Steven Marcus
COMMENT ON THE STATE OF CRITICISM
My response to William Phillips's paper,· like my response
to the situation that it refers to, describes, and tries to appraise, is
uneasy. It is impossible to render adequately so complex a set of
realities in a simple short account. And, in fact, no one account, short
or long, known to me is adequate to the set of circumstances that he,
and this meeting, undertake to address.
Colleagues from the outside, from other disciplines, tend
to
think
that we have gone mad; others suggest that there has always been
something suicidal in the undertaking of literary criticism and express
themselves as not being surprised that we have come to what they
perceive as our present confounded state of affairs. I take such friendly
comments as truly external, for they fail to see the affiliations among
what has been happening in literary criticism, where it comes from in
our culture and society, and how it is connected with other develop–
ments. Any generalizations on these matters are bound to include some
things and persons and exclude others-no single statement or descrip–
tion can cover or make consistent such a multitude of expressions; yet
one has no alternative but to try to begin somewhere and hope that
more is included than is left out.
My own partly arbitrary choice is to begin provincially, that is
to
say in our own set of provinces. Although the approximate intellectual
origins of the changes that we are discussing lie largely in France (and
in some degree behind that in Czechoslovakia and Russia), I want for
the moment to direct attention to the intellectual and cultural grounds
here that were prepared to receive and cultivate these influences. I see
an intervening moment
(in
the Hegelian sense) between the New
Criticism in its most general, institutional sense and the partial
installation as its successor in the American academic literary world of
one form or another of structuralism. That intervening moment, in my
judgment, is to be located in the radicalism of the late 1960s and early
1970s within the University-with its advent and rapid rise, and with
·See
Partisan R eview
#3, 1980.
