Literary Criticism as Political Reaction

When Marxism hit the English departments, they went theoretical; literary criticism had been so anti-theoretical, and so conservative, that political and academic radicalism seemed to go hand in hand. Yet there is nothing new or intrinsically radical about theory. All three of the main discourses of literature — scholarship, criticism and theory — go back to ancient Greece, ¹ and have had many different political orientations in the course of history. In Britain and the United States, scholarship was displaced by literary criticism as the intellectually dominant academic discipline in English in the 1930s; it was a progressive move. In the same way literary criticism was displaced by literary theory in the 1970s. Each displacement left a furious and despairing old guard of academics, and an intolerably smug new wave.

These academic revolutions were accompanied by, and partly driven by, a politics of academic fantasy, in which literature teachers negotiated a shifting and unstable relationship of mutual rejection with the whole twentieth-century world. This politics swung with gestural extremism from the monarchism of T.S. Eliot — aligning him with the court of Charles I and Archbishop Laud — to the Maoism of the 1970s' revolutionaries — aligning them with urban guerrillas. From this arises the illusion that criticism — actually an apolitical mode of self-cultivation - is inherently reactionary, while theory is inherently new and radical.

12Few, if any, critics or theorists have been vulgar enough to admit an admiration for the valuable developments of the twentieth century — modern science and technology, or bourgeois popular democracy. This is presumably because both of these tend to marginalise literary critics and theorists, and cast doubt on their usefulness. The violent and unreasonable politics of literary academics, and their extraordinary global metaphysical claims, stem from this marginality. Their politics have been self-defeating. The reactionary elitism of the later Leavisites went along with Labour victories; the triumphal left-radicalism of the theorists foreshadowed Conservative hegemony and the collapse of socialism. It is useful to ask what we can learn from this.