Gerald Graff
TEXTUAL LEFTISM
Literary criticism always has a political dimension, but
some critics refuse to see the politics whereas others scarcely see any–
thing else. Thirty years ago, the dominant academic schools of criti–
cism gave scant encouragement to the treatment of literature from a
political point of view. That may have been odd, in view of the read–
iness of prominent critics to assume political stances in their work -
one thinks of Eliot's royalism, Richards's liberalism, and the South–
ern critics' agrarian conservatism. One can see now, if one couldn't
then, that the very idea of literature as an "organic" and "autono–
mous" entity, closed off in an esthetic sphere from doctrinaire politi–
cal commitments, was deeply shaped by political attitudes, that it
arose in response to the social cataclysms of the mid–
twentieth century. Yet at the time, critics were able to feel that the
autonomous status of literature conferred on it an independence
from political judgments. The distinction between the "intrinsic"
and the "extrinsic" approach to literature, worked out most thor–
oughly in Wellek and Warren's
Theory
oj
Literature
(first ed., 1948),
permitted the argument that even though literature
can
always be
looked at from the point of view of its political origins and conse–
quences, that way of looking at it is less "literary" than the intrinsic
way.
This distinction did not go unchallenged. Leslie Fiedler and
others objected to it in the name of archetypal psychology, and cer–
tain
Partisan Review
critics-creating the nearest thing to a mature
sociocultural criticism we have had in the United States-disre–
garded it completely. But most archetypal critics were as loath to
acknowledge the political dimension of literature as were the intrin–
sic critics. And the
Partisan Review
style of criticism-though by the
fifties less frequently dismissed by university professors as "mere"
journalism-lacked the high-powered technical methodology seem–
ingly required for any critical mode to be emulated by professors
and graduate students. Insofar as it was practiced at all in the uni–
versity, then, criticism from a social and political viewpoint
remained marginal.
Of course, one can easily exaggerate the aridity of intrinsic crit–
icism, ignoring the fact that it was originally part of a larger cultural
