526
RICHARD POIRIER
conspicuous consequence in all cases has been if anything regressive.
The past few years have witnessed not only a failure of efforts
to
make
literature serve something like Black Studies, but a deterioration in
the quality of literary study itself under the pressure of its having to
become, in packaged and tiresome ways, so readily available and topi–
cal. The good reasons why literature and literary study have come
to
count for less are now inseparable from the bad reasons. Leaders in
the movement for the study of popular culture and minority culture
have chosen to be intimidated by the political constituencies they rep–
resent as well as by the academic ones they pretend to oppose. As a
result they have failed to serve either of them well and have patronized
both. Instead of insisting on the special difficulty of their
task-which was well beyond the difficulties of the kind of literary
studies pedagogically in vogue during the fifties and sixties-they
chose to make literary studies the focus of popular culture and minor–
ity culture and in consequence had to adulterate and simplify all of
them. Not having asked any of the right and complicated questions
about the new media, these enthusiasts could scarcely be expected to
ask the right and complicated questions about literature. There has
been a retreat from the frontiers at which inquiry might have started,
and there is now going on a mere scavenger hunt of literary
sociologizing, psychologizing, politicizing, and the collecting of motifs
and cypes.
The agitations in the late sixties did not come to much of any–
thing, but the targets-the conventional form of English Studies and
the hierarchies of the profession-were the right ones. They remain,
now, in the self-satisfactions of their survival, the right targets still. In
fact, the failure of the radical movement is that it chose to exploit and
to be exploited by the established economy of literary studies; it al–
lowed itself
to
do nothing more than continue in the pattern of infla–
tion which has always characterized literary studies in the United
States . It is important to recognize this as part of a larger recognition,
namely that literary studies has very few traditions to return to, with
the profitable limits these would imply. This does not mean that liter–
ary studies has been without productive and healthy periods-like the
great scholarly achievements of the thirties and forties and the new
critical response which accompanied and followed it-but these were
meant to correct historical inadequacies. Once having fulfilled their
