WINTER 72
The Cultural Crisis.
George
Levine's piece in
this
issue
is
one
of the best - certainly one of the sanest - I've seen about the confused
state of the "profession of literature," which includes both criticism and
teaching. Even if he has no ready answers, Levine is still no worse off
than
the rest of us, and more honest than most. But there are some
aspects of the situation he does not go into which I think might throw
some light on our dilemma.
For one thing, as I've suggested before, teaching and critical
think–
ing
are
not the same thing, though they do overlap, particularly today
when so many critics also teach. As for the problem of what to teach
and how it relates to students' lives,
it
has been with us for a long time,
and has only been accentuated and dramatized recently by radical
students and blacks who sloganized their dissatisfactions into the notion
of relevance. Ever since the schools became instruments of mass edu–
cation, both teacher and student have been caught in the confusion
between professional, vocational and general education; and they have
constantly shuttled between the most antiquated and the most new–
fangled ideas of the classroom. When the impressionable student and
the academic teacher want to challenge the educational system, they
usually turn to the most permissive theories of the moment.
Today the profession of literature in the schools is being ques–
tioned most aggressively by those under the influence of the "counter–
culture." But the counterculture, since
it
includes almost everything
that sees itself as opposed to the "established" culture, has no definite
shape
or content, or any clear idea of what is living and what is dead
in
our attitudes to writing and teaching. Hence criticism from the
side of the "counterculture" tends to polarize the schools by encourag–
ing
half-baked experiments and by stiffening the resistence of the aca–
demic diehards to any kind of change.
Nor is the idea of a counterculture new. In the past there have
been several countercultures, whose features have been less blurred
than the current all-inclusive version. The most distinctive was the
modernist movement, and it was not
SO
long ago that figures like
Joyce, Eliot, Kafka constituted an avant-garde,
in
opposition to the
standard literary diet of the schools and the popular media. And
be–
cause it had a unique sensibility and sense of direction - because it
was not just vaguely dissident - this was a counterculture that was able
to change the course of modern writing. Then, too, the university gen–
erated a kind of counterculture, arising from an academic, detached
punuit of
knowl~dge
in various disciplines. Its effect, obviously, was to
create certain ideals of method and scholarship. And, more broadly, the
various phases of the radical movement in the past, much like the
