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revisionism. As for the classroom, it had never been clear even from
the beginning just what exercises in explication were to accomplish.
Were they designed to sharpen the students' powers of discern–
ment-a modernized version of the "mental discipline" by which
classical translation and grammar had been pedagogically justified
in the nineteenth century? Or, as the New Critics suggested, did
these exercises inculcate a kind of humanistic knowledge through the
contemplation of literary complexity? Both claims can be seriously
defended, yet increasingly doubts have arisen about the efficacy of
teaching literary texts in an historical and cultural vacuum. Survey
courses may supplement critical analysis by providing a "back–
ground" of periods and contexts. But background and foreground
in literary pedagogy, like extrinsic and intrinsic analysis in criticism,
too rarely come together effectively for the individual student. Both
in the journals and in the classroom, literary studies have come to
comprise a set of disconnected experiences without much intellectual
coherence.
By the sixties, discontent with the literature curriculum had
become vocal, and though the standard complaint that the curricu–
lum lacked "relevance" may have been vulgar, it did point up the
woeful lack of context in literary studies. The human mind requires
a conceptual "handle" in order to assimilate any new subject; a lit–
erary work can be made intelligible on ly in relation to what its
reader already knows, what he is able to bring to bear on the reading
of it.
If
the work is presented as an object " in its own right," outside
any matrix of historical, cultural, and philosophical issues, the stu–
dent is unlikely to achieve a sense of relation to it. He may be able to
master the mechanics of explication, but usually with little sense of
why
he is mastering these mechanics, and
how
that mastery can fit
into his everyday social behavior. Such a student may be quite ready
to believe that this mastery is part of the acquisition of "humanistic
values," but the nature of these values is too vague to instill a coher–
ent sense of purpose .
By the mid-sixties , the rationale of literary study in the univer–
sity had become a "humanism" whose content could no longer be
plausibly specified. Insofar as the word meant anything precise–
evoking the classical humanists of the Renaissance or Matthew
Arnold's revival of their creed-it obviously comprehended only a
fraction of the literature department's actual interests. Only when
made platitudinously thin could the term "humanism" include the
