Dead Letters

Nick Gillespie from the November 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

In fact, even the most fundamental question of literary discourse--What constitutes an appropriate object of literary study?--is a topic of debate. While the openness of the field should be celebrated because it allows for greater and more varied discussion, it is easy to see why that very fluidity gives an old-line critic the shakes. You are, in effect, free to say anything--whether it's well-informed or misinformed, logical or illogical, on-target or wide of the mark. And the same freedom that allows you to speak grants others the right to ignore you.

That's not to say that anything goes, that there are no rules of discourse. It's more appropriate to say there's no single set of rules. While it's true that there is no definitive adjudicating body to settle disputes, there are all sorts of academic communities and sub- communities that weigh in with opinions (the amount of influence and power each wields varying with time and circumstance).

In the face of such intense, cacophonic competition, it is particularly incumbent upon critics to make a convincing case for why their tastes should be preferred. How is their intellectual product essential to its prospective consumer? It seems that Shaw is mistaking his weak position in the current intellectual marketplace for a structural change in the way that market operates.

Ultimately, he is wrong to direct his anger at younger critics who are merely doing what younger critics always do: knocking off graybeards. It isn't enough to rail against their excesses, overwrought as they may be. The real focus should be on those scholars, young and old alike, who share his views but fail to "direct challenges to the reigning orthodoxy." It is up to them, after all, to create an audience, a demand, for their brand of criticism. That process is not an easy or simple one--every new school of commentary, from the New Criticism to deconstructionism, has had to duke it out--but its very difficulty provides the kind of test by which new critical paradigms are developed and strengthened.

To the extent that Recovering American Literature helps cultivate a new line of literary criticism (or resuscitates a dying one), it is all to the good. We can never be at a loss for competing ways of reading our national literature. But to the considerable degree that it merely pines for a lost era in which its author felt more comfortable, it adds little to continuing conversations.

Comments

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