Originally published in altered form in Academic Questions, Volume 6, Number 1, winter 1992-93.

 

The Controversy

In 1970 the New Left’s critique of American literary studies reached the pages of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association. Professor Frederick Crews of the University of California at Berkeley charged that literary studies in the United States had been “significantly affected by an ideological bias” (Volume 85, Number 3, p. 423). ‘Cold War’ American was “comfortable” and “corrupt.” Its universities tolerated the “perversion of scholarly research to purposes of exploitation and conquest” (423). This was occurring because capitalism had perfected “a socially manipulative style of thinking” whereby social evils were concealed from perpetrators and victims alike (423).

This “style” of thinking, Crews argued, was exemplified by PMLA. Literary scholars did not usually bend their labor to overt service in ‘Cold War’ projects, as many university scientists did. Instead, members of the Modern Language Association drifted through life in a state of “remarkable political innocence,” ignoring “racism, imperialism, and monopoly” in favor of “myths, motifs, and morals” (424). This lack of political ‘consciousness’ exacted “an ideological cost” seen “less in what [scholars] say than in what they refuse to consider” (424). The dominant political liberalism mistook “ideological consensus for neutrality” and failed to “question capitalism itself” (426). Liberalism is at most merely reformist. It is not radical; it does not get to the root of capitalist evils. Liberalism misses the “true and important” insight that “literature conveys class meaning” (426).

Crews wanted a literary criticism that would acknowledge socioeconomic causes of literary production, a criticism regarding literary works as “contingent, imperfect expressions of social and mental forces” (428). “[J]ustice and passion” deserve precedence over “order and sophistication” (427). Crews insisted that he did not want the “socialist” style of criticism seen in such places as the Soviet Union. Despite his obvious Marxist leanings, Crews dismissed Soviet literary criticism as “simpleminded and venal” work which made “political correctness the touchstone of esthetic value” (426). With other New-Left opponents of Soviet-style communism, Crews evidently viewed the Soviet regime as the ossified corpse of a Marxism gone wrong.

Today, Crews’ warning resonates ironically. Appropriated not by those who heeded his call but by their critics, the phrase ‘politically correct’ has become the staple taunt of those who claim that literary studies in the United States have become ‘politicized.’ These critics charge that a leftist academic agenda, associated with such movements as multiculturalism, radical feminism, and socialism determine the articles selected for publication in PMLA. This is so, it is alleged, despite the language of PMLA‘s “Statement of Editorial Policy,” reprinted in every issue, describing PMLA as “receptive” to “all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches.” [1] Other scholars dispute these charges and defend PMLA, saying that critics exaggerate the degree to which the journal conforms to a ‘politically correct’ line. [2]

In order to determine whether or not there is substance to the critics’ accusations, I examined the complete contents of each of nine volumes of PMLA from 1930 to 1990, selecting volumes in ten-year intervals from 1930 to 1970 and at five-year intervals thereafter. There were 457 articles in all. I classified each article in these volumes, first according to the type of critical approach it represents and also according to its ideological orientation, if any. Before presenting the results of this research, I shall briefly discuss the criteria of classification I employed.

 

Classification
The more important of the two kinds of classification is ‘ideology.’ For this I needed a definition of ‘ideology’ that would not predetermine the results of the study. For example, the assumption that ‘everything is political’ would lead to the result that all of the articles must be ideological, directly or indirectly—a conclusion one may all too conveniently draw without bothering with any evidence. The claim that everything is political rests on the prior claim that ostensibly apolitical scholarship in fact supports the social, political, and economic status quo by doing nothing to change the status quo. Literary scholars who write on myths, motifs, and morals—so Crews’s argument goes—ignore racism, imperialism, and monopoly, thereby leaving those evils unchallenged. Scholars who suppose themselves to be engaging in innocent study unknowingly reinforce injustice. Many are well-meaning liberals whose mildly reformist politics never get to the roots of the capitalist overgrowth. Radical scholarship, by contrast, can save the study of literature from an unintendedly reactionary irrelevance, first of all by being openly and honestly political.

