Critical

As frequent visitors to this site are well aware, I'm not exactly the most theoretically-inclined professor in contemporary academia; my interest in theory, with or without capital "T," is at best wholly pragmatic.  And so I'm not altogether the best person to respond to Lindsay Waters' article in the CoHE (sorry, reg. req.).  But perhaps other readers will share in my bemusement, befuddlement, or whatever be- you'd like to call it.   What follows is not so much for Waters or against Waters--just an attempt to work through what he's saying.

Waters lays down the law in the very first paragraph:  "Trying to figure out what's up with American literary scholarship — I mean the writing coming out of colleges that relates to literature — is difficult. This stuff cannot be understood by the norms of healthy literary criticism as it has been practiced from Aristotle to Helen Vendler."  At the risk of sounding like Ophelia Benson (not, I'd add, that I consider that at all a bad thing): "norms"? Which "norms"? What sort of historical narrative easily encompasses everyone from Aristotle to Vendler? (This generalization treads dangerously close to the dreaded Michener School of the Looooong Historical View.) And what's the relationship between "criticism" and "scholarship"?  In any event, it's not yet clear if, by "healthy," Mr. Waters simply means practical criticism, rhetorical criticism, or something else entirely.

Luckily for all concerned, the next paragraph makes things somewhat more specific: "Ever since it became professional and, for the most part, lost touch with the readers who have fostered the little-magazine criticism that reaches back to The Spectator, today's academic scholarship has become separated from its grounding: It is no longer connected to the very medium that gave it rise, literature."  Sort of luckily, anyway.  It's a bit of a stretch to describe The Spectator as a "little magazine," and surely no-one would describe any of the truly influential 19th-c. Anglo-American periodicals as such. Moreover, the slip between "criticism" and "scholarship" is back, even though literary scholarship has never looked much like periodicals-based criticism; it's not clear that Wood's An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction, or Warton's History of English Poetry, to take three random examples, would qualify as "healthy" under Waters' apparent definition of the term.  In any event, though, we're back to a standard-issue complaint: nobody cares about literature anymore.

Or, to be more precise, nobody cares about it in the right way: "Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art. Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul."  I'm a little baffled by Waters' choice of examples here, since most literary critics do not, indeed, primarily study either Turner or architecture--and surely one might wonder if "dizziness" normally results from an evening spent reading Bleak House. More to the point, though, Waters seems to confuse the acquisition of taste and/or the experience of beauty with the cultivation of morality.  (Before you object that "morality" is not inherently linked to "enlarg[ing] the soul"...well, wait until you see where Waters takes his argument.)  Personally, I'm all for cultivating taste, experiencing beauty, understanding the workings of form, and so forth; it's just that these seem to me to be goods that exist independently of anything related to "the soul" (and there are those out there who would argue, from a theological perspective, that emphasizing the aesthetic may be at best neutral in relationship to "soul" and at worst actively detrimental to it).  This line of thinking treads close to elevating art to a form of religion, and one doesn't have to be a theologian to ask if this is a viable, let alone valuable, project.    

Be that as it may, Waters' generalizations about our obsession with "ideas" don't quite seem to conform to the historical record.  Art, Waters warns us, has no "meaning"; we've abandoned the study of form for "the meaning-mongering of interpretation for its own sake."  From the perspective of a young-fogeyish literary historian, this claim is somewhat bizarre.  First of all, in academic scholarship, hermeneutics didn't displace aesthetic criticism; hermeneutics displaced old historicism, biographical criticism, philology, theological criticism, and--oh yes--plot summaries, with aesthetic criticism on the side.  Waters dates the incursion of meaning back to 1948, in the form of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, but "ideas" were alive and well in academic scholarship long before then.  (As anyone who has ever slogged through nineteenth-century book reviews soon discovers, they were also alive and kicking in "criticism.")   In British studies, most of the pioneering work on second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-rate authors was done in the first half of the twentieth century, well before feminists and postcolonialists started walloping the canon around.    And, to be honest, the quality of "aesthetic" speculation in early 20th-c. academic scholarship tends to be pretty embarrassing; when, in The Novel and the Oxford Movement (1932), Joseph Ellis Baker finds William Sewell's Hawkstone to be a more ripping yarn than Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Ellen Middleton, it's not exactly clear what aesthetic criteria could possibly underpin that conclusion.  (They're both pretty dreadful, but--death by rats aside--Sewell's novel hits more spectacular heights of ineptitude, especially when it comes to dialogue.) 

Even if the Gentle Reader disagrees with this historical narrative, there are still two pesky problems of an empirical nature.  Problem #1 is that Waters apparently doesn't do much reading in the area of Restoration & 18th century studies, where formal studies remain hot, hot, hot.  (G. Gabrielle Starr's Lyric Generations [2004] is an intriguing recent example; Howard Weinbrot's Britannia's Issue [1993] is a more self-consciously epic endeavor.)  Problem #2 is that studies of effect and affect have apparently moved into work on pop fiction; for example, a lot of scholarship on the romance, whether based in empirical reader-response studies or not, explicitly emphasizes how romance narratives and tropes generate emotional, even erotic, responses.  There's the body for you!  (It's doubtful if Waters would actually welcome the work done under the auspices of #2, even though it qualifies as "aesthetic" according to his loose definition of the term.  Someone more attuned to current philosophical trends in aesthetics might want to weigh in.)  The reader may object that this doesn't absolve all those other scholars who aren't doing such work, which is fine; I merely point out that Waters' polemical intent is leading him to over-generalize. 

