it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “repressive” or “reactionary” aspects of the culture ultimately can be made to serve surprisingly (yet reassuringly) liberatory or progressive ends.
In this dispensation it should come as no surprise that literary texts are commonly treated as pieces of cultural evidence rather than as artifacts to be explicated on their own terms (however their “own terms” may be construed). In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with treating literary texts in this way: they undoubtedly are, among other things, important pieces of evidence about the culture(s) from and to which they speak, and any reasonable historicist, feminist, reader-response, or psychoanalytic critic will say so. (Even myth critics, if there are any left on the planet, will agree.) On the other hand, there may indeed be something wrong with forms of cultural analysis that seem to dictate their conclusions in advance of their evidence, and there may indeed be something wrong with analytical procedures that fail to attend to the specific details of what kind of evidence is placed on the table. It may be folly to claim that English departments are places where graduate students hold literature under suspicion, and where jejune junior faculty are incapable of constructing a literature syllabus. Nevertheless, it is possible to ask a skeptical question about English in a different register: is the discipline dominated by reading practices that so determinedly overlook the specificity of textual genres (be they novels, verse satires, Hollywood screwball comedies, sonnets, epistles, mystery plays, manifestos, billboards, or laws) that, for the purposes of those reading practices, professors of English could just as well be reading anything at all?
George Levine’s edited collection Aesthetics and Ideology speaks directly to this question; one might even say that the book is itself, like the formation of theAssociation of Literary Critics and Scholars in 1994, a major announcement of a major scholar’s dissatisfaction with current practices in literary studies. But Levine himself is no nostalgic belletrist, and he has little sympathy with the ALCS theory that English departments have been taken over by rabid ideologues who hate great literature. How then, he asks in his introduction to the volume, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” can he call his colleagues to a renewed examination of aesthetics without being mistaken for a reactionary and an enemy of the people? How might he best frame his misgivings about contemporary criticism while retaining his political allegiances to feminism, multiculturalism, deconstruction, new historicism, gay and lesbian studies, and all their friends? “This book,” writes Levine,
and this introduction, have required that I face directly my own anxieties about what my passion for literature will seem like to the critical culture with which I want to claim alliance. . . . Beginning this book with the language of the affective, the sublime, the aesthetic, I hoped to rescue from the wreckage of the mystified ideal of the beautiful the qualities that allowed for such rich ambivalences. Eliot is anti-Semitic and worse. Arnold is both statist and snob. I wouldn’t be without the writings of either of them. That, I recognize, puts me and this book under suspicion. (11)
Levine occasionally gets quite dramatic on this score: the “anxieties” Levine faces seem to derive principally from the fear of losing face before one’s valued colleagues, and one would think, from reading Levine, that one’s valued colleagues are only all too ready to pounce on whoever starts talking about anapests and pastoral elegies instead of gender and hegemony. As Levine writes toward the close of his essay,
I am happy to see politics as an inescapable element of all human creation and to read every text into its political moment. But I ask, breathlessly and nervously, for the opportunity not, as I try to come to terms with the specific forms of literature, to use my understandings of these texts in a political program that turns them into instruments and destroys that very small breathing space of free play and disinterest left to those who risk finding value even in the literature that seems to despise them. (21)
Breathless and nervous, Levine appears to be under even heavier assault than are Ross Posnock and William Cain. All you have to do in an American English department, it appears, is to profess aloud your abiding love of literature, and the room will fall strangely silent; within days you will be labeled a revanchist; by the end of the term you’ll have been booted out of the fancy critical clubs, and come December you can just forget about getting that table by the window at the MLA’s annual Banquet of Critical Eminence.
There are, of course, a few serious questions buried in my somewhat facetious response to Levine’s somewhat theatrical “staging” of his book: does the politicization ofcriticism require a devaluation of aesthetics? Is it necessary to overlook the specific properties of literature in order to read literary works in terms of their relations to larger cultural formations?
Any assessment of the profession—any assessment of the functions of criticism at the present time—will turn on how those questions are answered. Roughly half the profession’s accusers seem willing to indict any and all “political” criticism, on the grounds that “politics” is precisely that which is bracketed or transcended by the monuments of timeless aesthetic excellence. The other half of the profession’s accusers make a more careful case, in which the politicization of literary study is a problem of degree rather than of kind: literature and criticism are inevitably entangled in social, historical, and ideological commitments, but contemporary literary criticism simply stresses this aspect of literature too strongly, just as an earlier generation of critics failed to stress it strongly enough. The first of these positions, in my view, is either contentless or intellectually bankrupt, and not even the ideologues of the Right, who so often use the aesthetic as a stick with which to beat “politically correct” literary criticism, believe a word of it. The second position seems to me quite plausible. And it is this position, apparently, to which Levine wants to claim allegiance as he tries to straddle aestheticism and historicism, formalism and feminism, the pleasure of the text and the epistemology of the closet. Unfortunately, his discussion of the role of aesthetics serves only to blur the distinction between position one and position two, and thus to invite, from politically minded theorists, the very kind of dismissal or condemnation it most fears.
By my count, there are at least half a dozen formulations of “aesthetics” in Levine’s introduction, and half a dozen corresponding diagnoses of what’s wrong with the profession. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it does indicate how difficult it is to devise a firm disciplinary basis for the protean thing called literary criticism. In his very first paragraph, for instance, Levine remarks that he “conceived this book in response to the radical transformation of literary study that has taken place over the last decade,” in part because that transformation marks “a change that might challenge the very existence of departments of literature in universities.” The paragraph closes with three questions that flow from this concern: “Can, in fact, a category, literature, be meaningfully constituted? If so, once constituted, is it worth much attention? Is not, after all, the real subject of literary study ideology, the real purpose political transformation?” (1). The first two of these are very good questions indeed; as I hope to have made clear thus far, I would like to inhabit a profession that asks them in the most rigorous possible manner. But the third question is a strict non sequitur; it even contains a non sequitur within a non sequitur. For if in fact it is not possible to constitute literature as a distinct category of writing (and many minds finer than mine have tried to do just this), there is no reason to assume that the subject of literary study is therefore ideology (whatever “ideology” might mean in this context); and even if the subject of literary study were ideology, there would be no warrant for eliding the study of ideology with the goal of political transformation. Many professors in history and political science, I believe, manage to study ideology without demanding to see their students’ voting records at the end of the semester. In the course of only a few lines, then, Levine has moved from asking fundamental and indispensable questions about the donnee of the discipline to caricaturing politically committed criticism in terms as reductive and (mis) leading as New Criterion boilerplate.
Levine then moves to more specific targets, naming Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Stephen Greenblatt, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as examples of politically
