ABSTRACT
At its simplest the ongoing conflict in English Studies in America can be seen as an effect of the difference in approach between the New Critics and the so-called New New critics, or poststructuralists. Both these books are concerned with addressing the difference which generates this conflict. In The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism Mark Jancovitch sets out to reassess the nature of that difference with particular regard to the current perception that New Criticism represents an aesthetic retreat from the social: he tells us that his starting point was finding himself ‘impressed by the similarities between the positions of the pre-war New Critics (Warren, Ransom, Tate) and those of the post-structuralists themselves’ (ix), and that his primary goal is to present a reappraisal of New Criticism, particularly with regard to its political inspiration. In Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism Tobin Siebers demotes the importance of the difference between these two critical modes by recontextualizing them in a wider, and homogenizing, historical field. He suggests that contemporary conflict in criticism derives from an inherently conflictual mindset which actually unites all post-war ‘sceptical’ criticism, including the second generation of New Critics (Wimsatt and Beardsley), as well as his other examples: Geoffrey Hartman, Stephen Greenblatt and Paul de Man. Siebers argues that this critical mindset is generated by the fundamental, all-informing, oppositional political environment of the cold war.
