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 In
this era of budgetary belt-tightening and university press downsizing,
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism is a surprisingly
ambitious undertaking. Many years in the planning and execution, drawing
on the financial support of two major institutions (the Johns Hopkins
Press and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University
of Western Ontario), the advice of scores of academics, and the writing
of two hundred and one scholars, it aspires to be nothing less than an
overview of all of literary criticism in all cultures and times (with
an understandable emphasis on the developments of the present century).
The result is a massive, double-columned Yellow Pages of lit crit.
If it falls alphabetically between Abrams and Zola, historically between
Plato and postmodernism, intellectually between Aristotle and feminism,
or geographically between Japanese Theory and Criticism and Caribbean,
you'll find it here.
One of the problems with a
work from many hands, however, is the inevitable unevenness of the result.
While some of the entries are superb (Richard Macksey on Longinus; Richard
Shusterman on John Dewey and Richard Rorty; Martin Kreiswirth on Henry
James), many are merely pedestrian (J. Douglas Kneale on Wordsworth),
and a few downright embarrassing (Vicki Mahaffey on Modernist Theory and
Criticism). While some of the contributors bracingly point out the strengths
as well as the problem areas within their subjects, too many others function
merely as cheerleaders (Jean-Michel Rabate on Derrida and Barthes) or
as nags (Walter Kalaidjian's grousing about Susan Sontag's insufficient
attention to "the representation of gender, race, and class").
Furthermore, a work created
by committee is almost guaranteed to be subjected to the by now all too
familiar compromises of contemporary academic consensus building: token
Affirmative Action gestures to include as many representatives of sexual,
social, and cultural fringe groups and minorities as possible; obligatory
coverage of "name" academics (in this case, Canadian and American
ones) who themselves serve as advisors and consultants and whose good
will needs to be secured for the project to go forward; and a general
over-emphasis on trendy movements, issues, and figures at the expense
of the more enduring, more tried-and-true. As much as on Entertainment
Tonight, what's hot forces out what's not. The Johns Hopkins Guide
tells a reader as much about who's in and who's out on North American
college campuses (and who's on the A-list and who's not at editorial board
meetings) as it does about what will still matter in fifty or a hundred
years. That explains some of the more eccentric editorial choices: the
fact that space is devoted to extended, individual articles on Australian
Theory and Criticism, M.H. Abrams, W.H. Auden, Canadian Theory and Criticism,
Film Theory, Margaret Fuller, RenÈ Girard, Thomas Kuhn, Lesbian Theory
and Criticism, J. Hillis Miller, Charles Sanders Peirce, Adrienne Rich,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Madame de Stael, Gertrude Stein, Virginia
Woolf, and Mary Wollstonecraft, but that there are no entries on Louis
Althusser, Leo Bersani, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas De Quincy, Denis Donaghue,
Terry Eagleton, Max Horkheimer, William James, Randall Jarrell, Frank
Kermode, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Poirier, Pragmatism, A.W. Schlegel,
F.C.S. Schiller, John Searle, George Bernard Shaw, or Constantin Stanislavski.
Who says academics aren't fashion conscious?
But these are quibbles. A tendentious,
rebarbative, or slipshod entry, an advisory board vote-buying inclusion
or exclusion the more or the less doesn't ultimately matter. What is most
disturbing about The Johns Hopkins Guide is not its superficial
eccentricity and unevenness, but, at a deeper level, its frightening uniformity.
Approximately half of the volume is devoted to twentieth-century critics
and critical theories, and in entry after entry (with only the fewest
of exceptions) there is a near unanimity of critical values, assumptions,
and methods. Notwithstanding the lip-service paid to "diversity,"
"otherness," and "heterogeneity," and the unending
genuflections in the direction of resisting "hegemonic" and
"dominant" forms of discourse, it is clear that almost everyone
(both those written about and those doing the writing) worships at the
same church. The God of this congregation is named Marx; its saints are
Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure; its high priests are Levi-Strauss, Lacan,
Derrida, and Foucault; its ceremonies are called Marxism, structuralism,
hermeneutics, deconstruction, and cultural studies; and its sacred words
are ideology, gender, class, and race.
 The
conception of art that runs through the various articles is depressingly
consistent. "Texts" are treated as being more or less direct
emanations of the social "contexts" that surround them. The
critic's job consists of explicating the work's historical, ideological,
and sociological origins and consequences. Literary criticism, in effect,
becomes indistinguishable from the body of exegetical practices we call
the social sciences. (Practically speaking, it's not surprising that English
Department enrollments should decline under this dispensation, since their
duties can just as well be performed by departments of history, sociology,
economics, political science, psychology, and gender studies--as in some
of our universities they obviously are being performed.)
