Prologue

Abstract

The ‘crisis in English studies’, in its present form, is often said to have begun in the 1960s, with the rapid expansion of theory, cultural studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, and the associated challenges to the traditional canon. In Professing Literature (1987), Gerald Graff presents the history of academic literary studies in America from its inception as ‘a tale… of a series of conflicts that have been masked by their very failure to find visible institutional expression’,² but there is, as he would acknowledge, nothing masked about the present furore. In the 1950s, it was still possible to talk about ‘criticism’ as a homogeneous activity, internal conflicts notwithstanding; by the mid-1970s, this was no longer possible. Though traditionalists sometimes portray theory as a virulent French disease invading the previously healthy organs of criticism, the 1960s mark, not the sudden disruption of a harmonious enterprise, but the point at which the lid finally blew off the institutional pressure-cooker.

Because I have profess’d to be a most devoted Servant of all Modern Forms: I apprehend some curious Wit may object against me, for proceeding thus far in a Preface, without declaiming, according to the Custom, against the Multitude of Writers whereof the whole Multitude of Writers most reasonably complains.

Swift, A Tale of a Tub

‘Modernism is not a meaningful category of literary history or art history. It’s a feather bed for critics and professors, an endlessly renewable pretext for scholars to hold conferences, devise special numbers, and gloss one another’s works into powder…. The time has come for a definitive polemic called “The Poverty of Modernism”.’

Roger Shattuck’