Is literary criticism a failed project (short paper version)?

Here's my paper, as it stands.

Is literary criticism a failed project?

Is academic literary criticism a failed project? If so, what might that failure mean for literary studies more generally?

There are many reasons for asking these questions, but they have a particular urgency under current modes of university governance, in which the humanities in particular are under managerial pressure to account for their value, and to maintain themselves through complex market mechanisms. For us in English—whose discipline is also threatened by literature’s declining status in the culture as a whole—one way of re-establishing our purposes might be to examine the forces and energies that first shaped us. That is a familiar move within religious and intellectual institutions: Latin Christianity, for instance, has often attempted a revitalizing return to “primitive Christianity”. In difficult times, philosophy too has returned for inspiration to its putative Greek sources.

For English, however, this move is problematic not just because the discipline is not dogmatic, and not just because our founders lack the first Greek philosophers’ heroic status, but because our field is so de-centred. Today, English departments routinely teach various skills and research various archives. For all that, I take it that most would agree that what we have to come call “close reading” still lies at our heart. And “close reading” is a version, even if (as I will argue) a rather debased version, of the literary criticism that did indeed ground the English department between about 1925 and 1970, the period of its greatest authority. I contend, then, that criticism rather than scholarship is what first granted the English department its legitimacy and prestige. And I further contend that modern literary criticism was established at a specific time and place—in England, and more especially at Cambridge, immediately after the first world war.

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What do I mean by modern literary criticism? Let me begin to address the question by examining a moment just prior to its invention, when British literary intellectuals began agitating for the university study of English, and for a new relation between the discipline and the State.

The most important such intervention was made by John Churton Collins, a well-known journalist, textbook editor, and university-extension lecturer, who had taught across Britain and the US. Involved in the efforts to establish a Chair of English Literature at Oxford in the 1880s, he became English studies’ most formidable champion. In his The Study of English Literature: a plea for its recognition and organization at the Universities (1891) which won support from a wide range of public figures, Collins complains that, although the state had taken responsibility for both technical education and primary and secondary schooling, it had not yet supported the liberal arts.

The disciplined study of English was necessary because the system now needed to shape citizens’ characters so they could take full advantage and control of political enfranchisement. That is, Collins was responding to the first stirrings of the social-democratic state, which took on some responsibility for the general population’s cultivation as well as for their welfare and security. For him, classical Athens and Rome provided a model of social-democratic pedagogy, since education there was used to disseminate cultivation in the required senses, namely as applied from the centre ethically, politically, morally, and aesthetically(4). Ethically, so Collins argued, the “interpretation of literature” could “effect for popular culture what it is of power to effect”, that is, as he cites John Morley saying, it could protect against “the disgorgements of the cheap popular press—with its superficial second-hand criticism, its flimsy summaries of the results of original scholarship or research, its slovenly vulgar editions of the English classics, and its irrepressible floods of sloppy, foolish, illiterate fiction.” (112) Politically, literary study could “warn, admonish and guide.” (4). And as a means of “aesthetic and moral education”, it could “exercise … influence on taste, on tone, on sentiment, on opinion, on character”. (4)
It is clear that Collins’s project is primarily based in discrimination—in sorting out good literature from less good or bad literature—but, for all that, Collins’s curriculum lacks anything that we can recognize as criticism as such. Criticism became the focus of English studies only after first world war. It did so when T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis appealed to three concepts in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, the most important of these was experience. Indeed, literary criticism could emerge as a specific academic discipline, independent of literary history, philology and rhetoric, by figuring the text precisely as communicating experiences, and hence by defining itself as “the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them” as Richards put it in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) (Richards 1928 2). With the horror of the war unforgotten, and as a contribution to what has come to be called “modernism”, English studies could sharpen its opposition to the destablizing and debasing cultural consequences of industrialization, militarism, modernization and democracy, could, as it were, refit its practices of discrimination, by appealing not to conventional but bankrupt categories like civilization, wisdom and gentlemanly cultivation but to what we might call the elemental particle of being-in-the-world: the experience, thought of as combining thought and feeling, intuition and sensation, desire and understanding, or, more simply, as the basic unit of what Henry James named “felt life”. As we shall see, and paradoxically, criticism could assert the full importance of close reading by replacing linguistic categories by experience for literary analysis.