There are at least two things
wrong with this picture. First, it treats experience as if it could exist
without individuals. It imagines it to be something in the air, something
undergone by a group. It forgets that all experience is experienced
by a particular person at one particular place, time, and state of awareness,
and is therefore utterly personal and distinctive. Second, it similarly
treats expression as if it were a general cultural product. It overlooks
the absolute singularity of all important literary and artistic texts.
It ignores the fact that a work of art is something momentarily wrestled
into existence--personally, precariously, irreplaceably. In a word, the
structuralists, the formalists, the Marxists, the gender theorists, and
the cultural studies types treat experience and expression as if they
were impersonal, generic, and representative--as if a culture produced
them the way it produces other commodities--cars or TV commercials--by
means of a set of general rules and generalized practices disconnected
from the eccentricity and specificity of individual feelings and visions.
In this respect, the Marxist
bemoaners of "capitalistic commodification" are themselves practitioners
of techniques of "artistic commodification." They depersonalize
and despiritualize the work of art as thoroughly as John D. Rockefeller
and Henry Ford depersonalized and despiritualized the work of nineteenth-century
craftsmen. But if there is one thing that literature (and indeed all art)
shows us, it is that the most important experiences and most valuable
expressions are absolutely personal and distinctive or they are nothing.
Their uniqueness makes for their preciousness. They do not come off an
assembly line.
Ideological critics ignore
the power of authors (and readers) to swerve away from--to creatively
inflect--the structures of knowledge and understanding into which they
are born. Under the ideological, "new historical," or cultural
studies approaches, Shakespeare's writing is reduced to being a manifestation
of Elizabethan structurings of power and knowledge, when in fact the wonder
and importance of his work begin where such explanations of it end. Of
course, some aspects of any work of art are socially and politically conditioned;
but to the extent that it is a vital and important expression, it leaves
these general determinants behind. Rembrandt's work will not be confined
by seventeenth-century social, cultural, or ideological "understandings."
The slippery, sliding clauses of Henry James' work register movements
of imagination that are independent of his family background and social
upbringing--and in fact subversive of them. These works go beyond the
social and ideological forms and structures that inform them. But that
"beyond" is precisely where the analyses in The Johns Hopkins
Guide are unable or unwilling to go. The volume offers a truly ingenious
series of attempts to account for literary events by means of impersonal,
systematic, theoretical, and cultural explanations, but what is brought
home to a reader over and over again is how the most interesting aspects
of each of the literary works and artists dealt with slip through each
successive interpretive net. The mystery, the eccentricity, the distinctiveness,
the mercurial mystery of individual consciousness eludes the systematizations.
That is why the cumulative effect of the volume is so depressing and mind-numbing.
In the end, all the theory seems irrelevant, unrelated to the strange,
moving, wonderful experience of reading. Amid all of the clever acts of
contextualization, almost none of the articles comes within ten miles
of what it actually feels like to write or read a particular poem, novel,
play, or story. You have to put the book down and pick up "Michael"
or "The Altar of the Dead" to remind yourself why literary criticism
exists in the first place.
What is almost completely lost
sight of is that literature is essentially a different way of knowing
from the forms of knowing that philosophy, history, sociology, and cultural
studies offer. Indeed, it might be argued that literature figures what
will never be known in those ways. Sociological, historical, and
philosophical knowledge is direct, clear, and abstract. It offers general
truths and insights independent of personal points of view, sensory particularities,
and emotional inflections. Literary knowledge, in contrast, exists always
and only in particular spaces, times, and bodies. It is not final or ultimate,
but emergent and shifting--continuously adjusted and revised. It bristles
with prickly sensory particularity. It is humanized and bent by voice
tones and emotional overtones. It exists only in specific, local, unrepeatable
forms: in the obliquities of particular words and the convolutions of
specific syntactic shapes.
In fact, it might be argued
that literary knowledge is not knowledge at all in the sociological, historical,
or philosophical sense of the word--but something more like experience
(since reading a novel is more like having an unusually complex and stimulating
life experience than like encountering an argument in a sociology or philosophy
text). While sociology, history, and philosophy bring clear and definite
ideas into existence, literature seems devoted to the cultivation of what
might be called unclear, uncertain, unresolved ideas. Literature frustrates
the search for simple or general forms of understanding. It destabilizes
definite meanings. When meaning does occur in literature, more often than
not it is meaning pitted against meaning, new meaning moving away from
old meaning. The meanings that emerge are entirely different from ideological
and social forms of understanding because they are not static but on the
move. They are temporal; they don't stand still. They slip and slide as
we work though the text, constantly being revised, re-adjusted, changing.
