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Literatur
The invitation I offered to scholars to explore the cultural differences of Marxist criticism (“The Future of Comparative Literature”, inActes du VIII e Congrès de l'Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée [Budapest 1976], Stuttgart; Bieber, 1980, 431–433), has found few takers. A culturally differentiated analysis of what has been called, far too summarily (often for purposes of ideological discrediting), “Fascist” criticism whether Italian, Spanish, French, Belgian, or National Socialist, is equally indicated and yields surprising insights: see e. g. Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Paul de Man, the Modernist as Fascist”,South Central Review (U.S.A.), VI, No. 2, 1989, 6–18.
See e.g. theEncylopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 148.
August Obermayer under “Kritik—Literaturkritik—Literary Criticism” in his and E. W. herd'sGlossary of Literary Terms, published by the Department of German, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand., 1983, pp. 124–125, and Gero von Wilpert,Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, Stuttgart, Kröner (Taschenausgabe, Band 231), 7th revised and enlarged edition, 1989, p. 486. Joseph Strelka, in hisVergleichende Literaturkritik (Berne and Munich: Francke, 1970), offers a definition and a promise: Comparative Criticism is described as an ‘open field of experimentation for comparative methods, ideas, and the formation of concepts in criticism’; it is to compare, critically, various methods within a national as well as an international evolution (pp. 86). But these comparative differentiations are not followed up in the book.
Here is a small sampling of useful interdisciplinary surveys for comparative investigations of criticism from that angle: James Thorpe, ed.,Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1967); Jean-Pierre Barricelli and Joseph Gibaldi, eds.Interrelations of Literature, ibid., 1982; Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, eds.Comparative Literature. Method and Perspective (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, rev. ed., 1971); Ulrich Weisstein, “Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste”, in hisVergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik, Reihe C, Forschungsberichte, Band 2 (Berne and Frankfort: Peter Lang, 1981), pp. 170–191; Jean-Michel Gliksohn, “Litterature et Arts”, pp. 245–261, and Jeanne-Marie Clerc, “Littérature comparée devant les images modernes: Cinéma, photographie, television”, in Pierre Brunel and Yves Chevrel, eds.Précis de Littérature Comparée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).
Symptomatic for the awakening of interest in making cultural differentations in the deep structures of literary scholarship are, in the case ofGermanistik, Das Fremde und das Eigene. Prolegomena zu einer interkulturellen Germanistik, ed. Alois Wierlacher (Munich: Iudicium, 1985), andGermanistik in den USA, ed. Frank Trommler (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989).
Although they do not deal centrally with comparative criticism, I have derived stimulating ideas for this essay from Stephen heath, “Theory, etc. A review of Jonathan Culler,On Deconstruction and Terry Eagleton,Literary Theory” inComparative Criticism, 9, 281–326, 1987, and Nicole Ward Jouve, “HowThe Second Sex stopped my aunt from watering the horse chestnuts,or Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary feminism”ibid., pp. 327–343.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in hisCultural Literacy. What every American needs to know. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), does not deal directly with Literary Criticism, let alone Comparative Criticism, but his book and particularly Chapters III on “National Language and National Culture” (pp. 70–93) and IV on “American Diversity and Public Discourse” (pp. 94–109) contain homey and historic facts about the need for a generally intelligible standard language, and about the linguistic limits of intra-national cultural diversity. Robert Alter, in his wonderfully therapeutic and long overdueThe Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), deplores “the promiscuous use of intellectual jargon ... as a cover for the lack of original thought” and illustrates his point by quoting from and analyzing three very recent (and by no means extreme) articles on Kafka, Stephen Crane, and Borges (pp. 15–19).
For a brief comparison of public with academic criticism, see my “The Uses of Comparative Literature in Value Judgements”, inKomparatistik, Festschrift für Zoran Konstantinović, Heidelberg, Winter, 1981, pp. 131–132.
