RENEWELLEK
525
William
E.
Cain's "English in America Reconsidered" discusses
Richard Ohmann's
English in America
(1976) with some sympathy,
though he doubts whether "to teach politically with revolution as an
end" is a practical advise and whether Marxism is not rather "a refuge
for academics who seek reassurance about their social conscience and
commitment." He is not worried about deconstruction, though it
seemed "on the verge of overrunning the discipline." He sees it rather
as a harmless consequence of the New Criticism, a rhetorical exercise
in discovering ambiguities, aporias, undecidables, quoting some
reassuring words of
J.
Hillis Miller, accepting the canon of English
literature. Mr. Cain does not see the deep self-confessed nihilism of
the theory, the absurdities of its main doctrines: the denial of the
author, which goes back to Roland Barthes; the denial of the coher–
ence of a work of art in favor of textuality; the denial of the possibility
of correct interpretation; the denial of any distinction between art
and nonart, and thus the very possibility of evaluation. It means not
the deconstruction but the destruction of literary studies. The deri–
vation from the New Critics, while historically correct, should not,
however, conceal the complete divergence of their aims. The am–
biguities, paradoxes, ironies of the New Critics were to elucidate a
work of art, enhance our understanding of it, while "deconstruction"
means dismantling, revealing the
irreconcil~ble
contradictions in
every text, a monotonous conclusion, which one would hope would
soon bore students and, thus, may today scare many away from
literary studies. Why should anyone wish to spend his life in such a
negative activity? One must grant that even the most orthodox prac–
titioners, the late Paul de Man and
J.
Hillis Miller, constantly con–
tradict their theories. They do in fact treat authors and individual
works of art, and Hillis Miller has actually proclaimed his acceptance
of the canon of English literature. He does often protest against
wrong readings by others and is convinced that his own are right.
Also Gerald Graff, who condemns "the fetish of textual disunity and
aporias," draws a rather bland picture of the academic situation:
"The very function of a university department, one might say, is to
keep professors isolated and thus incapable of coming into conflict."
The university even "fails to make this conflict visible to its public
and even to its own faculty." He concludes that we can expect
literary theory to be diffused "not by being repressed, but by being
accepted and relegated to the margin where it will cease to be a
bother."
It
will be a new ghetto alongside black and women's studies.
