Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Critical Credos
by Jeffrey J. Williams | ns 71-72
In the early 1950s Kenyon Review ran ten essays under the heading "My Credo: A Symposium of Critics." Kenyon Review is usually considered to have been the house journal of the New Critics, but it actually published a wide range of critics of that era, such as Lionel Trilling (three of the essays in his 1950 Liberal Imagination first appeared in Kenyon), Philip Rahv, and F. O. Matthiessen. The symposium demonstrated a similar range. It featured some allied with the New Criticism (Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, and Austin Warren), but it also recruited young myth critics like Leslie Fiedler, who had only entered the scene in the mid-forties with "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!," and Northrop Frye, who contributed the best précis of his method, "The Archetypes of Literature," several years before Anatomy of Criticism. It stretched even further to include the Harvard humanist Douglas Bush, the Americanist Richard Chase, the poet and occasional critic Stephen Spender, the biographer Arthur Mizener, and the appreciative critic Herbert Read. It was by no means a comprehensive survey of criticism, but it gave some sense of what professional critics of the time were about.1
If there was a tendency of Kenyon Review, it was toward establishing literature as a discipline and criticism as its central practice rather than simply propagating the New Criticism. (In contrast, Partisan Review, the other major literary journal of the period, had a political bent and covered a broader range of art and culture, although Kenyon and Partisan shared quite a few authors.) Fittingly, a preoccupation of the credos was specialization and whether criticism should be a science, with Frye voting yes, Fiedler voting no, and Read, observing from England, noting the American obsession with "scientific criticism." The struggle was over defining the role of criticism, particularly compared to the social sciences, and the place of literary study in the university.
Reading them now, an overarching sense that the credos give is of a thriving, serious, and diverse field of criticism. Criticism mattered, not only to critics but to teaching, and presumably to a general public (one should keep in mind that the teaching audience in the postwar university snowballed and represented a rising public). The era became known as "the Age of Criticism," but that sense was still new in 1950, and it was a decided shift. In the early part of the century, commentators were more likely to remark on the paucity and poor quality of American criticism. In 1928, for example, in an essay called "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," Edmund Wilson could assert that "What we lack, then, in the United States, is not writers or even literary parties, but simply serious literary criticism" (369). By the late 1950s people were celebrating the profusion of criticism—or complaining of the glut of it. The Kenyon credos signal that criticism had arrived, and their authors were trying to figure out what to do with it.
The ship it arrived on was the post-World War II university. The student population nearly tripled in twenty years, from about 1,101,000 in 1930 to 1,494,000 in 1940 to 2,659,000 in 1950, and faculty rose from about 82,000 to 147,000 to 247,000, as states subvented a large share of tuition for students and the federal government chipped in with acts such as the GI Bill and the 1958 National Defense Education Act, as well as underwrote a great deal of research (Digest; Graham). The credos reflected the enhanced conditions for doing criticism, although they also reflected their time in other, less flattering ways—there were no contributions by women, people of color, or even those who espoused a strong political position, so their range was not quite as catholic as they themselves presumed.
II
This issue of minnesota review borrows the idea of credos, adapted for our time and place. To be sure, the minnesota review has exhibited, through its history and during my time as editor, a much different leaning than Kenyon Review. It has been more interested in the politics of culture than the wonders of literature. Especially under my editorship, it has focused on the institutions that embed literature rather than the close reading of literary works, and on the state of higher education, particularly academic labor. And it has concerned itself with theory, a pursuit only hinted at in the 1950s. Still, the minnesota review has shared the effort of any literary journal to offer critical commentary to a literate public, as well as to investigate the aim of literary study and the function of criticism.
Credos, like manifestos, should only be allowed one per critic per twenty years. Otherwise, they might be like a perpetual grand opening or going out of business sale. However, I think now is a particularly apt moment for such statements of belief, for a few reasons. First, it seems that criticism is in a holding pattern, and we need to regroup. I do not mean this in the usual way of asking "what's next?" That question assumes that criticism proceeds in a continuous stream of new and improved products, as if it were its own self-enclosed market system, or as if it were a question of Geist, Thought moving according to its own internal logic. Criticism might have its own internal codes, but it also responds to its environment, and is formed through its interaction with its environment.
I think it's an especially apt moment because of the shrunken material conditions of criticism. Kenyon Review and many flowers of criticism grew in the enriched soil of the postwar era; now, we are only beginning to understand the consequences of the compression of the humanities and the casualization of the professioriate. In literary studies, as is probably familiar to readers of minnesota review, current MLA statistics report the paring of permanent, tenure-stream faculty down to skeleton staffs, while more than two-thirds of faculty hold adjunct, temporary, insecure jobs. Criticism, like most cerebral activities, flourishes under secure rather than precarious conditions.
