Richard Poirier
A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY:
LITERATURE AND THE HUMANITIES
No one can claim to have been "right" over the past decade
on the issues of education, literary studies, popular culture, and the
relation of these
to
the society we live in. Within the last decade,
anyone with a conscience ought to have hoped and worked and agi–
tated for a revision of education and a redefinition of culture in the
interests of human needs and hopes which everyone knows to have
been neglected. And within the present decade anyone with a con–
science needs to recognize that the effort has failed.
It
failed because it
defined itself within the very traditions it should have more radically
and toughmindedly assessed and attacked.
The sixties offered a great historical opportunity.
It
was one of
those rare periods when certain minorities came at last to make a
demand upon culture, and had the demand been properly re–
sponded to and then properly directed, our sense of what culture is
capable of including might well have been enormously enriched.
Minorities of course means blacks, it also means youths-since any
generation demanding recognition for youth culture (a rare thing
ever to have happened) was, as it passed. on into maturity, a very
small minority indeed. Minorities also means . women who look
upon themselves as having been historically repressed.
It
means
that element in humanity, be it "feminine," or "black," or "young,"
which feels that ·it has not sufficiently registered its presence on the
dominant tempo and quality of our national life. Minorities also
means those areas of popular culture, especially in film, music,
dance, even sports, which, even while they have always demanded
much of our attention, have gotten very little of our powers of
analysis or articulate appreciation, so little, that they have as yet not
been sufficiently accounted for in our characterizations of what we