The second key concept for modernist literary criticism was “impersonality”, through which a form of classicism already apparent in Churton Collins could decisively rebut both what was considered as romantic subjectivism and the “new humanism” which, from the critics’ perspective, was providing ethical cover for modernization’s wrecking force, including the passions that led to war.

More problematically, literary criticism’s last constitutive concept was “history”, or rather a particular notion of history which assumed, first, that changing social structures were imprinted in experiences themselves, and, then, that relations between literature and society have been in degraded over the modern period in ways that required criticism to present itself as a weapon for cultural resistance.

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T.S. Eliot’s central contribution to the new discipline, mainly written in 1919, did not involve any effort towards its academic institutionalization. It first appeared in his journalism for the literary weekly, The Atheneum. By that time, however, Eliot had completed his Harvard dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley in which he contributes to that reconfiguring of the concept of experience that had been a major philosophical enterprise since the 1880s, and which had two key features.

First, experience is considered as prior to the division between subject and object: “if, in seeking for reality, we go to experience, what we certainly do not find is a subject or an object,” as Bradley put it. (Bradley 1897, 146) Instead, experience forms a whole which ceaselessly divides into local clusters or centres, one of which is the self itself. This line of thought—which aligns experience to impersonality— offers a way out of methodological individualism and metaphysical atomism, but it has political consequences too since, in its de-individuating force, it unsettles political liberalism, making literature increasingly available both to collectivism and to conservatism.

The second key feature of experience as theorized in the period was Dilthey’s distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which for our purposes can be thought of as the distinction between the experience as it happens serially in a moment, and experience as accumulated knowledge and practical skill.

For Eliot, all our relations to the world occur as experiences, so that all that is knowable is experience. Within our experiences, however, particular knowable objects appear as “points of attention.” Objects always and only result from an effort of attention. (Eliot 1964, 157) As to truth: it is always a matter of interpretation, with the corollary that there is no difference except in degree between interpretation and description (164). Furthermore, no interpretation is normatively neutral: interpretation is understood as “a valuation and an assignment of meaning” (165). For Eliot it is also the case that that the only “significant experiences” occur outside convention and doxa’s web. But such experiences also tend towards the arbitrary, and, indeed, the mad. Here the figure of the critic enters: significant experiences are protected by “the true critic” who is “a scrupulous avoider of formulae” and who “refrains from states that pretend to be literally true,” knowing that her “truths are the truths of experience rather than of calculation.” (164)

Neither Eliot nor Bradley consider the relationship between language and experience head-on, but it should already be clear that Eliot assumes that experiences are semantic in that they always possess significance and meaning. That is why they need to be protected from repetition, emotionalism and uniformity. So even if Eliot was not interested in establishing connections between his academic philosophy, his literary journalism and his poetry, it follows from his philosophical work that, 1) the critic’s task is to objectify experiences by closely attending to the literary work. The more concrete the quality of attention to words on the page, the greater the objectivity and particularity of the literary experience; and 2) criticism’s task will be to assess experiences in terms of a significance which is to be measured, in the first instance, by their remoteness from the commonplace as well as from private arbitrariness.

Eliot’s early criticism extends and breaks from his commentary on Bradley by distinguishing the work of emotion from that of intelligence and contemplation, since now it is emotion, whether the reader’s or writer’s, that is associated with the “accidents of personal association” (Eliot 1928, 6) extrinsic to the literary work itself. In something of a conceptual leap, this means that intelligent appreciation of literature engages with content only secondarily. Such appreciation primarily attends to “structure” and medium both in the individual work and in the a-temporal order of literature as a whole. We can put it like this: for Eliot, literary form is to content roughly as experience is to the object. The first provides the structuring conditions for the second. Critical attention to form starves the merely personal response: it staves off subjectivity. This heightening of form’s functionality, along with the insistence that form is experience’s vehicle enables Eliot to think that successful literature involves an “extinction of personality” on the reader and writer’s behalf. Nonetheless good literature uses its medium both so that “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (56) and so that “sensory experiences” are sufficiently objectified to invoke a particular emotion. (100) For criticism tuned to consider literature like this, the literary text is fundamentally uninterpretable: (“qua work of art the work of art cannot be interpreted” (96)) in the same way that one experience cannot be translated into another experience. It is because literature is primarily experiential that texts are uninterpretable, just as it is because literature is experience that its forms may become fragmented into discrete evocative moments. Nor—and this is crucially important— can critics establish general rules or principles as criterion for judgment in their acts of discrimination: the threats of abstraction and routinization restrict them to comparing one literary text to another, mutely.

