BOOKS
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Sidney Hook, and myself, among the New York Intellectuals. But here again
he could have expanded more on the distinctive thinking of many of these
writers. Of the ew Critics, there are citations from Allen Tate,John Crowe
Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Rene Wellek, R. P.
Blackmur, and some of the lesser critics. But as in the case of the New York
Intellectuals, there are no full intellectual portraits - though space
considerations obviously prescribed some limits.
In
between the early stages and the contemporary welter of theories
and causes, Leitch covers such schools as hermeneutical criticism, phe–
nomenological criticism, existentialist criticism, myth criticism, and the Chicago
school. I suppose some academic ideal of thoroughness and fairness would
dictate such full coverage. But it does lead to a kind of unfairness in giving
equal time to approaches that now can be seen as less weighty in the scale of
critical writing.
In
this respect, Leitch, himself, can be described as a scholarly
rather than a thematic critic.
Yet I think most of the difficulties arise when Leitch comes to the con–
temporary scene with its profusion of deconstructionist, feminist, and black
criticism, and something Leitch calls reader-response criticism. Here his exe–
cution is truly evenhanded and value-free.
In
dealing with deconstruction, he
has lengthy expositions ofJacques Derrida, Paul de Man,
J.
Hillis Miller,
Harold Bloom (who is really only a fellow-traveller), Geoffrey Hartmann,
Jeffrey Mehlman (who has been shifting), and such younger Yale critics as
Barbara Johnson and Shoshana Feldman. But he does not argue with the
political meaning and assumptions ofdeconstruction. Nor does he question its
proponents' apotheosis of an imaginary and fluctuating text against the real
text. And he does not challenge their belief in the plurality of meanings.
In
general, their basic nihilism and undoing of the past
also
are not confronted.
In
the earlier periods ofliterature, the lines are clearer and more con–
tained within the boundaries of what has been thought to be critically accept–
able.
It
is the contemporary situation that presents the most serious problems
of discrimination and judgement. And it is here that we are most aware that
Leitch, while giving a fairly accurate and lucid account of a discipline that has
run wild, could have exercised most profitably his own critical appraisal and
taste.
As
a result, all directions appear to be equally valid and interesting. For
example, Leitch might have raised more doubts, in my opinion, about Ed–
ward Said's special blend of Marxism, deconstruction, and Arabism; or
Frederic Jameson's amalgam of deconstruction and Marxism; or the dissolu–
tion of the text by de Man, Derrida, Miller; or the Lacanian version of
psychoanalysis applied to the interplay of texts practiced by the newer Yale
critics such as Johnson and Feldman. It is all simply part of the history of
criticism.
When we come to the so-called reader-response, the feminist, the black
estheticist, and the new left theories and uses of literature, one wishes that
