The economic history of North America began thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, as the ancestors of modern Indians dispersed over the continent to nearly every kind of environmental setting and then, over time, elaborated and modified their various ways of life. Although generalizations about this diversity of peoples and their long history are hazardous, certain basic themes run throughout it and into the period of European encounters that followed. One theme is that because Indian communities represented collections of kin groups, both biological and fictional, rather than of individual subjects or citizens, the norms, roles, and obligations attending kinship underscored economic, social, and political life. A second theme is that economic life consisted largely of activities relating to subsistence and to the exchange of gifts. A third theme is that religious beliefs and rituals generally underscored these economic activities.

The arrival of Europeans after A.D. 1500 brought a people whose norms and customs presented a sharp contrast to those of Native Americans. While most Europeans likewise owed allegiance to families and communities, these were frequently superseded by loyalties to more abstract nation-states and institutionalized religions. Moreover, Europeans were elaborating practices of capital accumulation and market production that were utterly foreign to Native Americans. Finally, there was a biological discrepancy between the two peoples. By their exposure to a wide range of Eastern Hemisphere pathogens, Europeans had transformed smallpox and numerous other epidemic disorders into childhood diseases. Native Americans, on the other hand, utterly lacked previous exposure to such diseases and were thus far less effective in resisting them.

In the De augmentis, Bacon divides the kinds of learning into three primary categories - history, poetry, and philosophy - which correspond to the three faculties of the rational soul - memory, imagination, and reason. He then divides history into two kinds - civil and natural - each of which is further subdivided into subcategories (IV, 292-300). History is not only given a very wide domain in Bacon's division of knowledges, but because he identifies historia with experientia, its role in his inductive philosophy is also fundamental: of the reconstruction of the sciences, he claims, “the foundation must be laid in natural history” (IV, 28). As for civil history, Bacon claims that its “dignity and authority are pre-eminent among human writings. For to its fidelity are entrusted the examples of our ancestors, the vicissitudes of things, the foundations of civil policy, and the name and reputation of men” (IV, 302).

In a widely discussed report published in 1984, National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William J. Bennett deplored the new politicization of literary study in academic criticism and university curricula. The report, entitled To Reclaim a Legacy, attacked new trends in literary criticism and theory, which Bennett claimed had dislodged the canon of great books that traditionally had been at the center of the American curriculum in favor of a fashionable mixture of media studies and minority writing. Bennett would return to this line of attack two years later, when as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan he complained that, throughout U.S. institutions of higher education, professors were promoting critical ideas, methods, and vocabularies that took literature away from students and the general public and turned it into the private preserve of a specialized academic coterie. In phrases that strikingly echoed the Republican campaign rhetoric of the moment, Bennett charged that such critics and criticism had sacrificed the “common culture” of Americans to the aims of “special interest groups.”

In 1988, Bennett’s successor at the Endowment, Lynne V. Cheney, revived Bennett’s charges in Humanities in America, a report “to the President, the Congress, and the American People.” Cheney extolled “the remarkable flowering of the humanities” in state humanities councils and public festivals – everywhere, in fact, but in the universities, where she too found the public interest being sacrificed to narrow professional specialization and partisan identity politics. In literary studies particularly, she observed, “the key questions are thought to be about gender, race, and class, and truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant.”

Our narrative is a history of the debates that shaped the field in our time, rather than a venture in canon-formation. Accordingly, the entries that follow are intended to help orient readers who may be unfamiliar with the general biographical circumstances, critical affiliations, and publications of the theorists who figure most significantly in our narrative – i.e., the nineteen critics whose work collectively represents the key moments and movements in criticism since 1940.

THEODOR ADORNO (1903–1969)

The writings of Theodor Adorno (discussed in Chapter 6) are among the most diverse and influential works of neo-Marxist critical theory. The term “critical theory” itself was coined by the interdisciplinary group of progressive European intellectuals who established the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in 1923. Breaking with those principles of classical Marxism – economic and scientific determinism, and the doctrine of a vanguard revolutionary proletariat – that they found inapplicable to advanced, highly mediated, and complexly administered capitalist society, the Frankfurt School critics, as this group came to be called, sought to develop a more flexible social, philosophical, and cultural critique. Among their central concerns were the coercive or ideological force of putatively value-neutral instrumental reason, the psychological bases and effects of modern authoritarianism, the sociology of avant-garde and mass culture, the relationship between aesthetic and political criticism, and the role of cultural intellectuals in bringing about social change.

