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By Root 859 0

literature, the civilization it belongs to,” has itself been the matter of considerable debate. As for the transgression Brooks calls “the final abuse of criticism,” which he describes somewhat tendentiously as “to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself”52—this creates a dichotomy between analysis and experience that is worth unpacking. A truly unmediated experience of art would stand apart from all the helping mechanisms Brooks enumerates, from explanatory footnotes to kindly reassurance. “My toddler can paint (write, play, act) better than that” or “I don’t know much about art (poetry, novels, movies), but I know what I like” is, arguably, the experience or, rather, an experience of “art itself.” In fact, what is the “itself,” the self-identity, of literature?

The literary critic, in this model, is an intermediary, a translator, a guide. Like other members of “helping professions” (medicine, social work, therapy, counseling, clinical psychology), the critic enables, intercedes, advises, nurtures, ministers, sometimes even corrects. But this is not the role, or the only role, that literary and cultural critics, scholars and theorists play either in today’s academy or in today’s journals, magazines, blogs, or electronic media. Since the time of Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Samuel Johnson, extending through Samuel Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, to the present day, strong critics have been read and considered “primary” as well as “secondary” authors. Any serious inquiry into the use of literature must take into consideration the idea that criticism and interpretation are not inevitably helping or parasitic behaviors, but part of the life of the work of art.

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The fortunes of literary studies have gone up and down during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same volatility as the stock market. And like the stock market, the market in literary studies can be charted with confidence only with the benefit of hindsight.

English studies held the comfortable middle ground of the humanities in U.S. and Anglophile/Anglophone universities through the middle part of the twentieth century. The combined heritage of belletrism and the “little magazines” imparted a certain gloss of creativity and artiness to the practice of reading and writing about poems, novels, plays, and what was then often described as “intellectual prose”—works like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, or Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Practices like textual explication, often cognate with or imported from the study of other European languages and literatures—were partnered with literary history, thematic criticism, and the study of images, tropes, and what was called literary influence (the indebtedness and echoes of one literary work to another) whether such influence was deemed serene or “anxious.” Intertextuality, a term borrowed from the French, offered an adjustment to the question of influence by seeing it as a two-way street, and by emphasizing the agency of the text over that of the controlling author. Texts could converse with one another whether or not the author was consciously speaking or listening. The conscious/unconscious borderline was a natural topic for scholars steeped in the heritage of romanticism, whether or not they acknowledged the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the development of twentieth-century art and culture.

An infusion of exciting and provocative theoretical writing, again largely continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the UK, made “literary studies”—or, more properly then, “literary theory”—the star, and in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices like semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and literature itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction,