THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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Hebraic culture on which Western European civilization itself rests.
Such a creative merging of traditions cannot be planned or anticipated.
Nor is it inevitable or automatic: it would be easy
to
imagine the
liquidation of all traditions, and a civilization based essentially on
scientific technology and "mass," or more accurately, "consumer"
culture. This is a momentous and decisive question for teachers of
literature in the United States. The answer does not lie either in
eclecticism, nor in the cultural equivalent of ethnic neighborhoods.
Each of us will doubtless need to become immersed in non-Western
culture. But if we find an answer, it will come from a deep and
authentic grasp of our own cultural situation and tradition and of the
possibilities they open.
Alan Trachtenberg
Donald Marshall poses a question which in its apparent
simplicity seems to gather to itself all the pathos of a most peculiar
profession: "How do you talk about literature in a classroom?" To
profess a desire for such talk-and by talk he clearly means the give–
and-take of conversation-is already to confess a double vulnerability:
to place oneself aslant two uncertainties, what is called "literature," let
us say the "text," and the classroom: itself only an empty form with a
shifting, indeterminate content. And
to
assume this ambiguous
posture-ambiguous in that no inner necessity flows from ei ther
literary text or classroom that they conjoin-for the sake of achieving a
third entity, a talk, a conversation, a give-and-take, in which "the
teacher might also learn something."
This third entity, the desired product of the engagement between
"text" and "classroom" mediated by "teacher," is surely the most
problematic goal of any in the higher reaches of the higher learning in
America. Is it "knowledge" that one wishes to achieve by "talk about
literature in a classroom?" Knowledge of what (assuming that the verb
to know is a vacant formalism without an object)? The literary text?
And what precisely do we mean by
knowing
a text? Or is it "literature"
as such, an ideal form possessed by all texts that claim" literary" as a
definitive adjective? But how is such a claim filed, in what office of
final authority? And can we begin
to
grasp the literary without
grasping at the same time its presumed opposite, the nonliterary, the
