The Golden Age of Criticism: Seven Theses and a Commentary

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 15 · 3 September 1987

From Gerald Graff

SIR: In ‘The Golden Age of Criticism’ (LRB, 25 June) W.J.T. Mitchell misrepresents my views on current academic literary criticism, expressed in Criticism in the University, edited by Reginald Gibbons and myself (1985). Mitchell takes a position which is actually sympathetic to his own defence of current theory and criticism and makes it sound as if it is antagonistic.

Mitchell confuses me with the more conservative contributors to Criticism in the University (i.e. Donald Davie and Wendell Berry), a diverse collection of essays from opposing ideological standpoints which Mitchell misrepresents as ‘nothing if not single-minded’. In order to make this conflation, Mitchell twists my statements out of recognition: ‘Gerald Graff complains that “recent literary theory has become a private enclave” on one page, then laments the assimilation of my theory as “traditional” practice in the literary curriculum two pages later.’ What I actually said was that since all the academic literary fields are more or less ‘private enclaves’ from a lay point of view, it is unfair to single out theorists for blame in this respect. What I lamented was not the assimilation of literary theory into the curriculum, but the assimilation of theory as one more field to be ‘covered’, so that ‘the rest of the faculty is free to ignore the issues theorists raise.’

In other words, my point was that it is not the much-abused self-enclosure of academic theory and criticism which has created problems for literary education, but the failure of the university to foreground relations between courses, specialisations and critical positions so that students and laymen would be able to make sense of them. I was objecting not to the academic institutionalisation of literary theory, as Mitchell supposes, but to a particular mode of institutionalisation which masks ideological conflicts and deprives theory of much of its educational potential. As I put it, ‘the university is like a family in which the parents hide their conflicts from the children.’ I presented theory as a means of bringing these repressed conflicts out in the open, and concluded by praising the model of cultural studies, as conceived by Raymond Williams and others, as a promising trend.

In other words, my essay made the very point Mitchell makes, that we should value contemporary theory for its generalising power. Yet Mitchell presents it as if it were an outright dismissal of such theory: to me, he says, the idea is ‘quite unthinkable’ that ‘the success of theoretical criticism, feminism or Marxism in the academy could have anything to do with the intellectual excitement they generate, the cognitive results they produce, or the cultural needs they fulfil’. To propound this amazing falsification, Mitchell had to ignore, not only my general commendations of theoretical criticism and my endorsement of Williams’s cultural studies model, but also my praise of structuralism, ‘semiotics, popular cultural studies, the new social history inspired by Continental thought’, and of ‘speech-act theory, pragmatics, and various forms of current reader-response criticism’. He had, too, to ignore my inclusion in the book, as co-editor, of essays from Marxist, feminist and Post-Structuralist viewpoints. It’s true that I did express strong disagreements with particular versions of current theory, but to dissent from certain theories is hardly to oppose the theory-movement as such.

Gerald Graff
Northwestern University, Illinois

From Elisabeth Underwood

SIR: Until I realised that Edward Said and Stanley Fish write literary criticism, I was convinced that W.J.T.Mitchell was a teenage music fan writing about his rock idols. Edward Said, as ‘academic superstar’, ‘exemplifies the fulfilment of … fantasy’. Stanley Fish, writing about Pride and Prejudice, ‘is, as we say, “too much” ’. (I can see him now, at the climax of a seminar, biting through the neck of his guitar.) These heart-throbs are at the centre of a ‘new sort of … culture’,which the old regard as ‘an inexplicable temptation for the young’.

I was struck by the fact that Mr Mitchell’s idols, unlike the idols of rock music, are exclusively male. Have the literary theorists no Madonna to worship?

Elisabeth Underwood
New York

Vol. 9 No. 16 · 17 September 1987

From W.J.T. Mitchell

SIR: I’m pleased to learn that Gerald Graff (Letters, 3 September) regards his position as sympathetic to the view of critical theory I expressed in ‘The Golden Age of Criticism’ (LRB, 25 June), but chagrined at the possibility that I may have misrepresented his views as more antagonistic to theory than they actually are. If I have been guilty of a misrepresentation, I hereby apologise. Certainly Graff is the best judge of his own intentions, and I accept his present expression of them. I hope he will also accept my assurances that no distortion of his views was intended: I was simply trying to identify some recurrent features in the negative view of critical theory expressed in Criticism in the University, and I picked out those moments in his essay that seemed to fit that pattern, no doubt with insufficient regard for the particular differences among many of the contributors. On at least one point, however, I think Graff misunderstands me. When I characterised Criticism in the University as ‘single-minded’, I did not claim that all the contributors shared a single ideology: I did mean to say that many of them (despite other differences) agreed in regarding ‘the university and the appropriation of criticism by academic culture’ as the ‘villain’. The title of Graff’s article (‘The University and the Prevention of Culture’) and many of his statements (‘the university’ is charged with ‘blocking or muffling’ real critical communication and conflict) do make it seem that Graff shares Donald Davie’s sense that academic institutions are the real problem. Graff does, unlike him, have some proposals for reformation of the university to remedy what he sees as the university’s ‘failure to bring specialisations into relation with one another in any planned way’. We could argue about exactly what shape this master-plan is to take, and who might be qualified to impose it. I’m sceptical about the feasibility and desirability of institutional solutions to intellectual problems, but I’m willing to listen.

With regard to Graff’s claim that I misrepresent his view of theory as a private enclave as something unique to theory: it is true that Graff makes the (contestable) claim that ‘all academic fields’ are esoteric enclaves to the ‘lay public’, but he also goes on to qualify this point by suggesting that the more traditional fields still have a ‘sentimental pretence’ that they have an ‘audience outside the field’, in contrast to critical theory, which has ‘simply abandoned this pretence’, and delights in ‘flaunting its difficulty and esotericism’. I took this to mean that some enclaves (particularly critical theory’s) are more enclave-ish than others. Graff does seem to agree with my claim that he ‘laments’ the ‘assimiliation’ of criticism as a field among others. What I’m wrong about, evidently, is the source of the lamentation: Graff seems to want theory to provide the overall structure for reformation of the university, so that real communication and conflict may be brought about in a ‘planned way’. Perhaps some theory, somewhere, some day may accomplish this feat; again, I’m sceptical. But I fail to see how theory can leap to the task of overall reformation of academic institutions without first taking the modest step of establishing itself as a field or specialty, with all the hazards that entails. I don’t agree with Graff’s certainty that ‘the assimilation of theory as a field’ leaves the ‘rest of the faculty free to ignore the issues’ it raises. Would a refusal to treat theory as a ‘field’ force colleagues to confront it? Or would it simply make theory a nonexistent category in the practical affairs of literary study?

I plead guilty, then, to an oversimplification of Graff’s position, and to a possible misunderstanding of his ideological position vis-à-vis the ‘conservatives’ he wants to distance himself from. But I do hope it is clear how Graffs all-or-nothing rhetoric can invite such misunderstandings (not to mention his earlier, much less qualified attacks on theory in Literature against Itself). I’m delighted to see the leopard can change his spots.

W.J.T. Mitchell
University of Canterbury, New Zealand