The State of Criticism, Part Three

We're about to settle this once and for all, champ

The proliferation of the word “project” to describe various creative undertakings, from the scholarly to the artistic, rankles: remember “science projects” in elementary school? Yes, I’m sure my second-grade study of Bernoulli’s principle was groundbreaking. More seriously, projects are bounded. The boundaries may be self-authored, they may be imposed; regardless, they often lack the capaciousness that intellectual undertakings should have, bounded as they are by the demands of convention in the guise of professionalism.

The thinking that I’ve put into this—ahem—project, thus far, has largely circled around a central question. Not an assertion, not—God forbid—an argument, but a question: What exactly is criticism? After mulling over a forensic approach, I abandoned it, thinking that this undertaking needs to be more occasional, more capricious as opposed to rigorous. I’m not embarking on a study here, and anyway who has time to read Joseph Addison? Most of what we recognize as literary criticism was non-professional up to the (wildly successful) efforts of the New Critics to professionalize it. The academy is dying, about which I have already lamented and fulminated, but in a very real way this death is a tribute to the success of John Crowe Ransom and his cohort in making “Criticism, Inc.” very, very real.

The New Critics come under fire these days mostly for their racism. Only witness the podcast Criticism, Ltd. that I referenced in my first post here. I gave up on that podcast pretty quickly, which I feel bad about. It’s very well produced and the conversations are sometimes interesting, but as I listened I found myself bored. I’d rather read Cleanth Brooks’ most dull essays than listen to a bunch of professors prattling on about the future, the past, the middle of literary criticism while I fold laundry and walk the dog. It’s nobody involved’s fault. The host and his myriad guests seem splendid enough, but the medium is wrong for the message.

But yes, the New Critics were racist. It’s true, and it’s not very interesting—modernity itself is pretty racist, seeing how race is a concept developed to justify the primary ideology underpinning modernity. Is it any wonder that the need to oppress a lesser group in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the global order trickled down to its aesthetic practitioners, particularly those coming out of the South in the early decades of the twentieth century? That aspect of New Criticism is about as close to the dustbin of history as it gets, which is why the discussion of it bores me—I found the episode of Criticism, Ltd. on that very topic quite boring. My own shortcoming, no doubt. Nonetheless, I suspect that yet another symposium on the racism of the New Critics tells us precious little new, and furthermore fails to frame their project in a new way, which is at least the one thing criticism should offer.

I’m not particularly interested in naming any of those involved in that podcast; others can listen and decide for themselves. It does feel to me like a loss, to tread that old familiar ground instead of considering anew what was so off about the New Critics, as seen from the late months of 2023. Their racism is inarguable, and uninteresting inasmuch as at least two generations of African American and postcolonial literary critics have revealed the deep racism at the core of humanistic undertaking broadly. What is far more relevant for our moment—and particularly pernicious—is the professionalism espoused by the New Critics, a gesture that indelibly yoked the act of critique to the academy in ways even the most radical practitioners of the form (largely academics themselves) can’t shake.

Partly this is a function of late-stage capitalism; few of us can be expected to hold down a non-academic job and still engage seriously with books and ideas. Neither can most people teaching in colleges and universities, for that matter. Your boss likely wouldn’t take kindly to your reading Ploughshares and The New York Review of Books in your cubicle, to say nothing of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Good luck slogging through that in your off-hours, bud. Guess you should have gone to grad school and been given the opportunity to grade piles of essays.

What I am circling around is this: if the New Critics’ racism could be seen as an articulation of their social position as Southerners of a certain time and place, a weak attempt on their part to square the circle of regionalism in a rapidly nationalizing, even globalizing economy, then their insistence on professionalism was equally reflective of their negotiation of the cultural moment. Yes, criticism needed to be lifted from the morass of impressionistic evocation; it needed to achieve the academic legitimacy of disciplines like philosophy and—particularly—philology. Yet it was this same professionalism that spelled criticism’s doom and explains in part the state of the field today.

Right-wing state legislatures and consultant-driven academic administrations have helped, of course; the humanities are over, cooked, donezo, in large part due to this obscene legislative budget-slashing and reliance on the consultant class to drive strategic planning at the administrative level. But, by the same token, many decades of professional criticism left alternatives few and far between after the governmental and administrative hammers came down. The pain of curtailed state appropriations and millions wasted on consultant fees could not be lessened by criticism’s recourse to some other realm. There was no other realm. The practice of criticism had become so irretrievably intertwined with the demand to teach ever-swelling ranks of first-year composition courses that nobody who could do anything about it had time for criticism anymore. (I employ the past tense quite deliberately. Any future must clear away that which is past, even as it limps on in an attenuated form.)

And yet, as I’ve said before, we’re in a kind of golden age of criticism. I won’t argue that; there’s (mostly digital) reams of great writing out there at present. This paradox is unshakable, which leads to the question I can’t let go of: What exactly is literary criticism? It cannot and should not be something steady across history; what it was for Addison can’t obtain for us today. Yet I can’t quite ignore the notion that the 18th century practitioners of the form had a surer sense of what they were doing than today’s critics do. They could answer the question I pose in a way that we can’t. The reason has to do with the difference between world-historical ascent and world-historical descent: they wrote on the cusp of a time of momentous change that redounded to their benefit. Today’s critics write in the ashes of that order’s apotheosis, and a viable alternative has not emerged.

For that simple reason, the question of what exactly literary criticism is cannot be ignored, but neither can it be answered. Simply, anyway.

There seems no other conclusion for now, but this: Criticism is dead! Long live criticism! May a thousand (critical) flowers bloom.