I intend nothing terribly profound
with the preceding observations. I am simply summarizing a few of the
most basic qualities of literary experience. Yet, as astonishing as it
may sound, one can read from cover to cover in The Johns Hopkins Guide
and find almost no acknowledgment of these obvious realities. (Off
the top of my head, I can't remember a single reference in the entire
volume to voice, tone, sensory events, sound effects, emotions, the eccentricity
of style, the uniqueness of authorial performances, the obliquities of
syntax, or the time it takes to read a poem or a novel.) The overwhelming
majority of the twentieth-century critics featured in the entries (and
the critics writing them) treat literature as if there were no difference
between its ways of knowing and historical, philosophical, or political
ways of knowing. In effect, these critics deny literary works the opportunity
to offer forms of knowledge different from their own personally preferred
sociological ones. They treat literature (and the act of explicating it)
as if a text could simply be translated into a series of historical or
ideological generalizations--but fail to realize that, in that translation,
almost everything that makes it literature is lost.
 Now,
one of the critical positions that figures prominently in The Johns
Hopkins Guide, the Derridean deconstructive stance, is an apparent
exception to these comments, since Derrida and his followers obviously
have a more complex view of language than most ideological critics do.
Deconstructionists understand that language is less like a transparent
piece of glass though which underpinning historical, social, or political
structures may be viewed, than it is like a lens that inevitably distorts,
colors, and filters what it transmits. But where the Derridean position
and the ideological and social readings join hands is embodying what Paul
Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion. As different as they may
be in other respects, the Marxists and the Derrideans, the feminists and
the formalists, the new historians and the structuralists are all engaged
in a fundamentally debunking project. They want to unmask the text, to
demystify, to demythologize it. (With a utopianism touchingly American
in its naivetÈ, many of them seem to hope to break mankind free of literature's
spells and seductions by revealing language's deceits.) The important
point is that they are all skeptics, and their skepticism commits them
to a strategy of unremitting textual resistance. They hold themselves
outside of the text and fight its emotional blandishments. They resist
its intellectual designs by executing their own counterdesigns upon it.
They must master it to prevent being mastered by it.
Ricoeur had a name for the
alternative position. He called it the hermeneutics of faith, taking his
metaphor from the great tradition of biblical study and exegesis. In this
tradition, rather than debunking the text and resisting its language by
imposing the critic's language upon it, the critic allows the text its
own unique and alien way of speaking, and, as hard as it may be, attempts
to bring himself, through demanding intellectual and emotional discipline,
into relationship with it. As the biblical resonances suggest, the hermeneutics
of faith asks far more of the critic than the hermeneutics of suspicion
does. The critic in quest of alien revelation cannot hold himself safely
above or outside the text, superior to it, but must dive into it and make
himself vulnerable to it, entering into an intimate encounter with a difficult
and potentially disorienting experience. He must attempt the impossible:
as much as he can, emptying himself out and giving up his own ways of
understanding in order to allow the text to inhabit him and teach him
entirely different forms of knowing. He must expose himself to the true
otherness of genuinely foreign points of view and unfamiliar ways of seeing
and feeling. He must risk becoming temporarily or permanently lost in
a wilderness of unformulated experience.
All of that obviously requires
of the critic not only personal humility, but specific practical skills--namely,
the capacity to negotiate an incredibly complex verbal experience without
taking refuge in inherited emotional or cognitive formulas of response--that
are far from common even among "traditional" English Department
faculty. It is always easier to be a scoffer, a debunker, a skeptic, than
to open oneself to unfamiliar insights. It is always easier to resist
an experience, to hold oneself above it, than to put one's certainties
at risk by deeply yielding oneself to it. There are twentieth-century
critics who practice the hermeneutics of faith, but for obvious reasons
they do not get as much attention as the other sort of critics. They are
not system builders. They are not generalizers. Their work does not make
self-aggrandizing claims about literature's complicity with repressive
systems of race, class, and gender. They do not offer comforting, utopian
prospects of escape from those systems through projects of literary and
critical cleansing. What they do offer, in fact, is not what most people
want: an unending course of work, conducted through arduous acts of sustained
attention, without the promise of grandiose ideological insights and sociological
generalizations at the end of the road. The faithful critic does not demystify
texts, but reveals their unfathomable mysteries. He or she does not show
us the limitations of works of art, but returns us to an appreciation
of the inexplicable wonder and boundless complexity of artistic consciousness.
For all of these reasons, the discipline these critics practice is not
now in fashion, never has been, and probably never will be. You will not
find many of their names or more than a passing appreciation of their
achievements in this volume.
--Excerpted from "A Yellow
Pages of Criticism" (a review of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory and Criticism. Edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth),
Partisan Review, Volume 62, number 1 (Winter 1995), pages 138-143.
To read more about fads
and fashions in academic criticism, click on "Multicultural Unawareness"
in the Carney on Culture section, the essays "Sargent and
Criticism" and "Eakins and Criticism" in the Paintings
section, "Day of Wrath: A Parable for Critics" in
the Carl Dreyer section, "Capra and Criticism" in the
Frank Capra section, and all of the other pieces in this section.
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing. To
obtain the complete text as well as the complete texts of many pieces
that are not included on the web site,
click here.
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