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behind them. Each also fosters its own style of writing badly as a sign
of initiation.
It
is considerably easier to train students to write bad
sentences of a ·particular, monotonous sort than
to
teach the difficult
craft of style. Imagine trying to teach a class of graduate students to
write-or to think-like Harold Rosenberg, and the appeal of the
vague and portentous as a group style becomes immediately obvious.
In
any event, critics who operate exclusively in cenacles with no access
to
any larger marketplace of ideas and no particular desire
to
enter one
have less need of style than of emblems of affiliation.
What we are witnessing presently is the hierarchy of intellect in
action and an example of how ideas percolate down, like drip coffee,
from the centers of influence in the major private universities.
If
the
focus of semiotics and its affiliate disciplines were Montclair State
College or Queens College, we'd hear precious little about it. A related
feature of the social structure of "English" is its domination by a class
of gentlemen scholars who ruled the profession largely without chal–
lenge until after the Second World War, when scholars of immigrant,
working-class origin, especially Jews and Irishmen, gained admission
and began to challenge certain prevailing notions of how the affairs of
the mind are conducted. Not least among the unwritten laws they
successfully overthrew was the notion that the exclusive subject of
English is the literary history of England. Another is that learning and
social class are closely linked, that one either enters English as a
gentleman or, through exposure to the great documents of literature
from
Piers Plowman
through
Paradise Lost,
learns to act the part. (So
long as you earned a living at your job, however, you were just acting.)
But despite this infiltration of alien elements, the mandarin class is still
the backbone of the tenured English faculty in many major universi–
ties, and continues to set the tone of the profession. The insurgent edge
of critical theory, I have been led
to
understand, has something to do
with a belated revolt in certain institutions against the entrenched
power of the old guard for whom English is still a realm of exclusive
privilege. One would like to know more about these sentiments of
rebellion among the younger scholars who have turned to theory, as
well as about the degree to which they have taken on the colors of the
enemy, adopting a mandarin exclusiveness of their own.
I am persuaded that the essential drama in the culture of academic
literary study today is that of disaffected elements gathering force in
sanctuaries outside departments of English-in French and compara–
tive literature departments, writing programs, humanities centers-in
an effort to outflank them as one outflanks a superior force that cannot
