THE STATE OF CRITICISM*
The Effects of Critical Theories on Practical Criticism,
Cultural Journalism, and Reviewing
WILLIAM PHILLIPS:
The subject of this morning's discussion is the
effects of critical theories on practical criticism, cultural journalism,
and reviewing. The speakers will be Morris Dickstein, whose latest
work is
Gates of Eden,
a study of the culture and politics of the
sixties, Eugene Goodheart, chairman of the English department at
Boston University, and Rosalind Krauss, who teaches at Hunter.
Morris Dickstein
In
an 1891 essay called, simply, "Criticism," Henry James,
who had suffered greatly from the obtuseness of reviewers, posed a
dilemma which bulks ever larger as the territory of criticism expands:
'The bewildered spirit may ask itself, without speedy answer, what is
the function in the life of man of such a periodicity of platitude and
irrelevance? Such a spirit will wonder how the life of man survives it,
and above all , what is much more important, how literature resists
it. ..." For all his exasperation James was no enemy of criticism, not
the artist determined to keep the mysteries of his trade intuitive,
unspoken. The prefaces he later wrote to the New York Edition of his
novels aimed to provide formal ground for the criticism of prose
fiction. But James could not anticipate the forest of signs and symbols
that would grow from his formalist acorn, nor could he imagine that
technical sophistication would one day pose as great a threat to
literature as the philistine platitudes of periodical reviewers. Once long
'Some of the papers and discussion at the Conference on the State of Criticism (held at
Boston University on September 14 and 15, 1979) were printed in the 1980 #3 issue of
Partisan R eview.
