524
PARTISAN REVIEW
raises most of the burning questions of the moment. The con–
tributors have too divergent points of view to be reduced to a com–
mon denominator, but most of them are worried that theory has
taken over and that a contact with texts has been lost more and
more. The engaging reminiscence by the Amherst professor William
H. Pritchard would relegate theory to another department, presum–
ably philosophy, as he is interested in criticism in the old sense of
comparative placing and judging. He sympathizes with F .R .
Leavis's conception of English studies. Donald Davie has similar
views, recognizing the energy and intelligence of the new theorists,
but missing literary sensibility. He goes so far as to say that
"criticism as an institution does not and never did exist. There exist
here and there critics worth listening to ." Wallace Douglas, in an
essay entitled "Accidental Institution" on the origin of modern
language study, traces this institutionalizing of literary studies very
instructively, but these studies were then largely philological and
historical and merely opened the way to the entry of criticism into
the academy. He does not describe this process, which is not merely
the achievement of the New Critics. They were preceded by Irving
Babbitt and his followers, such as Norman Foerster, who in the late
thirties encountered fierce resistance to his introduction of criticism
at the University of Iowa. Simultaneously with the New Critics , the
Chicago Aristotelians established their local school of criticism, often
in sharp polemics with the New Critics. The only critics outside the
academy were the Marxists, and even these recently have been more
and more incorporated in it. Professors with excellent academic
qualifications now teach Marxism in the universities , sometimes
rather of the type advocated by Adorno and Habermas. Still , they
engage in a revolutionary rhetoric, though it is hard to see what in
practice they would achieve besides the conversion of a few students
and colleagues. One understands that Terry Eagleton, a fellow of
Wadham College, Oxford, whose
Literary Theory
and new short
book,
The Function of Criticism
(Oxford University Press, 1984) are
straight Marxist propaganda, can speak of our "liberation." He
hopes for the departure of Mrs. Thatcher, but when his American
counterparts use the same revolutionary rhetoric, one wonders
where possibly could be the political forces in this country to achieve
this liberation . Much of this has been discussed with striking quota–
tions in a recent article by Peter Shaw, "The Politics of Deconstruc–
tion," in
Partisan Review
(Vol. LUI, no. 2, 1986).
