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PARTISAN REVIEW
that move outward from the text
to
culture and society. The vast
expansion of subsidized academic publishing has fractured the literary
readership into discrete and isolated professional units.
It
is indeed an
irony of the current reign of grand theory that it appeals
to
a sentiment
for unifying the world but is normally expressed in the piecemeal
manner of what C. Wright Mills called "abstracted empiricism,"
demonstrating in essay after essay that theory can discover in a text
whatever it predicted to be already there: a structure, the problematics
of the text 's own composition, an identity theme, a latent content. The
life of the mind has never seemed more fragmented than at the
moment, as dozens of "humanistic" theories compete for attention,
each claiming to be
the
synthesis we've all been waiting for.
The key to the present situation in criticism, if we have to single
one out, lies in its institutional life, for criticism not only exists
in
the
academy but is decidedly
of
it as well. Yet of the major critical realists
of recent generations, few were creatures of the university. They have
been, by and large, writers first and, if they have had university
connections, teachers second. With the exception of those New York
intellectuals who established a base of operations at Columbia Univer–
sity in the 1930s and after-Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, Jacques
Barzun , F.W. Dupee, and Richard Chase-the writers in and about the
Partisan Review
circle in its heyday entered the university largely as an
expedient, to support their careers as writers. They used the academy as
a writer's colony with certain housekeeping duties. They did not seek
to spread their influence by "turning out" graduate students. The
influence they wielded through their writing was, by and large, what
they wanted, but as the power of the little magazines for which they
wrote began to wane, they sometimes discovered themselves left high
and dry in their academic offices, alien dignitaries in a culture which
honored their past achievements in the way that America honors the
Indian and the buffalo. They became conspicuous appendages to their
institu tions, in tellectuals-in-residence.
There are many reasons why the university has not always proven
to be a happy environment for the generalist of ideas . His "methodol–
ogy," such as it is, is likely
to
be a compound of intuition, sympathy,
and a certain kind of social experience that has brought him into
contact early in life with both hardship and books, social dilemmas
and social ideas. His attitude toward education is likely to be passion–
ate but unsystematic. His brand of learning does not always amount to
a curriculum. In touch with the spirit of ideas and the best minds of his
generation , he is nevertheless unlikely to have mastered the bibliogra-
