526
PARTISAN REVIEW
This is not a cheerful prospect if one cares for the life of the mind,
but it is, I'm afraid, plausible, and surely Graff and other con–
tributors are right that the divorce between the actual literature now
being written in America and the academic criticism could not be
more complete. The pretense of some critics to create works of art
equal or even superior to those usually classed as "literature" seems
defensible until one reads
Gtas,
a pitiful hybrid of puns and specula–
tions juxtaposing Hegel and Genet.
Criticism in the University
has
much more to say on many topics.
It
gives a valuable conspectus of
the present moment.
Somewhat surprisingly, the issues raised by deconstruction
arise also in historical contexts.
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism
2
contains the striking debate between
J.
Hillis Miller and M.H.
Abrams, besides other pieces of no immediate relevance. Northrop
Frye's "The Survival of Eros in Poetry" is an anthology of English
love poetry from Thomas Campion's "There Is a Garden in Her
Face" to the present. The following question and answer period
allows Frye to assert his own Christianity and to reassert his theory
of poetry, which he calls criticism: "I dislike the notion of shifting the
center of the study of literature from literature to something else." To
force upon criticism social concerns seems to him "practically a
definition of bad criticism." Mr. Frye repeats his own view that
value judgement is no part ofliterary criticism, though he modifies it
slightly, admitting that "value judgements are an expression of cer–
tain social attitudes" and thus are subject to change. Frye also
defends the view that great art can arise in any kind of mind, for in–
stance, Celine, who was "a Fascist and an anti-Semite and generally
a most reprehensible person," but was still a great novelist.
J.
Hillis Miller's "On Edge: the Crossways of Contemporary
Criticism" appeared, until now, only in the
Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1979, and thus a reprint is most
welcome. Miller interprets Wordsworth's Lucy poem, "A slumber
did my spirit steal," reading it at first quite normally, and then en–
couraged by the liberty of interpretation preached by him and his
followers, spends many pages constructing an obscure sexual drama.
We can only marvel at reading that "to be touched by 'earthly years'
2. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism.
ed. by Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer.
Cornell University Press, 1986.
