THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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irrelevant, and perhaps pernicious-continental drift; and they will
characterize my request for exposition as naive, too liberal, or per–
missive. Some will say that the differences in assumptions, aims, and
procedures of many of the contesting critics are so profound that the
idea of a continued, fruitful discussion is a chimera. Still
more
criticism of criticism has the paradoxical effect of validating the
enterprise at the same time that it isolates it. And someone is sure to
dismiss my last points with a phrase I saw in print for the first time
recently: "mere common sense."
There are a lot of problems here, not the least of which is
whether we can agree on how and at what point it would be most
useful to begin talking about them.
BARBARA ROSECRANCE: We have limited time, but we'd like to go on
for another half hour to allow William Phillips to respond and the
commentator to counter-respond.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Well, I made some notes as Lawrence Graver was
talking, and, as you might expect, on the points he agreed with me,
I agreed with him, and on the points he disagreed with me, I
disagreed with him. He made an appeal to common sense-but I
thought that was what I was doing! Common sense is vague
enough to be appealed to by people on different sides of the fence.
Certain types of analysis seem to me contrary to what might be
called either common sense or normal reading. Certain types of
exegesis and critical literary study have changed the normal mode
of reading. Look into your own experience and you realize that
when you were a student studying a text or when you were teaching
a text, that is not the way you read a book or a text, so there has
been a kind of revolution in reading. Now it could be argued that
this revolution in reading is for the better. But I do not think it is.
Lawrence Graver also said that the situation is more complex
than I presented it. It always is. Obviously there are exceptions and
currents I did not include. What I tried to do, though, is draw the
main lines of critical thinking in the modern period. That meant
leaving a lot of things out, leaving a lot of people out. The
question is whether these main lines are illuminating or not.
Obviously, I think they are. Some of the exceptions that Lawrence
Graver mentions seem to me to demonstrate my view rather than
his. And just to mention the proliterauon at criticism and of
