The Extra 637
New Orthodoxy describes is not the fortunate one they suppose, but fatal to the traditional project of American literary scholarship. It is figured not on Adam’s fall but on Humpty-Dumpty’s and the broken fragments of American literary studies show no inclination to cooperate in revisionist efforts to put them back together again into the “coherent narrative” Bercovitch, Tompkins, Kolodny and others are waiting for. In the mean time, their patience with the current disarray simply amounts to the determination that, since they cannot reconstruct Humpty, they will collect the surrounding debris into a pile and continue the ritual as before, though most of the life has long ago seeped out of the fractured body.
The attack on aesthetic formalism that supports their project is, as such attacks have always been in American literary scholarship, largely a matter of professional positioning and generational conflict. By redrawing the circle of American literature, they replace the previous generation at its center. That generation had, in turn, armed itself with art to kill off a still earlier school of cultural critics. Of course, this is not to say that they were not also committed to social issues, to moral values and political justice. As I suggested earlier, those terms have been the inescapable ones in American literary discourse for every generation of scholars. But Matthiessen’s generation was the first that could inject art into the discourse about American writing and culture without having to apologize for it. The question they were able to ask, really for the first time in American scholarship, was what literary art in particular has to do with the inescapable human social problems that have preoccupied Americanists in every generation. That question has not lost its point, and I don’t see how we can answer it by denying its relevance and simply swinging back yet again into a modernized version of the same cultural criticism from which the previous generation of Americans dissented. To do so would be to repudiate rather than to learn from our professional past and to reduce generational change to a pointless mechanical reaction.
Like the rest of the profession, American literary studies has only just begun to question the assumptions and methods that have supplied its intellectual and institutional foundations. Uncertain as we are where that questioning might lead, it ought to