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passionately held belief that most current literary theorists are often
bad influences who draw us away from what he calls "the medium of
literature" and humane values. I realize, of course, that his paper is a
set of reflections-obviously not a survey, not meant to be
systematic-but nonetheless I think it distorts a number of historical
facts and is questionable in many matters of interpretation.
My major objections are to the connected series of images of two
streams and several schools, and of a widening gap between them; of
professional amateurs prevailing in the quarterlies and mass maga–
zines, and of theory-oriented experts little concerned with history,
value, and judgment dominating literary studies in the universities
(with New Criticism now giving way to, or merging with a rising
structuralist tide). And if I had more time I would also want to
question William Phillips's description of what New Criticism was
and what structuralist criticism (if anything now exists in this
country that can usefully be called by that name) is actually like.
When I think about the critical scene in recent years, I do not see
two streams and a widening gap, but something more opaque and
shifting (often bewilderingly so)-a much messier scene uncommonly
resistant to mapping.
First of all I see a crisscrossing at every point and level: an
extraordinary proliferation of critical journals (many of them, such as
The New York Review of Books, New Literary History, Critical
Inquiry, Diacritics, Glyph,
and so on, less than twenty years old); and
many of the same fine critics writing for nearly all of them, and
working in and out (mostly in) the universities. Frank Kermode is
likely to appear in
The Review of English Studies, New Statesman,
Critical Inquiry,
the mass Sunday papers in England and America,
and scores of other publications across the spectrum of readership.
Northrop Frye has published dozens of books and essays for different
audiences, appears on TV, edits textbooks for grade schools
and
the
universities. And I'm sure you could easily extend the list with many
examples of your own.
Second: I do not see in this country any ruling critical school but
rather a great variety of methods and approaches; very few cardinals
and certainly no pope; but instead many fiercely independent, polem–
ical critics, several of whom often describe themselves as revisionists
or schismatics, going "bey<;md" something (exactly what is being
revised, broken up, or being gone beyond will be coming up again
and again). This variety is reflected not only in the weeklies, quarter–
lies, and learned journals, but in a typical American university
