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stumble about until they discover that there is no way of coping with
the discourse of a Derrida or his American fellows except by making
claims just as absolute as theirs. No wonder that a community of
judging selves, able to understand and appraise each other's judg–
ments, has become unthinkable for most of these young scholars. This
impulse to isolate literature from individuals and to rob the imagina–
tion of its power to make alternative proposals about the character of
human affairs, in short, to impoverish our sense of ourselves as actors
on a human scene, appears to be a more energetic version of the
impulses which foster contemporary religious movements. These often
assume a likeness to a cocoon embracing the whole world, a self–
sustaining context for those no longer able to bear the pressures of the
times.
The academy, or that segment of it represented by the imposing
list of scholars and critics on the board of
Critical Inquiry,
seems quite
unprepared to counter these massive appropriations of literature for
various forms of supraterrestrial play by hidden godlings. Those who
write for the magazine appear to assume that the search for a sufficient
method of inquiry need not involve any awareness of the distinctive
character of those who pursue it. The exchange between Wayne Booth
and Meyer Abrams in the spring 1976 issue is a good example.
Booth, one of the most learned and alert of American commenta–
tors on the methods and procedures of literary inquiry, begins the
discussion in an engaging way by proposing to discover why it is that
he finds himself so completely persuaded by Abrams 's book
Natural
Supernaturalism.
I will try to suggest what the book enforces for those
who accept its argument.
It is more than a major piece of literary history; it gives the
romantic movement a position it has not heretofore had in the English–
speaking world. Abrams gives a persuasive account of the traits
common to the movement in Germany and England, and of its
continuity with the Quistian and classical past. Without reducing
Hegel as philosopher or Wordsworth as poet, Abrams succeeds in
making the work of those engaged in the effort to comprehend the
meaning of the fail UTe of the French Revol ution to realize their hopes,
definitive of important aspects of nineteenth-century literature and of
leading strands in nineteenth-century thought. What is most striking
in the light of what has been said here of the kind of power individual
critics are now covertly assuming, is that the romantics are not
proclaiming the need for a total change in our apprehension of the
