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its failure. The connection I am suggesting is logical as much as it is
chronological, since there was undoubtedly a good deal of overlapping
between and among these connected phases.
In
my view there is some
substantive connection between the goals and failures of the radical
and sometimes absolutist and utopian thinking of some academics
who were involved in the political turmoil of a decade ago and the
radical relativism and anti-idealism of some considerable parts of the
newer academic criticism. The generally gloomy utopianism of a few
years ago has given place to the cheerful nihilism of the more recent
past and present.
In
part, the newer criticism is a reflex away from
preceding conditions, in part it is a reversal of them; but in part it is a
continued expression of a similar bundle of frustrated and aggrieved
impulses. One can make out a portion of this continuity in the
language used by certain adherents of the newer criticism. They speak
of criticism as a liberation, as "a release from the bondage to the past, "
as deploying itself within an intellectual field in which all boundaries
and limits are equally arbitrary and constraining. They sometimes
speak about criticism and literature in the language of domination,
and a number of them refer to their own criticism as " terroristic." I
cannot regard their language entirely as traditional donnish self–
inflation-although there is, perhaps, an element of that in it.
There is another, conceivably connected sense in which this self–
inflationary tendency is connected with what I am suggesting preceded
it.
In
the wake of the defunct radical isms, a new interest in individual
selfhood arose, and gave rise to a by now comically familiar set of
institutions for self-actualization. The inflation of the reader or inter–
preter in recent criticism, the attempted abolition of the author, the
inflation of the text as a function of the reader, and the rendering of
everything into a text to be read by the same reac'.er, seem to me to have
coherent cultural bearings upon the less academic forms of self–
actualization that most of us have been amused by in the culture at
large. I want to remind you that I am speaking of cultural tendencies
and how they work in a broad way upon non-trivial numbers of
people. I am not speaking about the writing alone of several expert
critics, but about the way this writing works upon its audiences and
these in turn upon their own work.
One can also suggest connections-all too easily and readily
perhaps-between the state of criticism and states to be located in the
university and higher education in America in general and the state of
the humanistic disciplines and their methods of inquiry in particular.
Once again one can make out a complex, mediated, and partly inverted
