394
PARTISAN REVIEW
LAWRENCE GRAVER: But I think it would have been very hard to
predict-and I was only a year old then-the effect of New Criti–
cism on reading in general in 1932, because, as you correctly say, it
started out as a theoretical movement.
It
then became a tool for
doing a particular job that needed to be done. The new critical
techniques happened
to
fit very nicely, and they had extraordinarily
important contributions to make to the teaching of reading. Of
course, many of the current attacks on the new critics and their
methods are well founded, but I think there's been a lot of
misrepresentation about the role of history in new criticism, about
the whole issue of science, and I think those are some of the issues I
would like to hear debated. My sense of your paper is that you were
making conclusive statements about the nature and direction of
some tendencies in contemporary criticism which seemed to me
either misconstructions or premature conclusions.
STEVEN MARCUS: I would like to make two comments, one of them on a
statement that Lawrence Graver made and William Phillips picked
up, which has
to
do with the proliferation of academic journals of
literary criticism being somehow a sign of the vitality of, the life of,
criticism in the United States. I'm afraid that is really not a convinc–
ing argument, since it seems to me from what I know that the
proliferation of academic journals is as much a function of the
economics of university presses as it is of any critical activity. And
one finds in recent years an equivalent proliferation in every other
discipline, many of which are moribund if not torpid. What aca–
demic presses discovered was that once you set up a publication
system for journals, it costs very little money
to
keep producing new
journals in sufficient numbers to break even. So it's no great burden
economically upon academic presses
to
turn out one more journal,
and I don't think that in the first instance these new journals have
anything
to
do with the vitality of literary criticism. One would have
to demonstrate it from some other sector, it seems to me.
LAWRENCE GRAVER: A quick parenthesis. I was talking about the
proliferation of critical journals as a sign of diversity, but I thought
at the end I talked about it as clearly an ambivalent matter which one
can say is very much the source of our troubles. I related it to the
theme of the difficulty of discourse, that one of the reasons we find it
so difficult to talk to one another is that we're reading different
journals. Most people who have been involved in discussions of
contemporary criticism have been struck by the problem of the
difficulty of discourse. We do not talk well about our situation and
our problem in discussions of this kind.
