THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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monly exemplifies the predicament of the place, and the folklore of
literary teaching.
It
is often a place of mutual, and thus incomplete and
unresolved, acculturation. Discrepancy seems typical between institu–
tional definition and student expectation on one hand, and a teacher 's
perception of his own necessities. "He must use whatever authority he
may possess to say whether or not a work is true; and if not, why not;
and if so, why so. He can do so only at considerable cost to his privacy."
Add to this inner demand an eroding public sense of the authority of
literature, of criticism-as Eugene Goodheart has argued recently–
and a mutually frustrating predicament replaces the inaugurating
difference of the ideal classroom. Classroom, even in the higher
learning, often resembles a battlefield of blind struggle sublimated in a
decorum of lectures, examinations, final grades.
There seems no clear route out of this impasse-surely curricular
reform has abundantly manifest its own exasperating futility. But it
seems commonplace that any talking about literature in the classroom
that takes itself seriously should confront two features of its own
enterprise; one, it should knowingly include in its critical theory at
least a descriptive sociology of its own occasion, its own place within
the institutional structures of the higher learning; and two, it should
consider the social character of its own ends. We resist, and must, and
must even more forcefully than we have, any instrumental view of
literature, of the cultural tradition in general. But if we resist only on
behalf of honorific values of pure contemplation, then we have already
surrendered the field of culture to those forces that properly worry
Donald Marshall; of consumerism. Talking about literature is at least
talking about discourse antithetical to the normal, everyday environ–
ment of students and of teachers. Can such classroom talk translate into
alternative, adversary public discourse? Not easily, nor without media–
tions that have yet to be invented. But we might keep before us the
translation of Arnold's vision of the potency of criticism by the
American literary radical, Randolph Bourne, who in an essay in 1915
on "Medievalism in Our Colleges" wrote: "The · turning of these
cultural studies into power is to be the exact measure of our growing
conviction that ideas and knowledge about social relations and human
institutions are
to
count as urgently in our struggle with the future as
any mathematical or mechanical formulas did in the development of
our present." Can we think about talking about literature in the
classroom, finally, without at once thinking about the various social
futures that await our acquiescence or our making?