The most highly esteemed poet among American intellectuals is probably the Irishman Seamus Heaney; the most widely honored is surely the Lithuanian Czeslaw Milosz. I mean not only that American readers have a special attraction to foreign poets, but also that the recent history of American poetry can exclude neither the writing of foreign-born American residents nor the efforts of American-born poets to rewrite the poetry of other languages. In “The Day Lady Died” (1959), Frank O’Hara casually records picking up “an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets/in Ghana are doing these days.” American poetry since 1945 has been cosmopolitan in an obvious imperial sense: it has absorbed much more than American poetry ever has before. “The simile of an exhausted, Hellenic Europe surrendering its fate,” George Steiner remarked in 1964, “to an imperial, Augustan America gained a certain currency. There was, until circa 1959 a touch of Rome about American power, and a shade of Greece about the nervous, worn brilliance of European artistic and intellectual life.”

I am purposely making a wide circuit around the topic of translation, because my real subject is the interaction of American literary culture with other literatures, not just what is usually called translation. Our half-century has been especially greedy, especially curious about the world’s art, as well as its other resources. Clearly, we have a poetry of global ambitions partly because our economy is global and our political interests extensive. It is much too simple, though, to say only that one causes the other.

Until about 1965, the term “political” referred to the activities of the state: the conduct of foreign policy, the exercise of police authority, the control of borders, the use of the ballot, and so on. These were the matters that American intellectuals thought of as political, and most Americans still hold to this sense of the term. Poets such as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Bly have spoken to these issues, often powerfully. But what comes under this statal sense of the political varies in detail from country to country and year to year, because the nature of a state is unstable – the areas in which state authority is exercised and the differences between one state and another are great. For instance, the Soviet state governed enough of life that the notion of privacy was political there, though it was the ostensible essence of what liberal Americans, before the advent of identity politics, considered unpolitical. Partisan Review told how Anna Akhmatova’s silence about all things political from 1923–39 was itself an act of political defiance – and the grounds for punishment in Stalinist Russia. And the history of recent American political poetry, its strengths and weaknesses, is inseparable from the unusual status that the term privacy acquired just after World War II.

This period begins dramatically with the arrest of Ezra Pound in Rapallo on May 3, 1945. He was brought to an American military prison near Pisa, where he wrote his most personal and elegiac poetry, The Pisan Cantos (1948), and later to St. Elizabeths in Washington. His career is the most spectacular instance in American literary history of the problematic relationship of poetry to politics. His name gave focus to the difficulty of bringing modernist art together with democratic politics. While Pound sat in a Washington asylum, various intellectuals took positions on the question of a poet's proper role in a republic.

Among the postulates of deconstruction that we presented in Chapter 5 was the following:

We added that “the political efficacy of deconstructive reading strategies (and their link to Marxism, feminism, and other directly sociopolitical forms of criticism) rests on a claim that these strategies can help shake dominant discourses by revealing their repressed contradictions.” Among the issues to which we now turn is the extent to which such claims of political efficacy can be justified.

If they think nothing else about it, media detractors of deconstruction believe that it is politically armed and dangerous. In the preceding chapter, we attempted to defuse some of the polemics and dispel some of the misapprehensions that have long surrounded deconstruction. We ended by agreeing, however, that the deconstructive argument that linguistic meaning is self-divided, performative, and interested “inevitably returns us to politics.” Texts indeed become political, we suggested, when their meanings are understood not to be natural, stable, or simply “there,” but instead determined, and thus “produced,” by particular cultural interests and institutional circumstances, by the clash of social discourses and interpretive systems.

This appendix is designed to provide the fullest and most up-to-date biographical information available to students of contemporary verse. In addition to consulting scholarly analyses of the poets and their works, I have made use of information available in Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1962–), The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Gale Research Co., 1978–), Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Frank Magill (New York: Holt, 1994), The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd edition, eds. Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair (New York: Norton, 1988), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994). I have conferred with the individual poets to confirm and augment this information when at all possible.

elizabeth alexander (1962-)

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City in 1962, and attended Yale University as an undergraduate. After receiving a B.A. in 1984, she went to Boston University on a Martin Luther King Fellowship to study with the West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott. There she took an M.A. in 1987. Alexander completed her graduate education at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1992), writing a doctoral dissertation entitled Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women’s Literature.