The argument fails even on its own political terms. An ‘irrelevant’ article need not support the status quo at all. ‘Objectively’—as Marxists used to say—such scholarship supports the most active, well-organized faction within the university. This may not be the faction that wields power today. It may be the one that will wield power tomorrow. The man who warned that the triumph of evil in the world will be assured if good men do nothing was no leftist radical. As a slogan, Burke’s words can be used to ‘mobilize’ support against any putative evil—’Left,’ ‘Right,’ or ‘center.’ Faculty withdrawal from campus politics or from politics generally can as easily contribute to the successes of the radical ‘Left’ as to the liberal-reformist inertia deplored by the ‘Left.’ The criticism of traditional scholarship as reactionary requires the accuser to know whether a given act of scholarship will make the success of a certain ideology more or less likely. This puts an extraordinary demand on the accuser’s powers to discern causal connections between scholarship and its practical consequences. Nor does it offer much guidance on how to find and apply such scientific and/or prophetic principles as are needed for the tasks, particularly in view of doubts concerning the predictive power of such constructs as ‘scientific socialism.’ Absent such guidance, there is nothing to prevent different people from coming to different, arbitrary conclusions about the political meaning of any particular scholarly work.

While avoiding this or any other excessively broad definition of ‘ideology,’ I also wanted to avoid any definition that is too narrow. One such definition limits ‘ideology’ to explicit statements of political affiliation or overt arguments for a political agenda. This would exclude all writers who possess even a minimal degree of perspicacity and tact. No scholarly article in PMLA to date has called for a lettuce boycott or a vote for Angela Davis for President. It is nonetheless fair to look for subtler clues . Whereas the excessively broad definition of ideology would be unable to aid in the detection of change (by saying that everything is and always was political), the excessively narrow definition would guarantee in advance that no article likely to appear in a scholarly journal could be called ideological. This too would prevent the perception of change, as it were ‘on principle’ or ‘by definition.’

According to the leftist critics of modern language scholarship in the late 1960 and the ‘neoconservative’ critics today, there is something happening here. In order to be able to see if they are right, this Mr. Jones has done something that takes much less intelligence than the prophetic approach required by the broad definition of ideology, and somewhat less obtuseness than is required by the narrow definition. I have availed myself of a conventional definition of ideology, classifying PMLA articles according to the well-known ideological categories of the times in which they were written. Resisting the temptation of pornography critics who can’t define the stuff but insist they know it when they see it, I glanced first at the history of the term ‘ideology,’ which dates from the late eighteenth century. As used by such writers as Condillac and Destutt de Tracy, ideology means the department of philosophy or psychology dealing with the origin and nature of ideas. As used by Napoleon (and cited by John Adams), the term soon took on a pejorative cast, meaning an airy, abstract speculation of the sot that (according to critics) prevailed in French politics since 1792 or thereabouts. Eschewing the pejorative but retaining the political connotation, recent political scientists define ideology as any system of sociopolitical convictions and aims, as distinguished from the occasional, more or less random political animadversion. [3]

I classify as ‘ideological’ those articles that, first, allow me reasonably to infer the author’s system of sociological opinions (‘reasonable’ meaning, at least in part, with reference to all such systems then current). Second, I classify as ‘ideological’ articles whose plausibility in some way depends upon one’s assent to a system of such opinions. That is, a random comment matters much less than a discernible (even if unstated) political opinion that determines the content of an article. [4] I do not classify as ‘ideological’ articles that take a moral as distinguished from a sociopolitical stance, inasmuch as a moral system may fit any number of ideologies—e.g., one might be a Christian and a political conservative, a liberal, a socialist, or even (if sufficiently vexed) an anarchist. Instead, I classify such articles as ‘borderline-ideological,’ inasmuch they often do suggest an ideological orientation; a critique of capitalist greed frequently if not invariably registers a ‘progressive’/socialist ideological leaning, for example.