John Crowe Ransom, who founded The Kenyon Review in 1939 and edited it for twenty-one years, named the "New Criticism" in a 1941 book so titled and practiced a version of it in writing about the "tissues of irrelevance" of poetry, but he also was deeply concerned about the material situation of critics. In a largely forgotten 1941 essay, "Strategies for English Studies," he argued for the value of criticism, which was then a minor practice in the university, as a fitting mode over scholarly pursuits like source studies, which were then common. Ransom's argument was not just a conceptual one, but concrete, with the suggestion that jobs be opened for those who practice criticism. As he put it, criticism was at risk after the Great Depression because it was "the charge of unsponsored persons; of young men of letters with tenuous academic positions or none" (235). He closes the essay with the challenge, "Those who direct official literary studies can manage better than that" (235). (Who knew that John Crowe Ransom was an academic labor activist?) One way to tell the history of modern American criticism is the course of sponsorship. In our time we have lost a good bit of that sponsorship, and with it our autonomy.
The point of gathering this set of credos, however, is not to adopt a tone of elegy. Rather, it is to take stock, replenish supplies, and go back to it. It aims toward renewal—in the topics we address in criticism, as well as in finding a way to reconfigure the university and work therein. I hope that the reflective pause and clarity of declaring one's belief might aid in renewal. To paraphrase another critic, it is a long road to renewal, but that is the road we need to take.
Another, more personal reason for this issue is that, after seventeen years of editing minnesota review, I am stepping down as editor. Because of cuts to editorial support by Carnegie Mellon—the new-model entrepreneurial university incarnate—I will be passing the journal on to a new editor at a different institution, and I thought that a set of credos from friends and allies of minnesota review would be a fitting way to conclude my term. (There will be one more issue under my banner, no. 73-74, guest edited by the managing editor, Heather Steffen, called "The Feral Issue.") I am grateful to all the contributors herein for taking up my assignment, especially since it came with a fairly tight deadline.
This issue gathers eighteen credos. They do not attempt to give a full inventory of the kinds of criticism practiced now, but are admittedly partial, to those concerned with the politics of literature, culture, and higher education. Most of the contributors have been affiliated with the journal as editorial board members, past contributors, or supporters in other ways. I asked them to give a statement of belief of the kind of criticism they favored or where they think criticism should go. The one stricture was that their essays be shorter than normal articles (no longer than ten pages in typescript—a tougher requirement than one might think and on which only a few cheated). The results take a few directions: many reflect on that critic's history and choices, some advise a turn to a particular mode of criticism, some are more experimental or suggestive, and many address work in academe.
III
When you edit a journal, what you believe criticism should be is not an abstract question. It's a question that you answer, concretely and specifically, almost every day, with each piece of writing you encounter. It has always seemed odd to me, despite the habit of putting all manner of things "into question," that the large majority of criticism we produce follows a rote format (the twenty-five-page article), an often prefab idiom, and with a constrained spectrum of topics. During my term as editor, I have pushed against critical writing as usual, in several ways.
There is a study to be written of the rise of the academic article in literary studies. (My surmise is that the critical article arose during the postwar years in the burgeoning university, grafting the bearing and bibliographical regalia of the previous era's scholastic method onto the traditional literary essay, to make criticism an identifiable mode of research in comparison to the rising social sciences, which came into their own after WWII and developed quantitative methods. The twenty-five-page article is a product and metric of the research university.) In minnesota review, I have tried to encourage different kinds of writing, starting simply with length. It's sometimes remarked that many scholarly books could really be articles; likewise, many articles could be six or nine pages, dispensing with any filler, self-indulgence, or ponderousness. One of my observations at conferences is that rarely does anyone complain of a shorter paper. This is not just a question of page count, but a stance toward one's audience.
I've also tried to enforce a more direct style. Academic style frequently suffers from indirection, from canned phrases, rampant clauses, and syntactic tangles. Perhaps I am impatient, but one does not want to follow a tour guide through a thicket; rather, by the time the guide gives his or her tour, he or she should know how to lead you (for more, see my "Confessions of a Journal Editor"). Part of the problem is that there is so little editing. There is no training devoted to it, as there should be in any craft; one is just expected to glean the form of articles from reading them. We need more editing.
Another thing that I have tried to prompt are different genres, for instance revaluations or interviews, rather than close readings, that give useful overviews of and discriminations among a critic's work. A revaluation, for instance of Viktor Shklovsky in a recent issue, surveys Shklovsky's varied writings, correcting the perception that he wrote primarily on narrative theory. Rather, he was involved in artistic movements of his time, writing memoirs and novels, and ended his life writing biographies. It redraws our view of Shklovsky and informs us.
I suppose this is one way of saying that, while I was trained in the last wave of the theory years, I have come to value literary, cultural, and social history more than readings and more than most theoretical speculation. Contrary to the mantra of the corporate university that we produce new knowledge, I do not think that the knowledge we produce is new in the sense of a science, as theory once promised, but recursive and historical, so a key task of criticism is to sort out the vast body of material we have, explain it, and revalue it. This has become clearer to me in the classroom, when students are at swim in a sea of information. In some ways this is a modest aim, but when you edit a journal or teach, you realize that much of the work you do is not revolutionary but a step here and there.
