INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
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everything, in marriage, friendship, state, confederation, corporation,
learned societies, religion, that something proper may grow."
These Nietzschean qualities are lacking in much of the academic
world today. The contemporary fields of the new social history and of
literary deconstruction repress resistance and antagonism as the disci–
plines reproduce their own kind, spawning and cloning younger schol–
ars to emulate their elders and keeping ranks closed to anyone who
might bring to campus a different perspective. In American history, the
white Anglo-Saxon male who is not a Marxist, feminist, queer studies
specialist, critical theorist, cultural studies promoter, poststructuralist,
or multiculturalist has about as much chance getting hired as does a
Partisan Review
intellectual being drafted into the NBA.
The older participants in the symposium "Our Country and Our Cul–
ture" were concerned with the question of what to read. Today the issue
is how
to
read, and it is not all that important who the author is or what
he or she wrote. The author as subject has disappeared. With "the lin–
guistic turn" we stare at the text and cannot see beyond it.
The break between the then and now in American intellectual life
revolves around what has affected knowledge, as though any way of
knowing has lost its innocence. With language no longer regarded as
transparent, with knowledge inseparable from interpretation, and with
reality dependent upon its representations, we are in an entirely new
world. In philosophy, of course, this linguistic turn was a long time in
coming, going back to Wittgenstein and Austen. In constitutional law,
the new theory produced debates over "originalism"-whether it is pos–
sible to reestablish the intended purpose of those who framed the Con–
stitution. Even the field of economics can be read less as the study of
statistics than as the analysis of rhetoric. And in history the study of the
French Revolution becomes a study in how it was verbally and pictori–
ally depicted, not necessarily why it happened but how it came to be
portrayed in language, art, music, and other modes of representation.
In literature-the primary passion of the New York intellectuals–
there may be a thread of continuity between older writers and newer
scholars. Certainly one could make the case for Kenneth Burke. But
because the poststructuralists are little concerned with tradition and
continuity, Harold Bloom's conviction that the influence of the canoni–
cal masters of the past can produce "anxiety" is of little worry to those
who regard the canon as an arbitrary construct. But what would Lionel
Trilling think of the Parisian-based postmodernism? He would be hor–
rified to be told that the self has disappeared into structures, that liter–
ature has lost its angst and may be unable to teach "wonder and fear,"
