PARTISAN REVIEW
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charges. Only an apologist for old academic routines can deny that
English studies needs to be revised. But, this is not to say that the past
is to be given up
in
a splurge of historical masochism, or that it is to
be
taught in a gimmicky fashion to satisfy an improvised principle of
relevance.
Of course, it is difficult to talk about "relevance" because the term
has been so sloganized, and has led to simple-minded and ingenious cor–
relations of older figures to current events and fashionable causes. Ob–
viously in some sense relevance is relevant to the act of writing and the
study of literature, as it is to thinking in any field. After all, as T. S.
Eliot pointed out, the past is not fixed; it is constantly reshaped by new
ideas and new works. In this sense, the past is a retroactive version
of our engagement in the present - cranky, biased, very selective.
If
such a view of the past were applied
to
teaching, it would
mean abandoning many academic conventions based on the idea that
literature is a self-perpetuating body of knowledge, which can be taught
once it has been sorted out by qualified experts. The more scholarly
teachers think of literature as a museum with walls stocked with works
to be studied and rearranged, the more literary ones as a gourmet shop
in which to cultivate one's tastes. But for both literature is identical
with its history. (Comparative literature departments, which sound more
sophisticated, have their own baroque mystiques for correlating and ex–
tracting aesthetic juice.)
Those of us who teach often forget that the whole academic enter–
prise is a vast, semi-autotelic system, with its own conventions and tradi–
tions that are not the same thing as critical thinking - a kind of aca–
demic counterculture. True, the teacher is affected by currents from
the outside. But he assimilates them into the business of teaching and
studying literature, so that while the body of teaching and learning
cannot be said to be totally independent of literature itself, it does de–
velop its own rules and intellectual habits. What it does is to isolate
thinking about literature from writing. The best example of this process
-or state of mind - is to be seen in Northrop Frye. Mr. Frye does
not represent the academic unconscious; he set out to construct a para–
digm for the academic approach to literature, freed from the battle–
scarred critical polemics of the literary marketplace. Frye may go too
far for some, but his dismissal of "literary taste" and "opinion," which
includes all non-academic criticism, is essentially a justification of a self–
enclosed intellectual apparatus. But to give Frye his due: he is probably
the best academic critic today, and not always bound by the limitations
of his scheme. Much of the other criticism coming out of the univer–
sities, lacking Frye's architectural vision, is little more than an accom–
plished deployment of current academic assumptions.
Leavis once said that you cannot teach literature without critical
values, that is, without a critical mind. Otherwise you are teaching
someone else's appreciations. And our graduate schools, through their
emphasis on vocational training, standardize and transmit secondhand
