THE STATE OF CRITICISM
387
English curriculum which might look in outline something like this:
a majority of courses blending close reading of a New Critical kind
with historical analysis emphasizing literary, political, philosophical,
and social questions; American studies courses again with divergent
critical methods; courses in Afro-American literature; other courses
looking at literature from a Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist,
phenomenological, or anthropological perspective; some courses in
film and popular culture; and courses reflecting the methods of
scholars and critics who may now disavow the label "structuralist"
but who work in areas at least conventionally perceived to be linked
to structuralism: linguistics, reader-response criticism, semiotics, and
so on.
My third related point is that despite the fact that there is a great
deal of pedestrian, self-serving, trivializing, and useless criticism,
there has also been an exceptionally large number of impressive and
influential books and essays thatare not easily classifiable by general–
izations, about practical versus theoretical criticism, or by "literary
school" -works by critics who are subtle, assimilative, and multi–
disciplinary. Here is a scattering of examples-not meant to be my (or
anybody else's) "top ten," but works and critics chosen to illustrate
the fact that attention to the immediacy of poems, novels, and plays
often goes together with profound knowledge of literary and cultural
history, theory, and methodology, and certainly judgment and value.
(From an overly developed sense of decorum, I am excluding the work
of participants in the conference lest
PR
be interpreted too singularly
in its colloquial sense. But I 'm sure you will intuit their relevance.)
Christopher Ricks's books on Milton, Tennyson, and Keats (and
his hundreds of essays and reviews written for many audiences);
Donald Davie's struggles with Pound and his writings on eighteenth–
century and contemporary poetry; GL. Barber on Shakespeare;
Wayne Booth on the rhetoric of fiction and irony; Helen Vendler on
Stevens, Yeats, Herbert, and recent poetry; Barbara Hardy on
nineteenth-century fiction; Richard Poirier and Leo Marx with
intricate, very different perspectives on American books and culture;
Ian Watt's
The Rise of the Novel;
Hugh Kenner on Joyce, Eliot,
Beckett, and modernism; M.H. Abrams's
Mirror and the Lamp
and
Natural Supernaturalism;
Robert Pinsky's
The Situation of Poetry;
recent criticism on literature written by women and blacks (such as
Elaine Showalter's
A Literature of Their Own,
the essays of Ellison,
Baldwin, and many younger, lesser-known critics). And I could en–
large this list several times over with little difficulty.
