Rene Wellek
CRITICISM IN THE UNIVERSITY
In 1948 I published, with Austin Warren as coauthor,
Theory of Literature,
the very first book in English which had this
phrase in the title. It was then generally interpreted as the summa of
the New Criticism, though it contained also ample information on
Russian formalism, Ingarden's phenomenology, and Czech struc–
turalism, novelties which were largely ignored. Victor Erlich wrote a
good book on Russian formalism in 1954, but Ingarden's
The Literary
Work of Art
had to wait for translation into English until 1973, and
Jan Mukarovsky, the main theorist of the Prague Linguistic Circle,
had to wait until 1977 before two volumes of his appeared with Yale
University Press. I have the impression that the impact of these
three trends remained limited to Slavicists and semioticians . When
in the late 1960s structuralism was imported from France, two lucid
expositions, Robert Scholes's
Structuralism
and Jonathan Culler's
Structuralist Poetics,
treated structuralism as a completely new French
invention with no other antecedents than the linguistics of Saussure.
Structuralism, which found these and other propagandists, was soon
exemplified by translations from Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov,
a Bulgarian settled in France, and Gerard Genette, but in this coun–
try I think little strictly structuralist work was produced except by
semioticians. It was soon overshadowed by what is now called post–
structuralism, which includes deconstruction as propagated by
Jacques Derrida and his adherents, the late Paul de Man, and J.
Hillis Miller. Deconstructionists had an extraordinary success in the
American academy. They excited also polemical reactions: the
books I discuss here can be seen mostly in terms of this debate. Some
are merely retrospective; particularly the books by Todorov, now
translated, are all solid, well-informed, well thought-out and well–
argued historical research and criticism.'
Criticism in the University
(Northwestern University Press, 1985)
is a miscellany edited by Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons, which
1.
Symbolism and Interpretation.
Cornell University Press, 1982;
Theon'es of the Symbol.
Cornell University Press, 1982; and
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principal.
Univer–
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984.
