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journals in this period seems to me not to prove anything, except
that it might be a sign of confusion and the availability of funds.
Critical Inquiry,
for example, prints highly specialized theoretical
criticism, of the kind that is at issue in this discussion. I didn't go
into Fish and Bloom, because they exemplify what I have been
criticizing. Fish is a highly theore tical critic. He started out as a
textual critic, but he 's been shifting more and more to the position
that we've roughly characterized as structuralist.
I also tried to make clear that there is no all-inclusive defini–
tion of structuralism. Roland Barthes says that structuralism is not
an ideology; it's not a philosophy; it's a method; it's a way of
looking at things, used differently by different people. Geoffrey
Hartman regards Frye as an early structuralist, a precursor of
structuralism. Certainly he's an example of the attempt to scienticize
literature, that is, to develop scientific categories. Frye indicated that
he was not interested in literary judgment. He said tha t literary
judgment belongs to the history of taste, not to the history of
criticism, and that he was trying to develop a theoretical approach
based on classifications and categories of literature. There are many
tendencies in modern criticism, but we're dealing with the central
ones.
Some years ago I read a psychoanalytic study of
Death of a
Salesman,
in which all the complex machinery of psychoanalytic
and literary criticism was trained on the study of this play.
It
never
seems to have occurred to the writer of this piece, or perhaps to many
of the readers, that
Death of a Salesman
was an inferior work and
that the writer was using the kind of language, the tone, the appeals
to our sense of language and our sense of taste, to our experience in
reading literature, in talking about
Death of a Salesman,
that one
might use for the greatest literary works. Similarly, in some of the
new criticism, the popular James Bond stories are analyzed with the
high-powered methodology of sturcturalism. The method used to
talk about them is precisely the same method that could be used to
talk about Proust or Shakespeare or Rilke. Now what I'm suggesting
is that one's tone and language have to be consonant with one's
judgments. Otherwise, one is using a neutral method of analysis that
can apply to any work. Clement Greenberg, for example, was
judging the abstract expressionists at the same time that he was
developing a code of critical terms and categories, and there was a
consonance of the two.
LAWRENCE GRAVER : In William Phillips 's response to me he mentioned
my evoking common sense. I thought the theme of m y commentary