At this point Eliot turns to history, since, as he argues in his essay on Phillip Massinger, in England the capacity to experience deteriorated soon after John Donne’s death, when the “intellect ceased to be at the tip of the senses” and when the language became less and less capable of providing “new and sudden combinations.” Otherwise put, after about 1640, literary language became more disjoined from the object (i.e. from the attended/evoked experience) (149). Indeed by Swinburne’s time “language uprooted [had] adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment” (149). This means that literary critics are involved in a struggle “against the continual deterioration of language” (8) in relation to experience. The critic’s weapon in this struggle is an organized attention to 1) literary structure, 2) literary tradition and 3) the new writing in which that tradition may be extended and transformed. In effect, Eliot is urging a dehistoricised historicism: a double temporality in which modern history progressively disjoins language from experience, while the literary tradition, in changing shape each time it welcomes a new work, protects language’s adequacy to experience from history’s predations.

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Eliot’s program first took academic shape with I.A. Richards. This is surprising since Richards’s intellectual orientation was very different from Eliot’s. He had been a student of the anti-idealist G.E. Moore and had interests in academic psychology (especially Gestalt theory, psychoanalysis and Pavlovian behaviorism) as well as the new language-centred “analytic” philosophy which Moore helped develop after 1920. Richards began teaching English literature at Cambridge in 1919, and in 1926, when the subject was given a new curriculum and placed in the Faculty of Archeology and Anthropology so as to detach it from Philology, he was hired as a University lecturer. That appointment acknowledged that Principles of Literary Criticism had legitimated the new field by offering it a means of removing itself from belle-lettrism as well as from philology.

Richards grounded literary studies as a discipline both intellectually and practically by reformulating Eliot’s project for a modernized version of Collins’s institutional activism, on the basis of the latest scientific psychology. In Principles of Literary Criticism, he is concerned first to demonstrate the social value of the aesthetic in general: “What is the value of the arts?” he begins by asking (Richards 1928, 4), and answers that the aesthetic realm provides uniquely complex, unified, and harmoniously structured experiences. This appeal to experience is crucial since once again the transitivity of literary and lived experiences allows literature to salve social damage. Aesthetic experiences are also ethically essential for historical reasons. Richards, like Arnold and Churton Collins before him, contends that literary experience can resist the “commercialism” that threatens a “transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination.” (36) But he argues further that “customs change more slowly than conditions” (56) and, this being so, art is where new conditions first produce coherent and stable experiences proper both to human potential and to the times, namely experiences that neither tear affect from thought, nor are bound to reactionary “occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness” (58), nor to the limiting discourse of virtue and vice (61). In Science and Poetry (1926), the literary experience forms the endpoint of a radically immanent and anti-religious worldview in which “experience is its own justification” (79) and which alone can stimulate what is truly valuable, “the fullest, keenest, most active and completest kind of life.” (41)

