Conclusion: Academic Criticism and its Discontents

Summary

In this volume we have told the story of the rise and development, between 1940 and the present, of a distinctly academic literary criticism. At the beginning of our period, as we observed, the very idea of a “criticism” rooted in the academy seemed inherently paradoxical. Criticism had been the purview of journalistic men (and in rare cases women) of letters. Literary academics, with the exception of the few cultural journalists who had infiltrated their ranks, were scholars and not critics, where “scholarship” often meant gathering philological and historical data addressed to other professionals and “criticism” often meant indulging in impressionistic or tendentious evaluation addressed to amateurs. With the expansion, modernization, and democratization of American higher education in the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the need arose for a study of literature that would be professional and disciplined but would serve broad cultural and educational functions beyond the scope of specialized research on language and scholarly accumulation of information. But it was only in the early 1940s that critical methods emerged that were capable of answering this need.

These were the methods of “the new academic criticism” that we discussed in our early chapters, methods that we now associate with “the New Criticism,” though, as we point out, this name originally denoted a diverse group of approaches that were often in competition. The new academic criticism generated tremendous excitement, not least for its emphasis on the close reading or “explication” of particular literary texts. Literature, it now seemed, was finally being understood on its own terms – really being read in its aesthetic complexity and particularity, not merely “appreciated” in the subjective way of journalistic men of letters or inventoried for factual data in the bloodless fashion of academic research scholars.