440
PARTISAN REVIEW
Roger Shattuck
Since I concur in great part with what Donald Marshall
writes in his essay on the teaching of hterature, I shall begin by
reaffirming his most telling ideas in the form of a summary.
The New Criticism of the forties and fifties grew out of a desire to
find a literary pedagogy that would allow teacher and students
to
discuss a work with sustained attention
to
"the text itself." According
to
Donald Marshall, this striving toward some "public objectivity of
meaning" has been fragmented by two new critical schools. Reader–
response theory, at least in its subjective-empiricist version, treats
literature as a kind of fodder to be assimilated and processed by the
reader's ego into his " identity theme." This quasi-therapeutic function
displaces objective study; discussion may lead
to
a form of low-grade
consensus, but that consensus does not take precedence over the
"seeming certitude of private experience." Deconstruction, the other
approach Donald Marshall criticizes, dissolves the text into an open or
undetermined verbal free-for-all whose contradictions cannot be con–
strued in order
to
yield a firm meaning or a consistent authorial self. In
several understated and often ironic passages,
Donal~
Marshall ex–
presses his belief that both approaches undermine the proper teaching
of literature. The first appea ls ultimately to subjective and inaccessible
processes; the second capitulates to an exaggerated sense of the slipperi–
ness of language and of self.
In the face of these two attacks on any shared or potentially
objective meaning, Donald Marshall affirms four desiderata in both
teacher and student: an "evidentiary cast of mind" respecting facts
enough to discriminate carefully among them; cultivation of the
memory as a form of intelligence and as an extension of the self;
"committed thinking" capable of using rational argument and evi–
dence both
to
reach and
to
defend an intellectual position; and the
increased use of writing as a means of studying literature.
Donald Marshall then devotes several pages
to
the doubts and
conflicts that have affected his teaching since the early seventies, and to
a picture of the profession today as uncertain and in disarray. Only
general education and the teaching of writing seem to hold firm while
the study of literature comes under attack from within and (rom
without.
The final pages describe another set of desiderata in the teacher of
literature. He shou ld be willing
to
identify himself with "larger
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