Richards departs from Eliot by the force with which he insists that literary texts communicate. It is this that requires their formalization, their use of symbols (i.e. of experiences that elicit other experiences) and their stripping away of “personal particularities” (78). For him, to repeat, aesthetic experience is uniquely valuable in that it enables a Schillerian harmonization of faculties, yet it is because literature presents experience within an organized verbal communication, that “keeps it from being a mere welter of disconnected impulses.” (Richards 1926, 36.) Nonetheless the transmission of experience trumps the transmission of meaning: poets and their readers are to be interested not in what “a poem says….but what it is” (Richards 1926: 34-35), just because the poem communicates not a message or a truth but a significant experience. It’s in these terms that, for Richards, literary works can become “simply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others” (32). And, in a further (leftish) move, he claims that literary texts may stimulate wider social co-operation (136) on the grounds that their communicability shelters impersonality and stable experiences.
As to criticism: while teaching at Cambridge, Richards launched an ethnographical project on students and colleagues, recording their responses to anonymous poems of varying quality. (Richards 1929, 4) What he found was that students typically failed to understand not so much what the poems said as what they expressed. Students did not grasp “the experience, the mental conditions relevant to the poems.” (10) As a result, he realized that criticism must focus on a poem’s “minute particulars” for only then could its experiental ambivalence, suggestiveness, nuances and complex admixtures of thought and emotion be uncovered. Here again, it’s a poem’s psychological rather than linguistic complexity that neither any casual attention nor any constative proposition can catch. And Richards carefully itemizes the various kinds of response that prevent readers from distinguishing between significant experiences and routinized ones. Such bad reading habits include, “mnenomic irrelevances”, “stock responses”, “sentimentality”, “inhibitions”, and “doctrinal adhesions.” Richards also notes two crippling professional presuppositions—first, those that he calls “technical” i.e. the false assumption that it is the poem’s use of language rather than its effect upon us that is the proper object of critical attention (whose consequence will be “dogmatic pronouncements upon detail” (277)), and, then, “critical presuppositions”, that is, any theory about, or any application of rules for, what a poem should be or do (283). In the end, just as a poem requires careful attention because it is an expression of an experience rather than a mere linguistic artifact, criticism must neither lapse into rule-bound judgement nor into interpretation since it needs to judge whether “new experience can or cannot be taken into the fabric [of past experiences and developed habits of mind] with advantage.” (285)

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Although F.R. Leavis modified his position in important ways across the course of his career, all his writing remain recognizably within the paradigm established by his immediate Eliot and Richards. (Unlike Eliot and Richards, Leavis fought in the war, of which he was indeed a serious trauma victim.) Indeed it is with Leavis and his followers that modern academic criticism revealed its full potentiality as well as its limits. That’s because, especially after about 1940 when his aim to stimulate a serious reading public through his journal Scrutiny floundered, Leavis was committed to harnassing the education system’s full power on literary criticism’s behalf. By that time Eliot and Richards were elsewhere engaged: Eliot, in retreat from capitalist modernity, had turned to High Anglicanism, and Richards, working in Harvard’s Education Faculty, was working to extend communicative rationality and critical literacy. But Leavis was building an institution he called the English School. He and his followers established journals; built bridges between the tertiary and secondary sectors; fixed a canon (in which the requirements of the curriculum magically harmonized with the heritage’s number of masterworks); and fostered academic disciples.

At Leavism’s core lay a classroom moment in which the critic-teacher guided students to value the best writing as Eliot and Richards understood it. In a seminar discussion, the teacher asked students to compare passages by attending to the concreteness of each—especially in their tropes—as well as to how tightly form cohered to content, a collective act of attention in which in which any signifier might be revealed as unexpectedly important. This careful scrutiny, attuned to fine surprises, culminated not simply in the teacher offering a definitive judgment of the text’s capacity to objectify a full and significant experience but in their then pointing to words on the page and asking the students: “that’s so, isn’t it”? This authoritative solicitation of student assent was only contingently attached to interpretation, since for Leavis as for Eliot and Richards, interpretation as such would smother and personalize the discrimination of experiences. It is worth noting that, in the Leavisite classroom, authoritative solicitation of an assent to judgment after analysis repeats the freedom/necessity relation within Kantian aesthetics, since the teacher-critic requires the student’s assent to an act of judgment in order for the student’s literary experience to be free, while the teacher’s insistence on a particular judgment is necessary if that freedom is not to fall prey to arbitrariness and subjectivism.
Yet the first literary-critical category to feel the stress under Leavisitism is experience. For Leavis, literature, at its best, was able to evoke less “the ordinary experience of life in time” and more, experiences of “supremely illuminating significance” as he put it in response to Eliot’s Four Quartets. (Leavis 1943, 92). So the literary canon becomes less a register of impersonal, harmonious, full and punctual encounters with the world and more a suggestion or symbol of unworlded possibilities, orientation towards which, however, is a moral accomplishment. The literary experience becomes less a balanced Erlebnis and more an elevated Erfahrung, often directed towards an unrealized future. And in Leavis’s later work, the aspirational character of the literary experience is conceived of as a vital creativity—the “living principle”—which drives both great writers and great critics, and which supplements actual fallen social conditions.
Leavis’s replacement of Erlebnis by Erfahrung is partly driven by his having a more sociological understanding than Eliot and Richards’s. For him the connection between social structures and individual experience is so strong that the experiental flow from reading to living to which Richards in particular was committed cannot easily be affirmed. After all individuals are formed socially rather than ethically through their reading. It is clear that Leavis’s years of teaching, his sensitivity to the hierarchical nature of the education system, along with his close connections to secondary-school English, meant that he fully understood the difficulties not just of effectively teaching criticism but of the barriers in using literature to realize and perfect experience in the larger world.