I am greatly indebted to Frances Wilhoit, Librarian and Head of the Journalism Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, for undertaking painstaking bibliographical research that has largely confirmed my hunch. I owe all titles in this footnote to her. She has dug up, among others, two items difficult of access, unpublished master's theses which come up with interesting findings. The first one is a survey of “art critics” working for newspapers in Iowa. Although the data provided do not make a clear distinction between “literature” and “art” critics, it would appear that many newspapers of limited circulation employ “cultural journalists” who do fine arts, music, theatre, and film criticism as well as book reviewing. The abstract of the investigation includes the following statement: “A wide variety of ethical and practical problems facing critics is cited, including their personal vs professional relationships with artists, the issues of “freebies” (books, records, tickets) and gifts, maintaining an individual viewpoint in the face of critical bandwagoneering, putting (or even recognizing) the artwork in a sociological content, and reactions from artists, the community and readers” (James M. Tarbox, “Reviewers and Critics: An Evaluation of their Training, Performance and Problems in Iowa”, Master's Thesis, Iowa State University, 1983”,Journalism Abstracts (Columbia, South Carolina: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication), XXII, 1984, pp. 76–77) “The major contention of the thesis is that the student can learn to be a reviewer, and that with a judicious choice of arts and journalism courses combined with actual reviewing practice, the graduate can offer prospective employers a useful and attractive package of proven experience” (ibid., p. 77). This stance is borne out by another Master's thesis by Michael McLane, “An Examination of Theater Reviews in 16 Selected Florida Newspapers comparing coverage in Cities versus Smaller Towns”, University of Florida, 1987, as summarized inJournalism Abstracts, XXV, 1987, p. 79: “It was found that most reviewers had little theatrical training and moved into reviewing without conscious goals. Most stressed the importance of good writing skills as prerequisites of their job.” The idea that anyone can do anything provided she is willing and there is an opportunity to get a job, the very use of the term “attractive package” are strikingly American. It is unlikely that in England, Western Europe, in China or Japan etc even newspapers or magazines of modest circulation would dispense with more qualified prerequisites. It suggests that in America “the arts” (including Belles Lettres) are viewed by the media as marginal ornaments which ‘anyone can do’. On the other hand, the very amateurishness and diffuse competence of the critic writing for regional or small town newspapers in America may inject a freshness into her perspective and style that speaks well to readers whose own consciousness is more oriented toward the arts in general than towards literature as such. Literary criticism and book reviewing in metropolitan newspapers are, to be sure, a different matter. Time limitations on the publication of this symposium prevent me from following up other leads on the deep structure of book reviewing in the United States and abroad at this time. Here they are: John Budd, “Book Reviewing Practices of Journals in the Humanities”,Scholarly Publishing: A Journal for Authors and Publishers, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1982, pp. 363–371; Morris Philipson, “On Judgement and Taste”,id., Vol. 18, No. 4, 1987, pp. 236–242; Stephen Knight, “Squabbling on the Iceberg: The War between Writers and Reviewers”,Meanjin, Melbourne Australia, Vol. 46, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 311–318; Judith Brett, “Writers, Publishers and Reviewers: A Reply to Stephen Knight”,id., Vol. 46, No. 4, December 1987, pp. 433–439; Olli Valikangas, “Caracteristiques d'un genre: Le Compte Rendu dansLe Francais Moderne de 1965 à 1970”, inAu bonheur des mots: Mélanges en l'honneur de Gerald Antoine, Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1984, pp. 607–612; Hannes Haas, “Die hohe Kunst der Reportage. Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Literatur, Journalismus und Sozialwissenschaften”,Publizistik, Vol. 32, No. 3, July–September 1987, pp. 277–294. In 1979, John W. English published hisCriticizing the Critics, Humanistic Studies in the Communication Arts, New York, Hastings House, 1979, the result, of a “pretested questionnaire...sent to 226 identifiable critics” in 1973 which “nearly 50 per cent” sent back (p. 3)—a method that would not please many humanists and in itself underlines the difference in intellectual, artistic social, and economic functions between academic and public critics. The fact that “Books” (of all kinds) occupy only four of the 229 pages of this study (pp. 191–195) and the fact that most of the space is filled by tidbits of quotations and facts (Drama criticism is discussed in twelve pages, equally quotational) may be culturally distressing (the areas or criticism covered include film, music, television, art, dance, books, restaurants, and architecture, in that mysterious order), but the quotations chosen are sparkling and candid. The subheadings are of clear relevance not only to public but to academic criticism and reviewing: among them are Critics vs Reviewers, Who Selects What to Review? Critics' Problems with Editors, Time and Space Limitations, Social Relevance as Context, Specialized Audiences Critics write for, Waves of Anti-Criticism Ebb and Flow, Artists Strike Back, Reviewing the Work of a Friend, The Audience Response to Reviews, Readability of Reviews Defines the Critic, Critical vs Popular Success, and Inroads of Ideological Fads.
Page 33. in this issue.
See, in this issue, Kálmán Ruttkay's observation that French criticism institutionalized Aristotle, created a French Aristotle whereas the British did not, allowing for an individual Britannization of Aristotle.
See e.g. the thoroughly scholarly but marvelously natural, seemingly effortless blending of substantive erudition, critical judgement, and common sense in A. T. Hatto's editions and translations of Gottfried'sTristan and theNibelungenlied, both Penguin.
Allan Bloom, in hisThe Closing of the American Mind. How Higher Education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's studients (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), lays worse crimes to the German account. In his chapter “The German Connection” (pp. 141–156) he traces the anti-rationalism and value relativism sweeping American Higher Education in its most prominent universities, the denial that there is some kind of norm called “the good life”, to Nietzsche (“now far better known and really influential on the Left than on the Right”, p. 144), Max Weber, and Heidegger who made their way, via such third parties as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the sociologist David Riesman (author ofThe Lonely Crowd) and Woody Allen (Zelig), into American cultural perspectives, a new inwardness replacing the universalism of Greek and French philosophy. See also the chapter on “The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa” (the derationalization of Marx and the making of Nietzsche into a leftist), pp. 217–226. Bloom, however, does not deal with literary criticism per se, although he lashes out at “Comparative Literature” (which he seems to equate with Literary Theory) for “deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and reconstructing them on the Left” (p. 226; see also p. 379). He fits Deconstruction into the present intellectual ambiance in the United States but-though an expert on French cultural/ideological history-does not ask why deconstruction should arise in France at the time it did (perhaps, in part, a reaction to de Gaulle?), what the prerequisites might have been, though there may be an interesting clue in a footnote on p. 160: “Thinkers like Tocqueville who, in a qualified way, supported the American solution, are little read or cared for in France; and Montesquieu, that Frenchman who is closest to the English and American tradition of political philosophy and most influenced the American Founders, is the one of France's truly great writers who least affects French consciousness.” Why?—See the discussion, chaired by Professor Siegfried Mews of the University of North Carolina, of “Allan Bloom's “The German Connection”: A Case of Germanophobia?” at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, Washington, D. C., December 29, 1989 (PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 6, November 1989, p. 1098).
