Closed-Circuit Readings

...He shows American universities now hit by wave after wave of exotic postwar theorizing directly from Germany or from Germany by way of France...

...Leitch's last three chapters are "Feminist Criticism," "Black Esthetics," and "Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s...

...Total rejection in politics went along with total rejection in art and philosophy...

...These projects made the collaborators primarily Americanists and historians, writing not for themselves but the educated public...

...Where students a generation before read voluntarily in common at least Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, later freshmen read voluntarily nothing at all...

...They took over the Modem Language Association, organized conferences, published book after book through the university presses, received grants, founded magazines with names like Enclitic, Semeia and Boundary 2. Their impenetrable vocabulary was a professional badge...

...He is talking about a succession of no less than 13 overlapping American schools of literary theory and their 50 years of complicated disputes about what, as they put it, the "critical act entails"— or should not entail, or deceives itself about entailing...

...Only to record ideas is he interested in them...

...These are not matters to be taken lightly...

...Bred of the same culture as the students, they not only ruled out each other's theories, they ruled out most "great literature" itself, especially as the Establishment canon decided on it...

...What it will do for literature and literary theory is hard to predict, but it is bound to end the appalling hermeticism and self-absorption to which so much of Leitch's history is devoted...

...Beckett's plays were an "interminable 'ontologjcal stammer' in the face of the void...

...At the same time Alan Bloom and Secretary of Education William J. Bennett have carried the battle directly into the colleges...

...The ideas and terms in Leitch's history are mostly carried over from theology, philosophy, politics, anthropology, linguistics, and even economics...

...Already disputable in their own field, they become doubly disputable when applied to literature...

...The ideas cancel each other out, and keep the work of our brightest scholars unavailable both to the general reading public and to the imaginative writers, themselves unfocused and confused...

...If they remain so after American Literary Criticism from the '30s to the '80s it is because Leitch in this massively detailed history—the index contains some 1,500 names and titles—tries to do too much...

...Derrida criticized the post-Freudian Jacques Lacan as "logocentric" for giving that "most peerless signifier, the phallus" a transcendental position in his theories...

...It is with the next five of Leitch's chapters that the going gets rough...

...Each leaf is, as it were, numbered and positioned on a chart...

...The Black estheticists are against past literature because it is whitedominated...

...Like those he quotes, Leitch loves categories, technical terms, schemes, systems, itemized lists...

...It all started with the remarkable Emerson revival of the past few years and with the collaboration of advanced literary theorists in producing the Columbia Literary History of the United States, published last December, and the Cambridge History of American Literature, scheduled for publication in 1990...

...Leitch, who is co-director of the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, explains that he uses a "schools and movements" approach as the best way of "lending coherence to the works of the 75 or so critics treated here...

...If we mean by the term what the ordinary reader expects to find when he comes upon an engaging piece by V.S...

...It was dangerous because it could cut both ways...

...Some New Critics attempted to establish an orthodoxy that would rule out the "didactic heresy," "the biographical heresy," "the affective fallacy," "the intentional fallacy" and the like, but these proscriptions were largely ignored by the other schools and by leading New Critics themselves...

...Citibank would not even issue a credit card to majors in the liberal arts...

...Time is of the essence...

...HetellshowabookonNorthrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism required "24 diagrams and 250 pages to disentangle and elucidate Frye's total systematics...

...If there are distinctions between the Americans and the French, it is usually because the French are one step ahead of us...

...Behind him was Nietzsche, whose "rhetoricity," a favorable Deconstructionist term, opened up "vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration...

...All this intercommunication about basic principles is good for democracy and good for higher education...

...It was centered in the colleges, not the factories, and as in France reached its rebellious, violent peak in May '68...

...How could an appreciation of polite letters on the level of Lyrical Ballads or Great Expectations be instilled in generations brought up on hard rock, Captain Midnight and TheA-Teaml But a return to prescribed masterpieces was not what these teachers wanted at all...

...The literary period as a whole is called "Post-Modernism" and the political era "Late Capitalism...

...But "coherence" is hardly the word...

...He writes calmly of the death of Civilization and the Self, as if he were speaking of an ailing family dog put to sleep by the vet...

...His 13 chapters on movements of foreign origin need to be capped by a 14th, because the swing today is back to American origins and to American works that stubbornly refuse to self-destruct...

...They cover "Marxist Criticism in the 1930s, " "The New Criticism," "The Chicago School," "The New York Intellectuals," and "Myth Criticism...

...The students, too, stirred to action as they have not been for 20 years, are experimenting with vocabularies outside a Marxism that even at its most flexible no longer addresses their immediate concerns...

...How can we expect neat categories in a history that covers five decades of wars, revolutions and contending ideologies...

...Ten pages later the distinctions are impossible to remember...

...Literary theories are influenced not only by what is going on in art and life, but in the other humanities as well —all of it "problematic...

...Professor Leitch, by the way, tells us that the anti-Stalinism of the New York Intellectuals was first evident in the "Menshevism" of The New Leader...