The second category to feel the stress was history. When, in 1943, Leavis presented a detailed curriculum for an English school, commentators were surprised how much history, or rather historical sociology, it contained. Topics he presented for discussion included “Calvinism to Puritan individualism”, “Church and State”, “The reaction against Whig history”, “The rise of Capitalism”, “Economic individualism”, “The causes of the civil war”, “The revolution of 1688”, “the social-economics correlations of literary history”, ‘the rise of the Press.” (Leavis 1943, 52-53). In effect, he fleshed out and extended Eliot’s Tory history by connecting it to the Hammonds’ left-liberal account of industrialization’s destructive wake; Tawney’s Christian Socialist critique of capitalism’s impact upon community and charity; some of Christopher Dawson’s right-wing Catholic polemics against the enlightenment, as well as contemporary works of sociology like the Lynds’ Middletown. Leavisite literary criticism was, then, based on a counter-capitalist, or, as he later put it, a counter-“technological-Benthamite” historiography. For the younger Leavis especially, one could not be a literary critic except against liberal democratic capitalism. But he also recognized that what he believed to be industrial capitalism’s predecessor, a Tawneyesque “organic society,” could not be returned to, and could survive as a truncated memory only in the university and the English school itself. So for him the universities are not just “the recognized symbols of cultural tradition” but cultural tradition and order’s “directing force” “having an authority that should check and control the blind drive onward of material and mechanical development, with its human consequences.” (Leavis 1943, 16) Yet the university—and especially the English school—could shelter only a small minority. Especially in the aftermath of the second world war and the incorporation of the wider university sector into social-democratic state planning, Leavis’s task was to extend this minority into the population through the education system, without losing sight of the fact that the conditions for genuine criticism did not exist in society as such, and would thus only be available to the elect.

I cannot here spell out the various routes through which Eliot, Richards and Leavis’s project floundered. It is enough to say that Leavism never took hold in the US. American new criticism, in accommodating itself to liberal capitalism, to the Cold War machinery of state as well as to the requirements of professional reproduction, elaborated close-reading techniques first developed by Richards’ student William Empson, and quickly succumbed to the heresy of interpretation and to what Leavis himself denounced as the seconding of “the sense of value” to mere ingenuity. (Leavis 1943, 71-72. To take an important early test-case: R.P. Blackmur, probably the major American critic closest to Leavism and whom Leavis published in the thirties, rarely engaged in close-reading as experiental discrimination. Despite his sense that modernization has produced an intolerable society, whose lacks and failures literature best allows us to sense and know, Blackmur is more interested in sensitively defining a text or oeuvre’s particular literary mode (which is also a “mode of the psyche”) than in pointing to literature’s possibilities for life as literary criticism originally demanded.

