The Problematic State of Literature

...Their task is not easy...

...Under the inspiration of earlier rediscovered of America—Van Wyck Brooks, V. L. Parrington, Lewis Mumford, and the D. H. Lawrence of Studies in Classic American Literature?they supplied a priesthood for a myth of American uniqueness revealed in sacred writings...

...396 pp...

...it will bear not merely on techniques and approaches but on the very value and continuing possibility of what is being done there...

...It was in the early '50s, too, that the term "problematic" was popularized for the French by Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot...

...Respect for T. S. Eliot and the ironic ambiguities of the New Criticism kept the movement from being too simply programmatic and political...

...Hartman's, containing the essays of 12 years, ranges most widely and learnedly, and is least dominated by a thesis...

...When the end of World War II supposedly determined this to be the "American century," our literature-based mystique became an article of export...

...Born of the social concerns of the '30s, the American Studies programs were even more ambitious...

...The great text for alienation is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit...

...It is a "libidinized space, something like a dream space, in that it is built out of the body or felt to be an extension of the body...

...In a difficult, crucial essay on Blanchot, Hartman says that for this novelist of psychic alienation art "is intrinsically linked to the quest for and the impossibility of realizing the self via symbols...

...Even this broad distinction, however, does not hold when Frye turns to actual history, and contrasts Shelley's romantic defense of poetry with that of Sidney, a Renaissance humanist...

...Literature is now in the process of telling us how little it means...

...To the reverent exegesis of selected literary texts it brought a heritage of "values" that had hitherto been the prerogative of departments of religion and philosophy...

...One clue to the situation lies in the vogue-word "problematic," given currency in this country by Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature, published in 1953...

...But now literature is no longer able to carry the burdens teachers formerly assigned to it, partly because of what has happened to literature, partly because of what is happening to youth everywhere, and partly because of what has gone wrong with America...

...With the '60s, the four critics agree, we entered again upon an overtly historical period...

...Feidelson held that the American classics were interesting not because of any relation to democracy but because they were a branch of the European symbolist movement, with American peculiarities dating back to Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans...

...Like Blake, from whom Frye's archetypal interests arose, Shelley linked poetry, imagination and freedom, but precisely in opposition to analytic rationalism...

...Writing about Emerson, Whitman and Henry James in The Imperial Self, Quentin Anderson provides a subtle, closely reasoned and—considering the radical nature of his rejections—strangely assured epitaph to this tradition of which he is both heir and destroyer...

...a host of nativist books followed, many of them by students of Matthiessen and his colleague at Harvard, Perry Miller...

...But taken together, in their choral response to crisis, confusion and contradiction, these books show how extremely difficult—or "problematic"—the teaching of literature has become, except for those who somehow can cling blindly to the old assumptions...

...They had, Poir-ier says, been kept outside history and society in a prolonged adolescence that "has become socially and economically unprofitable, demo-graphically unmanageable and biologically comic...

...His writing, and Anderson's, is heavily freighted, rich in specific references...

...Geoffrey Hartman says, "the theory of literature, like literature itself, seems to have entered the crisis stage...

...203 pp...

...They are critical, rational, analytical...

...The Performing Self By Richard Poirier Oxford...

...A period of intense reexamination is at hand in the universities...

...Symbolist writing—highly self-conscious—is "problematic not merely in the sense in which every literary symbol is indeterminate, but more specifically in the sense that its characteristic subject is its own equivocal method...

...12.50...

...This is a disastrous realization for a committed teacher...

...It found its first full expression in F. O. Mat-thiessen's American Renaissance of 1941...

...Now Frye is attempting to encompass history on his own terms by establishing what he calls "myths of freedom" and "myths of concern...

...The cure, though, is often worse than the disease...

...Though everything Northrop Frye writes offers incidental rewards, this particular attempt is not very successful...

...They cannot create or sustain a society, and must be subordinate to myths of concern...

...In an essay called "The Politics of Self-Parody," Poirier says, "It is an exasperating fact, then, that it takes such a lot of time, a part of one's life, to discover in some of the most demanding of contemporary literature, that its creators are as anxious to turn you off as to turn you on, that they want to show not the decisiveness but rather the triviality of literary structuring...

...He condemns the postwar American critics for endorsing without fully understanding an earlier American flight from culture and civilization, one that takes on more complete form among the students today...

...Whitman could be revived in the '50s by that "embryon of post-social man" Allen Ginsberg "because the world of differentiated social and sexual role was cracking, slipping and fading away...

...Myths of freedom are based on "truths of correspondence," on self-validating criteria rather than on authority...

...Poirier is perhaps most specific in his essays on the Beatles and rock festivals...

...Northrop Frye's The Critical Path is a thorough-going attempt to redefine literature in the face of this threatened destruction from within and without...

...In his title essay, Hartman examines critically Georges Poulet's study of James where "the problematics of the Jamesian consciousness derive from this situation in which form is impossible except as a self-constituted and always illusory act...

...6.50...

...Rejecting Matthiessen's thesis...

...to protect their art, French writers "have to fight Marxism on its own ground...

...but art is not itself conscious, so French critics feel free to seek the consciousness behind it in ways shocking to New Critical proprieties...

...For Frye, myths of concern are socially cohesive, require belief and obedience, and have church and state as their instrumentalities...

...This misassessment of the American classics was part of the "grim comedy" of the 1940s and '50s, when we asked ourselves "anxiously why we no longer had political imaginations, political concerns...

...With the influence of Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl, German metaphysics?supposedly killed in Vienna and Cambridge 40 years ago—has invaded in perplexingly different ways the "spaces" within which individual French writers create...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University THESE four books of criticism by professors at Columbia, Toronto, Yale, and Rutgers overlap dramatically in their troubled sense of what is happening to literature and to the teaching of literature...

...Frye and Poirier write more in generalities...

...In France, Hartman says, "Marxism gives Hegel a redoubled voice...

...Since the Romantic movement the artistic consciousness has been estranged or alienated, in problematic relation to society and those objects of the external world, including words, it must employ to realize itself...

...At a number of points in Beyond Formalism, Hartman criticizes Frye for both rejecting history and demystifying myth...

...In those years the work of Henry James occupied an unjustifiably privileged position...

...Beyond Formalism By Geoffrey H. Hartman Yale...

...Using "myth" in a loose, almost popular sense, he pretty well abandons the highly elaborated archetypal structure that gave character to his Anatomy of Criticism and enabled us, since Frye is so perceptive a reader, to see much of the literary past in fresh perspective...

...Emerson, Whitman and James, Anderson says, tried to absorb the world into the self and make a verbal concord that was possible only if the realities of history and society were ignored...

...At the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, established with Matthiessen's help, and through innumerable Fulbright professorships, it developed as a humanistic complement to the Marshall plan...

...We had begun to occupy something like Whitman's psychic space...

...He, too, is writing after the student disturbances of 1968...

...Art is supposed to give us access to other consciousnesses...

...It comes after a long era in which the Department of English—its emphasis shifting from traditional scholarship to interpretative criticism and from past literature to present—dominated the humanities...

...In his preface Richard Poirier writes, "Literature has come to register the dissolution of the ideas often evoked to justify its existence...

...These four books differ greatly in form...

...This at first seems remote from the equally alienated consciousness of American students...

...All four critics know what it is to teach students brought up on tv and rock music, many of whom admire Beckett and Godard and are ready to echo An-tonin Artaud's cry, "No more masterpieces...

...This mot d'ordre envisions, Hartman says, a nonhumanistic society "without masters or father...

...Anderson, whose first chapter is called "The Failure of the Fathers," sees this development already foreshadowed in Emerson and Whitman...