Léon Blum is another example of a leading French politician whose excellent literary criticism (Stendhal) helped rather than hurt him. As to de Gaulle, I remember, from a year-long stay in France in the early 1960s, a conversation with a Frenchman who had voted for de Gaulle despite strenuous objections to his policies. When I asked him to explain his baffling vote he paused, sighed, and exclaimed in admiration: “Mais le style!”
Paris, Payot, 1929. Mornet's book is by no means vainglorious. While he does not deny that there may be something in French landscape and climate that promotes clarity in writing, he faithfully records its downs (middle ages, XVIth century) as well as ups (XVIIth and first half of XVIIIth centuries), dwells, not uncritically, on the deliberate institutionalization (educational and administrative) of clarity, and while he personally prizes the benefits of “clarté”, particularly in the French educational system (where it continues strong to this day, super-intellectual trends of the last two decades notwithstanding), he concedes readily that it has come at the expense of “vérité” (Amiel) and he delineates with positive understanding its decline and particularly its organic metamorphosis in literature since the second half of the XVIIIth century.
John Livingston Lowes,The Road to Xanadu (New York: Vintage, 1959), p. vii.
George Levine and others,Speaking for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper, No. 7, 1988, p. 5.
“Appreciate” was the key word for nurturing ‘layladies’ and laymen's taste for literature. It is very telling that for yearsPMLA, still the most formidable of scholarly journals for the modern languages in America, signaled its high professionalism by specifically prohibiting “appreciation” pieces from entering through its august portals.
See e.g. the wonderful novel by Helen Hoover Santmyer, “...And Ladies of the Club” (New York: Putnam, 1984), 1176 pages (!).
Conjectural as my interpretation of the deep structure of deconstruction etc is, it seems less speculative than the linking of Paul de Man's wartime journalism with the essence of deconstruction.
I have tried to outline “The Uses of Comparative Literature in Value Judgements” leading up, eventually, to a canon in the essay previously cited (see footnote 8).
Ibid. I have tried to outline “The Uses of Comparative Literature in Value Judgements” leading up, eventually, to a canon in the essay previously cited (see footnote 8).
It is to be noted thatSpeaking for the Humanities (footnote 17), which in essence defends the necessity for challenge of the canon, nevertheless recommends “that humanities programs continue to teach the great works of the traditional canon in relation to historical scholarship and critical theory” (p. 33) while experimenting with other texts and approaches.
William John Bennett,To Reclaim a Legacy. A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. Washington, D. C., National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.—Lynne V. Cheney,Humanities in America. A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People.Ibid., 1988. Both favor the “Great Books” and a central though not exclusive grounding in western culture in high school and college. So do Bloom and Hirsch (see footnotes 13 and 7).
See footnote 13.
Fernand Braudel's leadership of the New Historicism had been prepared in France not only by the pioneering work of Lucien Febvre in the 1920s and Marc Bloch in the 1930s but had an equivalent and precedent on the more ‘popular’ side in the very useful “La Vie Quotidienne” series of Hachette providing a rich background for literature in different cultures and different epochs.
“The Scholars' Jamboree”,The Washington Post, December 29, 1989, Section D.
PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 6, November 1989.
See also Victor Brombert, footnote 10 in this issue.
This does not mean that “the 60s” have not had lasting, ‘quiet’, and even positive effects on mainstream culture: see my “The Socialization of the Student Movement in the United States: The late 1960s and early 1970s Revisited”, inRussland, Deutschland, Amerika, Band 17, Frankfurter Historische Abhandlungen (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978), pp. 369–382 and “European Romanticism and Contemporary American Counterculture”, inRomanticism and Culture, ed. H. W. Matalene (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1984), pp. 71–95.
See the very sensible, even-handed aperçu of the famous “Western Culture Debate at Stanford University” by Herbert Lindenberger inComparative Criticism, XI, 1989, pp. 225–234, and the balanced section on “Teaching” inSpeaking for the Humanities (see my footnote 17), pp. 24–29. In 1987, Roger Shattuck answered the question: Is there a core tradition in the Humanities? with “yes” (Perplexing Dreams, American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Papers, No. 2).
Frank Kermode,The Art of Telling. Essays on Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 178–179.
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Dedicated to the living memory of István Sőtér, who opened up Hungary to Comparative Literature
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Remak, H.H.H. Comparative criticism: Cultural and historical roots in the theoretical forest. Neohelicon 17, 161–199 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02092760
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02092760