Our account of the emergence of academic criticism in the 1940s and 1950s has emphasized the effort of the new academic critics to establish literary criticism as a discrete, systematic, even “scientific” discipline within the increasingly rationalized disciplinary structure of the postwar university. As we showed, the New Critics and myth critics, and the theorists of American literature who derived from them, all assumed the burden of this legitimating task. All argued for the autonomy, the structural literariness, of the literary works they valued. This argument entailed Cleanth Brooks’ distinction between the fallen worlds of politics or morality and the redeemed world of art, and Northrop Frye’s between “the world {man} sees and the world he constructs, the world he lives in and the world he wants to live in,” the mere brute “environment” and the meanings by which we humanize it. To differentiate art, imagination, and desire from “the environment” was to enhance the special authority of the professional critic.

The feminist critics who in the late 1960s struggled to enter and to change the established field of literary studies also sought authority in the academy and in the larger society, as the new academic critics had done a generation earlier. But, the sources, means, terms, and goals of the quest for authority on the part of feminist critics differed sharply from those of their male predecessors. Most centrally, authority for these women was not a matter of asserting the autonomy of the individual artist or hero against an allegedly routinized mass culture; nor was it a matter of sustaining a place for the humanistic intellectual in a positivistic and materialistic society.

A history of American poetry since 1945 is uncomfortably like a history of the present. To what sense of the present should such a history conform? I imagine that this book will be read by those with more curiosity than knowledge of its subject – a general reader, as we say, meaning students. A student may well try to find a path that passes between professors and poets, and so have I. Professors read poetry in order to discern patterns of significance that persist from year to year, poet to poet, and from one field of inquiry to another. For them, the important poems are the representative ones, those that allow one to draw out general claims about continuity and so on. But poets read for poems, looking for gold wherever it may be found. Pound said that the history of art is the history of masterpieces, not mediocrity.

Continuity is not exactly the concern of poets; discontinuity is. A poet rather fears writing a poem that has already been written. As Eliot said, poets learn the literary tradition in order to know what is already alive, what has already been achieved. Poets read literary criticism and history in order to find out what does not need to be done again. Poems that have achieved their effects perfectly – those are the ones that young poets shouldn’t try to repeat. And the readers of contemporary poetry? They too read looking for the gold. They want to know what’s been done perfectly so that they can enjoy those poems.

Imagine a time when a young poet looks to the critical essays published in journals with eagerness, excitement even. Critics would then genuinely influence the poems being written. Young poets would learn their craft from the models also dominating the academic curriculum, and college students would not be mystified by the poems of their near contemporaries – to say nothing of how their instructors would approach contemporary poetry. Critics would then lead the audience for poetry, and poets would be in an indirect relationship with their readers. This would be the sort of culture in which questions of whether literature counts for anything at all might seem implausible. It would also, of course, be one in which literary conventions, period styles, in short, orthodoxies would be easy to establish. Once orthodoxies were in place, one might well have good reason to expect the formation of an avant-garde to move against those conventions, for without established conventions, there can be no avant-garde. In fact, the young poet was Robert Lowell, the time was 1937, and the critics were Allen Tate, T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, and Yvor Winters. This was the first flowering of the New Criticism. “The world was being made anew,” Lowell thought.

In the 1960s certain notions of authenticity gathered very great cultural prestige, and not only in the United States. Theodore W. Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian existentialism, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), claims that German intellectuals produced a jargon based on the premise that moments of present experience are full of special significance and deserve greater esteem than thought or critical analysis. The criterion of authenticity inevitably produces dreams of origins unsullied by historical experience; the Adamic theme in American letters is all about authenticity. Adorno’s book is a useful reminder, though, that this traditional American theme gained surprising currency in Central and Western Europe in the 1960s. Several aspects of American and continental thought came together in what was then recognized as a sensibility for the moment.

Although this sensibility was rapidly and effectively exploited by the mass media, its hold was strongest on the intellectual class. One thinks of the 1960s as the decade of the young; but the times belonged more specifically to those young people whose lives were oriented to the universities. The prestige of notions of authenticity derived from intellectual culture. This is an interesting point, because many of the images then taken to express authenticity did not come from intellectual life. The hunger for authenticity often seemed to express envy of the lives of other classes. Admittedly the many representations of innocent heterosexual love making, in violation of the strictures of legally certifying institutions, were not far from the lives of university students. But acts of individual violence, an other emblem of authenticity, were actually very rare among such people, as was manual labor, and carried similar authority.