On the level of ‘theory’ any set of criteria can of course be subjected to the most exquisite dialectical wrangles. In practice, however, the criteria I employ are easy to apply and lead to results that at least in principle earn the concurrence of those not predisposed to disagree. For example, it isn’t hard to classify Edith Philips’ article, “French Interest in Quakers Before Voltaire”—a historical account of French literary opinion on the “Trembleurs,” as they were called, as non-ideological (Volume 45, Number 1). Similarly, no one could seriously (i.e., nonpolemically) dispute the ideological character of Suvir Kaul’s article, “Why Selina Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Idea”—a description and critique of the “mechanisms of social and ideological consolidation” deployed by “mercantile capitalism” (Volume 105, Number 2). Philips could be just about anything, politically. Kaul could not. He is indisputably ‘a man of the Left.’ To be sure, there are borderline cases, and I have taken these into account.

The other, less important, system of classification is a typology of critical approaches. These I divided into historical, thematic (including ‘history of ideas’), esthetic/formal, linguistic, editorial, and theoretical—categories that suggested themselves to me as I read the journal. By a ‘historical’ article I mean one that describes events surrounding a literary work or works, including biographical, social, religious, and political events, as seen in Sanford Brown Meech’s “Chaucer and an Italian Translation of the Heroides” (Volume 45, Number 1), which shows hat Chaucer had the opportunity to read Filippo’s translation during a 1378 visit to Italy and reports textual echoes of Filippo’s work in Chaucer’s writings. By ‘thematic’ I mean he description, with or without evaluation, of the ideas of an author, as in Walter Clyde Curry’s “Destiny in Chaucer’s Troilus” (Volume 45, Number 1), which discusses “Nature-as-destiny” in Troilus and Criseyde and criticizes Chaucer’s epilogue as advancing contradictory expressions of Christian piety and heavenly mercy for a pagan hero.

‘Esthetic/formal’ refers to studies such as George Pope Shannon’s “Nicholas Grimald’s Heroic Couplet and the Latin Elegiac Distych” (Volume 45, Number 2), which describes the poet’s pioneering use of the heroic couplet in English and his poetry’s stylistic affinities to the poetry of neoclassicism. An esthetic/formal approach concentrates on diction, genre, metaphor, and other stylistic devices in order to show how these produce a given effect.

‘Linguistic’ studies focus on grammar—as seen in Charles Barret Brown’s “The Passive-Reflexive as Applied to Persons in the Primera Crónica General (Volume 45, Number 2). ‘Editorial’ studies present an edited version of a work previously unpublished or corrects an error of some previous editor—e.g., Charles Caroll Marden’s “Berceo’s Martirio de San Lorenzo from and Unpublished Manuscript (Volume 45, Number 2).

Articles on ‘theory’ present and argue for some general understanding of literature itself. An early example is Charles Edward Whitmore’s “Some Comments on ‘Literary Theory'” (Volume 45, Number 2), with its refreshing diffidence concerning the question of whether literary theory is possible. A recent example is Susan Winnet’s “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure” (Volume 105, Number 3), which criticizes an “erotics of reading” based exclusively upon the model provided by male sexuality.

As even these short descriptions suggest, the categories usually overlap in practice. It would be a dubious effort indeed to discuss Chaucer’s ideas without engaging in description and interpretation of contemporary historical events and without showing considerable sensitivity to his literary style. The fact that many articles mix these various critical approaches in nearly equal proportions complicates matters still further. The classifications are, then, only attempts to identify the predominant approach seen in each article.

 

Results of the Study

The survey resulted in three sets of statistics. One set measures the frequency of appearance in each volume of the various critical genres or approaches. The second set measures the frequency of ideological or borderline-ideological articles. The third set measures the political orientation of the ideological articles.

 

TABLE 1: Types of Critical Approaches

1930: 48% historical; 23% thematic/’history of ideas’; 10% linguistic; 8.5% editorial; 7.25% esthetic/formal; 1.5% theoretical.

1940: 42% historical; 29% thematic; 14.5% esthetic/formal; 8.5% editorial; 0% theoretical.

1950: 41% historical; 26% thematic; 18.5% esthetic/formal; 13% editorial; 1.5% linguistic; 0% theoretical.