My objections so far, then, are two.  First, Waters appears to be conflating two different activities: scholarship (which, to my knowledge, is rarely first and foremost about aesthetics) and criticism (which may or may not be).   Second, his understanding of the history of specifically academic literary scholarship and criticism doesn't quite mesh, to say the least, with my reading in that area.  But OK. Let's flash forward to his example of aesthetic criticism:

A criticism devoted to aesthetics might take a novel like Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and note how its main character, Caroline Meeber, again and again finds herself in front of sheets of glass — store windows, mirrors — that seem to beckon her in. The question would not be whether her vanity or love of material objects is good or bad; it would be how Dreiser invites all of us to fall through the glass with Carrie, to become a part of the story and experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious. Contemporary meaning-mongers would emphasize how Dreiser is commenting on the materialism of a market-driven society: Whether arguing that he is endorsing or condemning it, they would just want to know the bottom line.

As anyone familiar with the history of Dreiser criticism is well aware, this is a rather loaded example--not least because, as is so often the case with novel criticism, readers have generally responded to the novel's, er, morality and meaning.  (And, of course, many readers find Dreiser less than aesthetically appealing.)  It has historically been very difficult to talk about fiction in a purely aesthetic mode, without discussing "meaning"; poetry, especially lyric poetry, tends to be far more conducive to this sort of approach.    Even Oscar Wilde had to admit that The Picture of Dorian Gray had a pretty obvious moral (perhaps despite his own best intentions). Waters would no doubt argue that, as he claims later on, asking readers to "experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious" is a matter of producing meaning, whereas "emphasiz[ing] how Dreiser is commenting on the materialism of a market-driven society" is simply assigning meaning to the text, ratcheting it down to the "bottom line."  To which I might respond that, well, Waters' alternative seems a trifle unsatisfactory: why presume that the imagery is supposed to make us identify with Carrie? In what world do adjectives like "vain and frail and ambitious" escape moral judgements like "good and bad"? Why make it sound as though the novel is operating at the level of allegory?  And whatever happened to the specificities of Dreiser's relationship to naturalism, a literary mode that involved rather a lot of "ideas" (some of them, to be sure, not very good)?  Well, perhaps when Waters gets around to writing his article...

Now, Waters' actual proposal--let's talk about the production of meaning, integrating form with content, etc., etc., etc.--sounds just fine and dandy to me.  (At least he doesn't refer to it as a "call.") Similarly, I also object to reducing art to "politics and virtue," even though I happen to spend most of my time writing about people who reduce fiction to, well, politics and virtue.   I only wish that he had made it to his point without some of the weirder accompanying claims. For example, "[w]hat the theory wars really did was convince literary critics that fretting about how meanings get constituted in art is dilly-dallying — in a word, 'French.'"  Actually, I would have thought that the whole problem was that most "theoretical" interpretations did not, in fact, seem to be "fretting about how meanings get constituted in art," but that's no doubt a personal opinion.    Similarly, Waters' attempt to read the purported revolt against things French--what is this, freedom criticism?--as "intellectual isolationalism" misses the far more important point that most American "theory" never engaged with European thought, French or otherwise; an article in the CoHE itself some years back noted that American literary critics appropriated French thought only piecemeal and often well past its actual expiration date in France.  (We won't even go into what some philosophers actually think of our attempts to draw on philosophy, let alone postmodernism.)   Moreover, American academics, like Americans more generally, usually stick to what's available in English, which makes the cosmopolitanism of our turn to European theory somewhat suspect. 

I also wonder if Waters' claim that "[d]espite the much-quoted charges that the humanities have been taken over by the left [...] I believe that what we're really seeing is a reactionary tilt — away from the rebellious, destabilizing, liberating aspects of art" is as helpful as he seems to think it is.   (Calling Dan Green!) One of the submerged problems in Waters' essay--hinted at by his use of the indefinte pronoun "you" near the beginning--is that he keeps moving back and forth between the critic's aesthetic response to art (something approaching Walter Pater's arguments in The Renaissance) and claims about what art itself does.  That is, who experiences art as "rebellious, destabilizing, liberating"? And can we really separate "sense" from "idea," as Waters does in his reading of Whitman--"That kind of experience embodies the experience of the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating, gives us a sense, not an idea, of that order"?  We might not get "ideas" from the poetry, to borrow from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," but we're hardly going to get a sense of "the new democratic order" from an aesthetic experience eo ipso.  For starters, we need to know what a new democratic order is, and we need to know that Whitman is celebrating it. 

In other words, I'm in the somewhat odd position of agreeing with the basic thesis, but disagreeing with large chunks of the execution.  Other responses?