they are serving themselves and civilization
by merely "doing their own work" with literature as they have
always done it are deluding themselves. The "same" work
is
dif–
ferent from what it was even a few years ago, for the reason that