1960: 62% thematic; 20% historical; 10% esthetic/formal; 4.3% editorial; 1.5% linguistic; 1.5% theoretical.

1970: 62% thematic; 16% esthetic/formal; 14% historical; 4% theoretical; 2% linguistic; 0% editorial.

1975: 59.5% thematic; 16% historical; 13.5% esthetic/formal; 8% theoretical; 3% linguistic; 0% editorial.

1980: 50% thematic; 29% esthetic/formal; 16.5% historical; 4% theoretical; 0% linguistic; 0% editorial.

1985: 50% thematic; 37.5% esthetic/formal; 4% historical; 4% theoretical; 4% editorial; 0% linguistic.

1990: 69.5% thematic; 16.5% esthetic/formal; 8% historical; 5.5% theoretical; 0% linguistic; 0% editorial.

 

As mentioned above, few articles are ‘pure’ specimens of any one genre, and most are a mixture of genres. The above classifications merely represent judgments respecting the predominant approach taken in each article. There are articles in which two or more critical approaches are so evenly mixed that the classification is arbitrary. Still, this is not the case so often as to invalidate the overall trends shown.

There was a marked shift from historical to thematic and esthetic/forma studies in the 1950s and 1960s, probably reflecting the increasing popularity of ‘New Critical’ methods and concerns. Theoretical studies have become more numerous in the past twenty years, but the percentages do not fully show the nature of their influence—the inevitable consequence of a ‘quantitative’ survey. Theories have become more elaborate, and literary scholars have become more self-conscious about theories. This is best illustrated by statistics cited by 1980 PMLA editor John Canarroe, who reported that Derrida, Barthes, J. Hillis Miller, and de Man were the four most frequently-cited authors in 35 papers submitted to the 1979 editorial board (Volume 95, Number 1).

 

TABLE 2: Percentages of Ideological Articles

1930: 0% ideological; 4% borderline-ideological.

1940: 1.5% ideological; 1.5% borderline-ideological = 3%.

1950: 3% ideological; 1.5% borderline-ideological = 4.5%.

1960: 1.5% ideological; 15.5% borderline-ideological = 17%.

1970: 10% ideological; 10% borderline-ideological = 20%.

1975: 5.5% ideological; 11% borderline-ideological = 16.5%.

1980: 41.5% ideological; 12.5% borderline-ideological = 54%.

1985: 50% ideological; 12.5% borderline-ideological = 62.5%.

1990: 52.5% ideological; 19.5% borderline-ideological = 72%.

 

The designation ‘borderline-ideological’ refers to articles whose content was significantly determined by moral concerns but without discernible political content. (Thus a writer might show approval of a poem because it celebrates married love, but this would not tell us if the critics were an oligarch or a democrat.)

The trend toward ideology gathered in the 1960s and achieved a decided ‘breakout’ by 1980. Comparing Table 2 with Table 1, it is notable that the ideological acceleration was preceded by the decline of the number of historical articles and, more immediately, by an increase in ‘borderline-ideological’ or moralizing articles.

 

TABLE 3: Left-Right-Center

1930: No ideological articles.

1940: 1 ideological article, centrist.

1950: 2 ideological articles, centrist.

1960: 1 ideological article, center-rightist.

1970: 5 ideological articles, 2 center-leftist, 3 leftist.

1975: 2 ideological articles, leftist.

1980: 10 ideological articles, 1 center-leftist, 9 leftist.

1985: 12 ideological articles, leftist.

1990: 19 ideological articles, 3 centrist, 16 leftist.

 

The categories are conventional. “Centrist” means pro-democratic-republican; “center-rightist” means conservative; “center-leftist” means liberal. The shift to the left side of the spectrum from 1970 through 1990 is marked.

