September 19, 2007
Three glances back
Three recent long-format essays have cast retrospective glances at aspects of literary and intellectual life as it was lived twenty to twenty-five years ago. I first came across Joseph Epstein’s “‘The Literary Life’ at 25,” which revisits the article Epstein wrote for the inaugural issue of The New Criterion. Near the beginning of the piece, Epstein notes:
My earlier essay, reread today, does not seem to me wrong so much as it seems a touch quaint. No mention is made in it, for example, of computers, let alone all they have brought forth in the way of benefits and distractions in connection with the literary life. Instead I wrote at some length about the university seeming to be taking over literature, offering jobs to writers who could not have survived on their writing alone, making so-called creative writing programs fashionable, valuing writers according to their multicultural credentials quite as much as their qualities as pure literary artists. This has all now become pretty much status quo.
He then savages academic literary criticism, literary politics (“it is a small but genuine national disgrace … that Hilton Kramer was never awarded a Pulitzer Prize”), the New York Intellectuals, Susan Sontag, European writers, English novelists, American intellectual journalism, playwrights, poetry (“the Darfur of twenty-first century literature”), male American novelists, and more. One can tell by the parenthetical excerpts included in that last sentence that Epstein, with his rhetorical excess, now paints the target on his own chest; as such, the essay is entertaining if not edifying.
The second article, Scott McLemee’s reconsideration of Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, appears in the current issue of Bookforum. It is an altogether more measured analysis of the earlier work’s place in contemporary letters, and ends on an oddly hopeful note: Perhaps the masses of untenured intellectuals who are “not very well integrated into the [academic] system,” might change the tenor of public discourse.
The third, which revisits Harold Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, was published in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Here is an excerpt:
“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. [ … ]
Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate—especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.
Donadio then offers quotes from a number of prominent humanities professors, including Louis Menand, Mark Lilla, Tony Judt, Elaine Showalter, and others. All three articles make for engaging reading, for different reasons. If three examples mark a trend, what do these reassessments say about our moment?