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PARTISAN REVIEW
pathized, as I still do, with the broadly liberal-to-radical ideology;
but my own political views, such as they were, had been shaped by a
third-party movement originating in the Nonpartisan League; and ,
although any thinking person of my generation had to come to his
own terms with Marx, I have been more strongly influenced by
Veblen, whose paradigms had come a good deal closer to my own
expenence.
In retrospect it seems easier to realize that
Partisan Review
was
finding its way out of the doctrinaire leftism of the thirties- not an
intellectual retreat but a recognition of diversity and complexity.
Others, terming themselves New Critics, prompted a sharp rebound
to the opposite extreme: from social consciousness to esthetic for–
malism. This had some warrant in a reanimation of poetic texts too
long obscured by pedantic contests . But again I found myself an odd
man out when , in a joint symposium on "Literature and the Pro–
fessors" sponsored by
The Kenyon Review
and
The Southern Review,
I
sought middle ground between New Criticism and historicaJ scholar–
ship . I gather that many other readers were troubled by such con–
flicts, since my essay attempting to reconcile them, "Literature as an
Institution," has been more widely reprinted and translated than
anything else I have written. The institutional concept made it possi–
ble to recognize the claims and pressures of society, while at the
same time allowing for the semi-autonomous roles of convention ,
structure, and style.
It
was at best a mere formula, a rough sketch, but tentative and
flexible enough so that _the operative idea could profit from the
refinements and amplifications of ongoing critical thought, rather
than be outdated by subsequent trends. My personal path- which may
not be atypical for an academic critic- has led from a professional
background in philology and old-fashioned literary history toward
engagements with comparative literature and the history of ideas.
But it has also provided me with stimulus from fellow travelers on
the routes of Germanic stylistics, Russian formalism, and French
structuralism. Insofar as I was a scholar or teacher, I was committed
to keeping in touch with the past, to upholding cultural continuities ,
to handing on a humanistic tradition which has appreciably fallen off
during the last half-century. Most of our own teachers would have
considered it unprofessional to show a serious interest in the present :
after all, I was a student of, and later an incongruous successor to,
Irving Babbitt. Incongruous because we students were bound to be–
come excited by writers who were then contemporary.