 

From Scholarship on Ideology to Ideological Scholarship

The earlier numbers of PMLA feature many non-ideological discussions of ideological issues in literature. PMLA writers have never neglected political issues. One difference between the scholars of 1930 (and for that matter, the vast majority of scholars before 1980) and many scholars publishing in the past twenty years is the tendency to move political/ideological opinions to the foreground of scholarship. When reading Professor Donald C. Dorian of the New Jersey College for Women on the “two-handed engine” in Milton’s Lycidas—the engine symbolizing “Christian liberty” as vindicated by Parliament against men Milton regarded as self-seeking clergy (Volume 45, Number 1, p. 207), one can find no hint of Dorian’s opinion of Milton’s opinions. The same is true of Professor Chanon Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin, writing on how Mesonero and Jouy both deplored “the respect for social distinction” that results in a denigration of native culture and the imitation of foreign cultures (Volume 45, Number 2, p. 562), and of Sister Eugenie of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, discussing Coleridge’s dreams of “Pantisocracy” in America (Volume 45, Number 4), and of Professor William Wister Comfort of Haverford College on the political and cultural struggle between the French and the “Saracens” as depicted in French epics (Volume 55, Number 3), of Professor W. Gordon Zeeveld of the University of Maryland on Tudor propagandists (Volume 55, Nos. 2, 4), of Professor Judith H. Anderson of Cornell University on the Knight of Justice in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Volume 85, Number 1), and of literally dozens more. There were even a few scholars publishing in PMLA as late as 1990, for example Andrew Galloway, a Ph.D candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote on choice and fate in Beowulf with impressive learning and no discernible ideological slant (Volume 105, Number 2).

This scholarly approach contrasts markedly with the well-articulated ideology or constellation of ideologies dominating recent issues of PMLA. Current PMLA writers almost uniformly condemn hierarchy and authority in whatever form. The use of the word ‘subversive’ and its variants evidently gives PMLA writers a frisson they find hard to resist, as when Professor Joseph Litvak of Bowdoin College argues that Jane Austen’s “most subversive” insight is that all society is a fiction, a game (Volume 100, No. 5, p. 769). The well-known techniques of ‘deconstruction’ serve PMLA writers as tools in the advancement of this project, and ‘deconstructionism’ provides useful ideological materials as well. If, as 1974 MLA President John H. Fisher contended, “Reality is communication” (Volume 90, Number 3, p. 361), and communication refers to nothing ‘out there’ but only to the human will, then reality, including social reality, may be deconstructed and reconstructed ‘as you like it.’ Condemnation of physical punishment and other techniques of social ‘discipline’ goes with this, as these are inconvenient reminders of phenomena both nonverbal and hierarchic. Because their condemnation issues from an antipathy for hierarchy in any form, PMLA writers cannot distinguish tyranny from (for example) the practices of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. [5]  (That there might be important political distinctions between the Tudors and the Stuarts lies even farther beyond the PMLA perspective.)

The incapacity to make certain real-world political distinctions serves PMLA writers when they turn their hostilities toward the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, you will understand, are a very bad lot. They are the sort of people described by Dickens in Little Dorrit as constructed by Professor Dianne F. Sadoff of Antioch College: “Orphanage and bastardy,” she explains, constitute “the central motivation that unites social patronage, exploitation, petit-bourgeois capitalism, and murder” (Volume 95, Number 3, p. 238). ‘Patriarchalism’ also comes in for frequent, predictable bruisings, and is explicitly linked to the imperialist bourgeoisie by Professor Suvir Kaul of the University of Delhi, who unmasks the sinister ideology of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (Volume 105, Number 2). As a rule, PMLA writers can be depended upon to know nothing about the Filmer-Locke controversy, of the opposition of real patriarchy to commercial republicanism.

Dovetailing with the attack on hierarchy is the rejection of the concept of trans-‘cultural’ human nature and of reason, which makes knowledge of human nature possible. PMLA writers, usually alert to the ‘contradictions’ of their political enemies, give themselves much more latitude. They dismiss the principle of non-contradiction in favor of a conflation of rhetoric, ‘epistemology,’ and historicism, as in Professor Thomas Mermall’s article on Unamuno (Volume 105, Number 2). Imagination fueled by eros or desires (themselves confused with the will) replaces reason. Perhaps there is no better proof of these writers’ willfulness or arbitrariness than their conscription of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a left-communalist ideological army. [6] The most striking evidence of this ‘transvaluation’ may be seen in the appropriation of what were once the rightist obsessions with race, class, and ‘gender’ for a leftist political agenda of ‘multiculturalism.’

