BOOKS
613
advanced or talented students, initiation into what has become a cult
takes the place of more traditional literary education. Similarly,
feminist and black studies, and other special approaches, are often
presented to students before they have a grounding in the Western
tradition. I am aware that deconstructionists, feminists , and some
blacks deny the validity of this tradition . This is not the place to ex–
amine these arguments, but it seems to me that such a view leads to
utter intellectual anarchy and nihilism .
These are some of the problems about which many of us can
agree. But their solution is not so simple, not at least as long as we
have undifferentiated mass education, and so long as there is no
agreement on how literature should be taught. Indeed, we must face
the possibility that some of these problems may be insoluble . But
that should not prevent us from thinking about them. Graff tries to
cope with the difficulties, inadequately, I think , by advancing an
idea of pluralism seemingly to legitimate the present babel of
theories, ideologies , and textual strategies. Perhaps Graff is saying
simply that since we cannot decide on any single method of conduct–
ing literary classes, we might as well make the best of it.
If
the problem should be insoluble , Graff may be right in tacitly
accepting the status quo. But if we were to disregard the dictates of
reality and were to think not of immediate but of ideal solutions, it
would seem to me that the teaching of literature by an organized
caste of literary theoreticians and political advocates does not pro–
vide the organic literary experience that students should acquire. To
begin with, I would suggest that the graduate study of literature ,
which is now a vocational school for learning how to transmit the
new theories to future students, should be revised simply to provide
more intensive and wider reading of literary works. And feminist
and black studies that are essentially historical or sociological and
not literary should be located in departments of history , sociology,
or political science.
Ultimately, I would like to see literature taught not by estheti–
cians, ideologists, or small-minded scholars, but mainly by writers
and literary specialists who are also writers of fiction , poetry , or
literary criticism . For the meaning of literary texts or of literary ex–
perience ex ists not in interpretive games or theories of hermeneutics,
but in the influence of works in the past on contemporary writers.
And their quality is determined only by the value given them by
later writers and literary movements . Otherwise texts degenerate in–
to icons whose value is taken for granted or are converted into po-
