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RICHARD POIRIER
evermore, in the precise sense of the term, grotesque. Richard
Ohmann, in tracing the historical development of English depart–
ments, has contributed importantly to our understanding of this his–
torical development. By offering certain public services and fulfilling
certain clear utilitarian functions the profession has moved, stage by
stage, into its present bloated affiuence. Thus the old rhetoric and
speech departments of the early part of the century, devoted to teach–
ing people how to speak and write clearly-an enormously profitable
business in a multi-racial country devoted to mass education--created
the financial resources necessary for funding the great period of tex–
tual scholarship. The very success of this activity, perhaps as close to a
measurable discipline as the profession has ever come, removed most
of the need for its continuance in kind. On the way it managed also to
assemble both the textual (and financial) resources necessary to such
later developments as studies in the history of ideas and the
emergence of appreciation and interpretation as the central activity of
English Studies up to the present time. Of course this evolution can–
not be as neatly compartmentalized as my description of it necessi–
tates. What I've described as steps were at certain moments really
simultaneous movements. Early on, however, each of these activities
offered a practical justification for itself, pretended to answer a dem–
onstrable need.
From this point of view the period that saw the rapid growth of
interpretive appreciation was notably interesting. The problem was
simply this: how does appreciation or interpretation justify itself in
the way composition or speech or textual scholarship or intellectual
history had so much more easily managed to do? How could it claim
any of their utilitarian function and thereby earn the public and
economic support needed for further growth? In the response to this
problem lies much of our present difficulty. Academic purveyors of
appreciation had inevitably to make the claim that literature was of
enormous public importance, that the study or reading of it provided
the opportunity for a comprehensive critique of society and of ideas
about it. Such an assumption might properly induce caution rather
than exhilaration. It is an assumption not that literary studies should
have fostered but that it might more properly have tried to dispel-4)r
at the very least to chasten.
At this point the centrality of Lionel Trilling becomes apparent.