PMLA writers praise oral as distinguished from written culture a vehicle for ‘multiculturalism.’ This allows them to praise non-Western, pre-modern ‘cultures’ while firmly channeling them into the correct ideological stream. Orality, they maintain, is egalitarian (you can talk back), fluid, communal; writing is legalistic, rigid, tending toward hierarchy—according to Cynthia Ward of Stanford University in her article on the African novelist Buchi Emcheta (Volume 105, Number 1). The preference for orality comports with the interest of some writers in a politics of consensus without force, in Habermas’s neo-Marxism. If this strikes some readers as utopian, PMLA writers would not blink. A politics of the imagination, a sort of poetic politics (the counterpart of Heidegger’s poetic philosophy) can ‘work’ in the ‘real’ world because the ‘real’ world is the stuff of fable. Physical power is real but brittle, depending upon mystification. What the bourgeoisie has done can be undone. Social realities are only relative to whatever mental constructs are currently believed. ‘The personal is the political,’ and what is more personal and (if you want) communal that the imagination? [7]  Imaginative (de)construction serves as almost exactly the same function as much-abominated Cartesian rationalism. It is a means of conquering sociopolitical conventions and even biology, as seen in Ann E. Hostetler’s “The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (Volume 105, Number 1). Human life, one learns here, is truly free only if self-created, resistant to any ‘alien’ or externally-imposed structures. At the same time (one must notice) because the personal is the political, individual freedom is assumed to be consistent with a soft form of totalitarianism or egalitarian communalism, a totalitarianism conflating politics and culture not in the manner of Leni Riefenstahl but more along the lines of Woodstock.

The PMLA ideology can produce the most delicious combinations of rhetoric and reality, as when Professor Carolyn G. Heilbrun reached for an applause line in her 1984 Presidential Address: “If we lift our eyes beyond our profession, the sight of Geraldine Ferraro still dazzles” (Volume 100, Number. 3, p. 282). But for a more comprehensive example nothing excels the work of Professor Melba Cuddy-Keane of the University of Toronto. Her article, “The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” (Volume 105, Number 2) serves as a veritable compendium of PMLA assertins and assumptions. Cuddy-Keane begins by reaffirming that “the personal is the political” (272). By “political” she means “the dynamic of power relations in society” (273). This conception of politics is identical to that of Hobbes, and Cuddy-Keane shares Hobbes’s egalitarianism. Her recommended means of obtaining maximum social equality differ, however, from Hobbesian despotism. Virginia Woolf’s “revolutions in narrative form,” Cuddy-Keane writes, “demonstrate a continuing protest against hierarchical power structures” (273), even structures designed to promote equality.

She explains. In Woolf’s novel, “politics and genre are fully integrated in her use of comic modes to subvert and overthrow prevailing assumptions about the role of leaders and the nature of groups” in “Western patriarchal society” (274). In this society groups are centered on the ‘leader’ or primal father; they are animated by beliefs supporting that structure. Patriarchy culminates in Hitler. Woolf’s alternative is a “decentering of authority” (274). She uses narrative to suggest that “fragmentation permits a new and fluid sense of community” (274). The title refers to the chorus (representing the community, not the individual) ‘between the acts’ of Greek tragedies. To redirect readers’ attention to the chorus “subverts the habitual dominance of the leader figure” and erases “the insider-outsider dichotomy,” both of which cause conflict (275).

