STATE OF CRITICISM
11
It doesn't take many months of graduate school to disabuse the
novice of these prospective ecstasies. The routines of professionalism
and apprenticeship, combined with the pseudoscientific methods of
positivist scholarship, quickly make an interest in ideas a hindrance, if
not an irrelevance, and turn affective intensities into a distracting
luxury. A personal stake in books must give way to a personal stake in
one's career, and to a casual facility masquerading as authority. Today
the graduate study of English is closing down shop, a casualty of the
job market, but the best that could be said about it fifteen years ago,
when it was thriving, was that a really deep love of literature
might
survive it, though it could not expect much encouragement. When the
word literature is used in graduate school, it usually refers not to the
work of art but to the body of writing that has been secreted around it,
like the Biblical glosses which, sentence by sentence, make up the
edifice of the true church.
I needn 't go into the ways that received opimon is sanctified and
institutionalized. In any case, by the early sixties traditional
s~olar
ship was on the defensive; the spirit of practical criticism, with its
emphasis on the text itself, had made serious inroads even into such
bastions as the scholarly journals and the major graduate departments.
Yale, where I was a graduate student, had long been the redoubt of a
muted and academicized version of the New Criticism, which com–
bined a focus on literature itself with a proper respect for what
everyone else had said about it. But the New Criticism was already a
tired movement, a toothless lion, well past old insurgencies. It had
made its peace with the old scholarship, whose occasional value it
acknowledged.
Inter~· retation
and critical thinking had by then a,c–
quired some status and respect in graduate study. Bm the New
Criticism itself was not interested in ideas, which it considered a little
extrinsic to the literary work, and it showed relatively little interest in
theory, except as an afterthought to justify its procedures of close
reading.
There is a body of New Critical theory on such matters as organic
form, the intentional fallacy, image and metaphor, and so on, but it
followed on the heels of the movement's practical work. The New
Criticism spread its influence more through textbooks like
Under–
standing Poetry
than through much later theoretical polemics like
William Wimsatt's
The Verbal Icon.
In Cleanth Brooks's
The Well
Wrought Urn
the theoretical chapters seem very much like a postscript
to
the exegesis of individual poems, and by the time of Rene Wellek
and Austin Warren's
Theory of Literature
the battle was essentially