Graduate training in literary and cultural studies usually funnels us to a menu of topics on which to write, in a prescribed field, on a set of objects in that field, in the normal ways of that field. The goal then is to "contribute to the conversation." That heuristic has some value in encouraging people to put their oar in the water, but there's also a way in which it fosters mechanical repetition (even Ransom, by the mid-1950s, complained of criticism becoming "the merest exercises with words"). Some conversations are more urgent and pressing, some not. Otherwise one can easily become a hobbyist. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote: I have an uncle who is a fly fisherman, and when I was growing up, he often and kindly took me fishing. Fly fishermen can talk at copious length and in specialized detail about all the various aspects of trout, the gamut of flies and the insects they mimic, gear and tackle, and fly fishing literature, which is quite extensive. However, it is a very rarefied conversation. It might be an enjoyable activity to spend a day on a trout stream or at a tackle shop, but I believe that criticism carries a more substantial public obligation. I think that we have too many pressing problems confronting us in the world around us, especially in the university and in its work arrangements, to indulge in hobbyist interests. In criticism, we have an obligation to choose our topics with more care, and to ask what needs they serve.
For myself, I have come to favor a genre of "intellectual reporting." I have a good deal of sympathy with what Andrew Ross calls in his credo here "scholarly reporting," and I find his recent spate of books, where he recounts his stays in Celebration, Florida, or in China, models of that practice. I also have affinity for his use of interviews, drawing his information from where people live. My version, though, is slightly different; what I mean is reporting on contemporary intellectual work, re-evaluating modern criticism, and recounting its history (similar to what another contributor here, David Downing, calls translation). I also mean reporting on other aspects of our culture, for me particularly the history of the university and present conditions therein.
Though I started conducting them in an ad hoc way, I have become more committed to interviews, and have conducted nearly fifty for minnesota review over the past fifteen years, with critics ranging from M. H. Abrams to Marc Bousquet. Interviews sometimes seem superficial, a sidebar in the morning paper, but the interviews I have done are more substantial, giving a holistic sense of a critic's work, one that one rarely gets in a book or article, and reflecting on their intellectual careers. They not only build an intellectual history of criticism in the humanities, but help us understand the paths people have traversed to do this work. I have in the back of my mind the remark from Gramsci that "The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory, therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory" (qtd. in Said 25).
I have also been drawn more and more to investigate and spend my time writing on the state of higher education, particularly the advent of what I've called the post-welfare state university and its ensuing protocols of privatization, which have extracted greater profit from research under the public trust of universities, greater labor from its teaching force, and a greater pound of flesh from students, in the form of work and student loan debt. My first book was on reflexivity in the novel, and I likely could have had a fine career continuing that, but I feel the more pressing need is to expose the facts of the case of this institution within which we work and which looms over American life, to sort out the ideas and policies that inform its practices, and to publicize more just solutions to its problems. Trained as a critic, it turns out that I have skills to perform this task—to research, to analyze, and to write. I think an obligation of criticism is to make the choice where to spend one's time and effort, and to go where the need is.
Note
1. The contributions to "My Credo: A Symposium of Critics" appeared over three issues; in 12.4 (Autumn 1950) were:
I. Leslie A. Fiedler, "Toward an Amateur Criticism"
II. Herbert Read, "The Critic as Man of Feeling"
III. Richard Chase, "Art, Nature, Politics"
IV. William Empson, "The Verbal Analysis"
In 13.1 (Winter 1951):
V. Cleanth Brooks, "The Formalist Critics"
VI. Douglas Bush, "The Humanist Critics"
VII. Northrop Frye, "The Archetypes of Literature"
In 13.2 (Spring 1951):
VIII. Stephen Spender, "On the Function of Criticism"
IX. Arthur Mizener, "Not in Cold Blood"
X. Austin Warren, "The Teacher as Critic."
Ransom had invited a number of others, such as I. A. Richards and Jean Paul Sartre, who declined. Several had agreed to write but never delivered their essays, including F. R. Leavis, Philip Rahv, and Allen Tate (see Janssen 175-79).
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Works Cited
Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2006.
Graham, Hugh Davis, and Nancy Diamond. The Rise of American Research Universities: Elite and Challengers in the Postwar Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Janssen, Marian. The Kenyon Review 1939-1970. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.
---. "Strategy for English Studies." Southern Review 6 (1940-41): 38-50.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Williams, Jeffrey J. "Confessions of a Journal Editor." The Chronicle of Higher Education 28 Sept. 2007: C1, 4.
Wilson, Edmund. "The Critic Who Does Not Exist." The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and the Thirties. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952. 367-72.
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