LITERATURE AND THE ACADEMY
I think
Partisan Review
is in a unique position to conduct
the kind of conference we are having today, even though no one
would have thought when
Partisan Review
was young and brash that in
May 1974 we would be sitting here solemnly discussing the fate of the
humanities. Everyone assumed we had what Lionel Trilling has called
an adversary role in the culture. But we knew then that this was only
partly true and only in a specialized sense. What I think we were
doing was not only to represent the best of the new, which was often
in an adversary relation to the old, but to find the proper
relation~r
continuity-between the two, in order to create a live sense of the
present and to recreate a usable past.
Today our aims are different, and perhaps because they are less
clear-cut, they cause the wardens of the status quo to regard us as a
wild, swinging magazine, and the really wild swingers
to
look at us as a
pillar of the establishment. But, even if both are wrong, the fact is that
the role of
PR
has changed. When
PR
was young it was a
spokesman
for
what it thought was the best of the new writing and thinking, and even
though we were not contemptuous of the idea of tradition, we were
clearly partisans of the new, of the tradition of the new, as Harold
Rosenberg put it. And we had a very specific idea of the new; it was a
fusion of modernist sensibility and radical consciousness. Today,
however, having reached the age of mellowness and wisdom, the
magazine cannot authentically be the spokesman for the new move–
ments and the new ideas, however discriminating we might be in
selecting them. There is nothing so phony and so funny as an older
writer-<>r magazine-putting on the uniform of youth. So while we
have the important function of representing what we think is the best
of the new, we cannot
be
its spokesman, its partisans as against the
official or established culture. We are really in the role of mediators,
NOTE: These remarks
by
William Phillips were the introductory statement at
Partisan
Review's
Rockefeller Conference.