Within Leavism itself, the pedagogy of authorized assent became routinized: Leavisite students dutifully and ceaselessly repeated the party line in a submissiveness which contradicted everything that literary criticism stood for. And Leavism came undone along another track when the post-war left-Leavisites—and in particular Raymond Williams —found criticism’s value less in the transmission of what Williams too could call “valuable experience” than in its relation to the institutions and collectivities in which “a set of conventional rules” could be converted “into an organic and contemporary body of judgment.” (Williams 1950, 29) That’s because literary experience was regarded as increasingly remote from ordinary life in society. The presentism that inheres in this move also meant that the category of experience was more radically historicized, and the experiential value supposedly preserved in great writing further diminished. Discrimination gradually became ideology critique. In the same period, that avant-garde critique which also urged the importance of literary experience as a category and insisted on experience as a form of impersonality—I am thinking in particular of Bataille and Blanchot’s writings of the forties and fifties—did not, however, privilege experiences which united feeling and thought, but those which negate and contest social living.

After 1968, the supposition that language was coextensive with experience also came undone, language being regarded as either autonomous from, or constitutive of, experience. Language’s divorce from experience was now shaped as academic orthodoxy. And in a twinned move, the universalism of the modernist category of experience was denounced. Whose experiences were Eliot, Richards and Leavis talking about? Upon what social system does any ‘significant experience’ rest? Whose particular interests lie cloaked in literary experience’s claim to significance and universality?

And so, a century on, nothing positive remains of modern literary criticism in its original form, barely even a memory.

The obvious lesson to be learnt from all this is that literary criticism cannot return to origins in any restorative spirit. Nonetheless my feeling is that there are few alternatives to this barred return. English can no doubt continue as an academic discipline without any commitment to the modernist literary criticism which first informed it, but only at the cost of its sense of purpose. This means that the field does need to try to re-assert—or reconnoiter—literary criticism’s fundamental suppositions in dialogue, admittedly, with the post-1968 transformations of the field and within a pedagogy that avoids coerced assent. To remind us again, those suppositions are 1) that great literature preserves valuable forms of experience so that criticism cannot succumb to populism, to pluralism or to cultural democracy; 2) in literary texts, form is inseparable from content, with the first requiring particular pedagogic attention; 3) that an enlightened metaphysics of immanence is a condition for ascribing a supreme value to literary experience; 4) literature, as criticism shapes it, exists both inside and outside of history, and 5) that the literary canon and its servants oppose democratic state capitalism and its commercial media;. We cannot, as I say, be confident that a criticism based on such propositions can now be articulated. If it were, it would likely be most energized by the last item on that list, by its left-conservative resistance to democratic capitalism. And it would remain the province of a minority much smaller than even Leavis imagined. In effect, criticism after the modernist epoch, will be an esoteric craft compelled to demonstrate literature’s social and experiential strength in terms that accommodate themselves to a society for which its purposes are either meaningless, obsolete or dangerously illiberal, a society for which, in turn, criticism can have no compelling respect.

To conceive of literary criticism like this is to echo Leo Strauss’s view that philosophers qua philosophers cannot wholly belong to their society because they must think outside the presuppositions and beliefs that enable social stability. It’s not of course that literary critics, like Strauss’s philosophers, need to believe too little to be wholly socialized, on the contrary they need to believe too much. Nonetheless, Strauss’s insistence on the distance between philosophy and society, and especially his defense of esotericism, do help us imagine literary criticism’s future. They help us anticipate the reserve that is required to re-imagine and re-activate the discipline: the ways in which anti-capitalist and less than fully democratic literary critics in the age of managerialism will not be able to be completely open and transparent either with university administrators or with their students. And I say this despite having no regard for Strauss’s own reactionary articulation of “liberal education,” where he shows no understanding of why the positive concepts he invokes—notably “education to perfect gentlemanliness”—became obsolete during the violent emergence of contemporary global capitalism, being pushed aside by the categories of experience and historicity as we’ve seen. (Strauss 1995, 6) But of all the academic intellectuals who worked in the modernist era, Strauss retained the strongest corporate sense of the consequences of thinking against the times. And to be a literary critic now and in any foreseeable future is, more than ever, to think against the times, especially, as I say, where critics find themselves working in highly managed universities.


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