Recovering American Literature.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

DURING MY WIFE'S UNDERGRADUATE years in the mid '80s, she took a class in modern poetry taught by a very famous Irish poet and critic (no names, please). He was a curmudgeonly, pedantic old fellow whose considerable literary reputation was outdone only by his even more considerable intellectual biliousness. He was also a hard-line "New Critic," which meant he stressed explication de texte and eschewed any recourse to an author's life or times. For New Critics (their brand of criticism was "new" in the 1940s), great literature--at least to the degree that it is "great"--manifests tension, irony, paradox, and several types of ambiguity. The New Criticism, in various forms, dominated academic literary studies through the 1960s and, although no longer cutting-edge, it still exerts considerable influence over the field.

In her term paper for the class, my wife analyzed "The Yachts," a poem by William Carlos Williams, and made the mistake of providing a historical context for her interpretation. She also moved beyond ambiguity to suggest that the poem actually conveyed something like a specific meaning. Her professor was exasperated and informed her that she would have to rewrite the paper. "This historical information is completely extraneous," he told her. "You can't use it to read literature.

You have to look only at the words on the page." When she tried to discuss the matter with him, he held up his hand: "We can go round and round the mulberry bush, round and round, but you've got to redo the paper." And redo it she did, after being threatened with a failing grade.

I thought about this anecdote after reading the first few pages of Peter Shaw's Recovering American Literature, a spirited effort to save our written masterpieces from the clutches (and cliches) of political correctness. When Shaw writes, "The free discussion of American literature is being stifled by a new, radical orthodoxy," he has only gotten it part right. "Free discussion" is always stifled by orthodoxy, whether new, radical, or otherwise. New orthodoxies come about every so often as revolutionaries--sometimes liberal, sometimes conservative, sometimes neither--depose the ancien regime. (As a professor friend of mine once noted, the academy is neither as P.C. as conservatives fear nor as liberals wish.) While Shaw, the current chairman of the National Association of Scholars, rightly derides contemporary critics who reduce complex literary works to unnuanced political tracts, Recovering American Literature is ultimately disappointing, largely because its author turns a blind eye to earlier orthodoxies and is unwilling to engage the way in which the marketplace of ideas operates in literary studies.

Lit-crit discourse revolves around a crow/anti-crow rhetorical structure in which a certain way of seeing things...