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Begin with an assumption: that literature defines our concepts of criticism or else it defies them, and that life constantly challenges the pieties of both art and thought. What I shall attempt here, then, could not be considered an authoritative review of postwar criticism. It should be understood, rather, as a partial statement on the gathering mood of American criticism, an intimation of a trend which the facts of literary history in the past two decades (colored inevitably by my own sense of fact) may help to clarify. | Begin with an assumption: that literature defines our concepts of criticism or else it defies them, and that life constantly challenges the pieties of both art and thought. What I shall attempt here, then, could not be considered an authoritative review of postwar criticism. It should be understood, rather, as a partial statement on the gathering mood of American criticism, an intimation of a trend which the facts of literary history in the past two decades (colored inevitably by my own sense of fact) may help to clarify. | ||
The admission that I neither hold nor accept a definitive view of criticism should not be too shocking. In England, where the empiric temper prevails in the name of common sense or urbanity, and even in France, where questions of methodology yield to a lively concern with new writing, such an admission would seem fairly innocuous. It is otherwise in America. Among us, the notion that criticism must become a rigorous, quasi-scientific activity in order to justify its name still finds wide support. Not long ago | The admission that I neither hold nor accept a definitive view of criticism should not be too shocking. In England, where the empiric temper prevails in the name of common sense or urbanity, and even in France, where questions of methodology yield to a lively concern with new writing, such an admission would seem fairly innocuous. It is otherwise in America. Among us, the notion that criticism must become a rigorous, quasi-scientific activity in order to justify its name still finds wide support. Not long ago —or is it really ages past?— most students of literature, myself included, recognized the elegance of René Wellek’s formulation of the destiny of criticism: “the interpretation of literature as distinct from other activities of man.”{{sfn|Wellek|1963|p=343}} Coming from Professor Wellek, the emphasis on interpretation rather than on literary theory seemed unduly self-effacing. Be that as it may, the formula appealed then to the common rage for order, and seemed also to aver the dignity of the humanities on terms that the age demanded. With the years, however, the formula seems, to me at least, to have lost in elegance as it has gained in naïveté. The breed of technicians it has unwittingly sanctioned may have found a truer consummation of their hopes in the laboratories of Oak Ridge. Literature as a distinct activity of man? Criticism as a distinct response to a distinct activity of man? What is man that we should be so little mindful of him, so arbitrary with the complexities of his mind? From Surrealism to Absurdism, literature itself suggests that a distinct aesthetic response may be defined only at the risk of deadly discrimination. | ||
Yet my object is not to engage in polemics. The point can be stated with some equanimity: a new breed of American critics are anxious to assert them selves against the rigors and pieties they have inherited. Their mood is restless, eclectic, speculative; sometimes, it is even apocalyptic. Those who feel out of sympathy with them may wish to apply different epithets: romantic, primitivist, existential, amateurish, or plain anti-intellectual. (The usefulness of these tags, dispensed usually with contumely, is as doubtful as their accuracy.) Others, however, may recognize the creative possibilities of this new mood, troubled, vague, or disruptive as it may seem. | Yet my object is not to engage in polemics. The point can be stated with some equanimity: a new breed of American critics are anxious to assert them selves against the rigors and pieties they have inherited. Their mood is restless, eclectic, speculative; sometimes, it is even apocalyptic. Those who feel out of sympathy with them may wish to apply different epithets: romantic, primitivist, existential, amateurish, or plain anti-intellectual. (The usefulness of these tags, dispensed usually with contumely, is as doubtful as their accuracy.) Others, however, may recognize the creative possibilities of this new mood, troubled, vague, or disruptive as it may seem. | ||