PARTISAN REVIEW
535
he shows us how extremely difficult it is to do so, even under the best
circumstances.
If
he teaches us lessons, his work also constitutes a
warning, that to do his sort of thing in America and with American or
contemporary materials or to do his sort of thing with Eng–
lish materials in American classrooms is
alt~gether
more stren–
uous than anything Leavis himself shows us how to do. Here Trill–
ing's cautions are precisely directed to our special situation.
It
is immea–
surably more difficult, that is, now and in America than it ever was for
Leavis then and in England to locate any kinds of connection between
literature and life, literature and social history, literature and culture,
which will be revealing about both.
What is needed, i10w and in America, is a pedagogical method
which induces the application to contemporary phenomena of some
of Leavis's insistent rigor about expression and, combined with that,
induces some of Trilling's insistence on the cultural burden that must
be carried by anyone proposing to use literary forms, regardless of
whether the person using them is black or white, a woman or a man.
Without this pedagogical method-and I realize the disrepute of both
the word "pedagogy" and the word "method"-the profession will
continue to rely on superficially implemented Arnoldian formulas
about the relation of literature to life and history. If that is the case,
then there is no way in which the profession of English can resist
proposed and attenuating expansions of English Studies into such
areas as Black Studies or Women's Studies or sexism generally. At
present, the only possible ground for opposing such expansion must
be, to put the matter bluntly, class, -racial, or sexual discrimination.
Consider for example a black student of English who has been edu–
cated to believe, as almost all of us have been, in the formula that
literature is a criticism of life, a black student who, under the stimulus
of the Black Movement has also come to recognize that literature in
the classical English curriculum shows no significant concern for the
life of his people. Consider further that this student knows (as
everyone does know) that graduate seminars have been given over the
years devoted entirely to quite minor and second or third rate figures
in English and American literature and that the excuses for these
courses have rested on their alleged historical importance. Then con–
sider this black student's reaction when informed, probably by the
chairman who approved or even gave these courses, that the poet