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.

The project of textual interpretation that distinguished the new postwar academic criticism contained a potentially explosive contradiction. On the one hand, by challenging the anti-interpretive bias of academic scholars and literary journalists, the new academic critics exposed the breakdown of a genteel consensus about the nature and cultural function of literature. Their assertion that literature required interpretation implicitly opened literary study to conflicts that had previously been unspoken or papered over. On the other hand, the school of the new academic criticism that became the most influential – and which, accordingly, came to be labelled “the New Criticism” – emphasized the separation of literature from political and moral judgments. With its insistence that the literary text be read as “a structure in its own right,” whose explication required a systematic “ontological” criticism, the New Criticism circumscribed the allowable forms of critical conflict, thereby containing the most radical implications of its own insistence on interpretation.

In several respects, however, the New Critics’ radical emphasis on interpretation and their conservative exclusion of “extraliterary” arguments from the arena of professional critical debate were entirely compatible. Both tendencies enabled literary studies to establish itself as an accredited discipline in the postwar university. The New Critical theory of literature as an autonomous, self-contained form of discourse and the New Critical method of close textual analysis gave academic literary study a distinctive domain, separate from the supposedly extraliterary disciplines of sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy. And both New Critical theory and method were ideally suited to the task of teaching a vastly expanded and demographically more diverse population of college students.

Though deconstruction, like feminism, is only secondarily a form of literary criticism, it too has posed a fundamental challenge to the institutionalization of academic literary criticism recounted in our second and third chapters. That process of institutionalization assumed that literature possessed unique qualities that distinguished it as literature from other forms of communication. It was this idea of “literariness” that justified the special disciplinary status of literary study as an academic department and field, whose objectivity and rigor were buttressed by frequent recourse to the language of scientific inquiry.

Whether one followed Northrop Frye, who claimed to uncover universal underlying archetypes of literary art and human imagination, or various New Critics who claimed to discover the defining structural principles of all poetry worthy of the name, the need for autonomous departments of literature seemed clear. The same need was indicated for different reasons, if one worked in literary history, by the presumably organic unity of national literary traditions such as that of the United States. Feminism, deconstruction, and the broader movement called poststructuralism, we suggested, all challenge these unitary images both of texts and of national literatures that have justified the disciplinary isolation of literary studies.

In each case, the identity in question (of integral literary work, national traditions, or academic departments) depends on a boundary distinction between an outside and an inside, which these new movements call into question. Just as feminism challenged the assumption that sexual power relations are outside literature (and therefore may be properly relegated to sociology departments), deconstruction has challenged the assumption that philosophical questions are properly outside literature – even as it has challenged the assumption of philosophy departments that the study of metaphor, rhetoric, and other literary concerns are outside, or merely tangential to, philosophy.

During the past decade or more, the field of literary studies has been a notoriously embattled one. The debates within and around it, sometimes referred to as “the canon wars” or “the culture wars,” have expressed in various ways the identity conflict not only of our academic discipline but of the contemporary American society and culture of which it is a part. Our account of criticism since 1940, like the other contributions to this Cambridge History of American Literature, was composed in the midst of these debates. One of the tasks we set ourselves, accordingly, was to situate the debates historically, to provide a narrative of the developments in modern literary, language, and cultural theory that have helped produce the current struggles, and to illustrate the relations between our cultural, institutional, and disciplinary moment and previous moments within the last fifty years.

This history argues that many of the contested issues in contemporary literary studies – issues that sometimes are represented as posing an unprecedented crisis for the discipline – not only have been repeatedly debated in different terms at earlier moments in our period but are, in fact, inseparable from the discipline itself. Often, these issues have been expressions of a central and longstanding tension in the discipline between the impulse to rigorously define and circumscribe the field, laying professional claim to a distinctive set of literary objects, interpretive procedures, and evaluative criteria, and the competing impulse to broaden and extend the discipline’s borders. Concerned with these conflicting impulses, our account of the principal critical theories, methods, and movements of the past half century pays particular attention to the academicization of criticism, its causes, consequences, and controversies.