THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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it. Having reconceived the nature of a poem, the New Critic in the
classroom fell back on the minimal elements of learning to read. In the
first place, you insist that the poem is a piece of language. After all, if
teacher and student talk
to
each other, they must have a common
language, the same language as the poem. And second, since we are
talking with each other, we are in one kind of dramatic situation. The
poem is the record of another dramatic situation, and we can use our
social self-awareness to recreate its tones and shifting attitudes. I think
it is no accident that this method flourished just when the students and
admission procedures of the best universities changed after World War
II. The new students were bright and ambitious and were chosen on the
basis of general intellectual ability, validated by verbal and mathemati–
cal aptitude tests.
If
you got into Harvard, you had lots of verbal
aptitude. You might never have read the Bible or Horace; you might
now know a word of Latin; seventeenth-century British history might
be a total blank. But faced with Marvell 's "Horatian Ode on the Re–
turn of Cromwell from Ireland, " considered purely as a piece of lan–
guage crystallizing a dramatic experience, you could find plenty to say
about it.
ThIs approach, centered on reading "the text itself," has frag–
mented. On the one side, critics have liberated the drama of the
classroom. They want to hear from the reader, and to generate in a class
a free conversation not restricted by the objectivity of the text. We have
certain varieties of "reader-oriented" criticism. On the other hand, the
philosophy of language has become steadily more sophisticated, until
we have arrived at deconstruction, the last turn of the self-conscious
rhetorical screw. I do not claim that these two extremes evolved out of
New Criticism. But they emerge into a critical and classroom practice
still dominated by New Criticism, and their wide influence and
acceptance is due, I think, to the fact that they carry the key elements of
New Criticism to a logical, but still recognizable extreme. Because
reader-oriented criticism and deconstruction seem
to
me most likely to
influence the teaching of literature in the next decade or two, and
because both seem to me fundamentally wrong, I want to consider
them, necessarily briefly.
Reader-response criticism, of course, varies widely. Norman Hol–
land and David Bleich draw on psychoanalysis and focus on real
people actually reading. Roland Barthes revels in the private pleasure
of the text and the erotics of reading. Stanley Fish drifts a little, but
seems finally to propose a rhetorically ideal reader, self-conscious but
restricted to the single dimension of the text's temporal sequence, like
Pope's spider, who " lives along the line." Michael Riffaterre cautions
