THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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sympathetic to the points made by the three speakers, I think an
important but side issue was raised by all of them. It is the dilemma,
the kind of pitfalls that you get into in the swing away from
concentration on text. And regardless of how you approach the
text-that is New Criticism, structuralist criticism-often the swing
away from textual criticism and the teaching of texts in the school
lands us on the opposite pole where we begin
to
cope with the
problems of morality or politics in the classroom. I'm limiting
myself to teaching now, not to criticism, which is precisely what
textualists and structuralists have been trying to get away from. But
this is another pitfall.
It
does not seem to me that those of us who
teach English, teach literature-I'm going to make this statement
schematic and strong-should be involved in the teaching of moral–
ity, the teaching of politics, the teaching of political attitudes.
In that sense I am going to answer Morris Dickstein's ques tion
in a different way . His ques tion is how can we prepare ourselves, or
what is the preparation for teaching moral issues in the classroom by
English teachers. I would say no preparation. We are not moralists;
we are not equipped to be moralists. And I might even go further and
say that perhaps there 's a danger here in assuming that the teaching
of literature is somehow involved with the teaching of the proper
political attitudes or the proper moral attitudes. In fact, Lionel
Trilling's essay that Alan Trachtenberg quoted seems to me to point
up the contradictions inherent in the whole teaching situation.
Lionel Trilling as usual is quite ambiva lent and ambiguous about
them, and he is saying that we as teachers of English upholding the
traditions of literature, scholarship, humanism, and humane values,
are teaching modernist texts which are subversive of all these
attitudes and va lues. In other words, remember his famous phrase,
"modernism in the streets." We're caught in a contradiction . I would
make an a lternative suggestion, one that would take a lot of time to
develop, and that is that we avoid certain difficulties if we say
to
ourselves that by teaching literature we're teaching students to think
about literature; we 're teaching them as much as we know, as much
as we can explain, about the kind of mind that produces poems,
short stories, critica l essays, and all the genres of criticism. So that in
a sense what they are learning is the essence of a discipline, the
essence of a specific activity, a specific intellectual or imaginative
en terprise.
Now one last point-I think we might touch at some point on
one of the problems behind what we are talking about but which