...Largely of Continental origin, with a technical vocabulary impermeable to nonspecialists, doctrinaire theorizing has long been a self-sustaining obsession in the graduate language departments of American universities...

...Nothing new can stay so...

...Deconstructionism has no sooner become a dominant movement than the inevitable volume Beyond Deconstructionism appears...

...The New Left lasted as briefly as the Old...

...In 1967 Susan Sontag wrote that "art moved in our epoch from being a noble expression of human consciousness to being a tragic, self-estranged antidote to consciousness...

...Where previously the slogan had been "no meaning outside the text," the dominant concern became the placing of texts in a full and developing social context...

...Deconstruction went far beyond any previous Marxism or Freudian "unmasking" or "demystifying" of literature...

...We learn, for instance, that where American feminist critics "took into serious account the sex of authors, French gynesic critics, in the wake of the (post) structuralists' "death of the self,' dismissed the empirical author as a locus of fruitful inquiry...

...Deconstruction attacked as "logocentric" every doctrine that thought its signifiers (and they need not be words) were the road to truth...

...Fortunately the academic mood has changed, and rendered Leitch's book somewhat out of date...

...Marxists, because it is classdominated...

...When American theorists shift allegiance, it is from one foreign theorist to another...

...There were, of course, strong constitutive voices during the '80s, such as those of Edward Said and Frederic Jameson, who based their hopes on the Left, and of Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman at Yale, for whom Biblical exegesis had great appeal...

...To the outsider the factional disputes seem as obscure as those of Lebanon—and as murderous...

...He tells how the "innovative narratologist" Gerald Prince, taking off from Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, worked out several dozen rules of narrative structure and then demonstrated them by a 12-page algebraic description of "Little Red RidingHood...

...Liberal Humanism, guilty of all these things, is increasingly "repugnant," Leitch says, to American critics...

...Lacan, Derrida said, was "phallologocentric," which means "cocksure...

...But many New Leftists became college teachers, kept their anti-Establishment convictions and flourished, paradoxically, by exploiting them...

...Studentsof the'70s turned materialist and became MDs, LLDs and MBAs...

...Imaginative works are of interest only as they are bones of contention or are given an "exemplary reading" by a leader of a school—or "misreading," as the Yale school would insist...

...New Criticism gives way to New New Criticism...

...Members of these earlier schools did little theorizing apart from particular texts, and that little is intelligible to laymen...

...Johns Hopkins and Yale are ports of entry, but the new ideas keep their foreign accents and dress...

...They arise, gather adherents, split into factions, join with other movements, disappear...

...Their driving emotions were entirely extraliterary...

...At times the word "American" in Leitch's title also seems a misnomer...

...About the effect of all this Leitch in his conclusion has absolutely nothing to say...

...A text was only interprétable from other texts, and of intertextuality there was no end...

...Yet in Leitch's 20-page index the names of Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, John Berryman, and Thomas Pynchon do not appear at all...

...Pritchett or Alfred Kazin in, say, the New York Times Book Review, Leitch is not talking about literary criticism at all...

...They have forced the radical literary theorists, for whom Deconstructionism was admittedly a political cop-out, to defend their positions in publicly intelligible terms...

...With the civil rights movement of the '60s and resistance to the Vietnam War, a New Left developed...

...With the declining enrollment in the humanities some of these theorists were reduced to teaching remedial English to students who, far from being able to read Heidegger or Husserl, were hardly literate enough to fill out an application for a driver'slicense...

...But they shared too many of its assumptions to do much to counter the disintegrative effect of most of the theorizing that Leitch shoots at us, 10 ideas to the page...

...Marx has given way to Louis Althusser, Freud to Jacques Lacan, Hegel to Michel Foucault...

...With its "floating signifiers," "ruptures," "insertions" and "undecidables," it brought into question any communication...

...Movements move...

...The immediate inspirer of Deconstruction was Martin Heidegger, nihilist and Nazi, who proposed, by "destroying ancient ontology," to wipe the slate of history clean and bring a new Being out of Nothingness...

...In the '60s academic events were visible to everyone...

...Not only is it hard to see his forest for the trees, but to see a tree beneath its leaves...

...Also entailed are the death of God, the death of man, the death of the "privileged work of art...

...As Leitch reminds us in the helpful historical overviews that begin each chapter, the preceding decade had seen the number of students and faculty in higher education almost double...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University The "literary criticism" of Professor Vincent B. Leitch's title is a misnomer...

...In 1971 there was great excitement among his followers and rivals when J. Hillis Miller of Johns Hopkins and then Yale switched dramatically from the Genevan phenomenology of George Poulet, which Miller had practiced in the '50s and '60s, to the French Deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida...

...A whole generation of students was taught appreciative close reading from the New Critical anthology Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Perm Warren...

...The first five chapters of this crowded history are the least difficult...

...Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction, which arrived here in the '70s, handed these rejectionists a powerful weapon...

...The titles suggest why: "Phenomenological and Existential Criticism," "Hermeneutics," "Reader-Response Criticism," "Literary Structuralism and Semiotics," "Deconstructive Criticism...