Not tragedy but comedy “provides the chorus with its true identity,” and comedy is Woolf’s genre (275). She avoids satire in this novel because satire is exclusive, aiming at the destruction of the other. Woolf writes “amiable comedy” (277), restorative not disciplinary. Women generally should be “outsiders in opposition to society’s competitive hierarchy”; Woolf’s protagonist participates in society without “changing her nature as an outsider” (279). Woolf thus “redefines inclusiveness,” rejecting social homogeneity for a “social dynamics of heterogeneity,” “celebrat[ing] an irreversible dismantling of order and actually advocat[ing] permanent instability” (279-280). Woolf’s envisioned community is a “fragmented, questioning, contradictory, but fully collective voice” (280). “The resulting ‘chaos’ is not apocalyptic but revolutionary, and in a fully political sense”—”an undifferentiated and participatory communal form” (283). The “collective voice” that is the new community is “communal without being coercive,” hence “more individualist than the voice of the spokesperson” or ‘leader’ (283). The community is “not an identity but a process” (283). It all reminds me of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, maybe without the money exchanged.

In a journal governed by a set of principles that attempt to square the circle of heterogeneity or personal freedom and egalitarian communalism, the most telling practical test will come in the way dissenters are treated. In the PMLA ‘community’ a few dissenters are permitted. Most of them are old, distinguished, middle-of-the-road. They merely react to the actions of the ‘Left.’ In a recent volume, Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, condemned the murder of cultured Africans by African tyrants, erstwhile anti-colonialists (“the catalog of betrayal by our own kind is lengthy,” often longer than that of colonial oppression [Volume 105, Number 1, p. 117]); the distinguished novelist Mario Varga Llosa attacked historicism and tried to rehabilitate Popper’s concept of verification (Volume 105, Number 4); Professor Victor Brombert of Princeton University delivered a Presidential Address criticizing the rejection of epistemologies of apprehension for epistemologies of assertion, noticing that a politics based upon the latter foundations will never remain pluralistic for long, whatever its intentions or protestations (Volume 105, Number 3).

Two other dissenting articles were noteworthy. The Shakespeare scholar Richard Levin attacked the Marxist-Deconstructionist nexus and added a few criticisms of “feminist Neo-Freudian critics” for good measure (Volme 105, Number 4). Both neo-Marxists and feminists use deconstructionist techniques to make Shakespeare into a mouthpiece for themselves. What was remarkable was not so much the article itself as the reaction it provoked. Discipline swift and sure followed in PMLA’s letters section. Professor Daniel Boyarin of the University of California called Levin’s article (“to speak generously”) “disingenuous in the extreme,” characterized by “demagoguery” and “sophistry” (Volume 106, Number 2, pp. 314-315). Critics of Levin’s “ilk” “serve only the continued dominance of a particular gender [male], class [the bourgeoisie], and culture [Western]” by appealing to pleasure in literary study (315). Professor Jeffrey Williams of East Carolina University scored Levin’s “tone of condescension,” his “disturbing and disempowering” argument (Volume 106, Number 3, p. 531-532). And Professor Margot FitzGerald condemned “Levin’s sneering and nastiness,” so typical of “capitalist boosters” (Volume 106, No. 5, p. 1173). [8]

 

Conclusion

In a 1990 article introducing an issue of PMLA devoted to the issues surrounding literary criticism, Professor Herbert Lindenberger of Stanford University called “ideological analysis” a “particular generational style of thought” (Volume 105, Number 3, p. 406). This “style,” he opined, amounted to a reaction to “the unusually conservative regimes that reigned”—”reigned,” yes, one must admire the mastery of the rhetorical turn—”throughout the 1980s in Great Britain and the United States” (p. 406). Notwithstanding the putatively devastating effect of conservative governments on sensitive literary academics, the contemporary PMLA New Left began its project well before then. The decade of leveraged buyouts and Adolfo fashions may have thrust much grit into professorial oysters, inducing such pearls of scholarship as I have reviewed, but the oysters themselves hatched twenty years earlier in beds provided by unusually liberal governments in the United States.

To be sure, ideological influences on PMLA writers go back even further than Crews and New-Left neo-Marxism. A 1940 article by Professor John Blankenagel of Wesleyan University summarized the principal sentiments and aims of German Romanticism. He cited Friedrich Schlegel, who wanted to blend poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric, “creative genius and criticism” (Volume 55, No. 1, p. 3). This synthetic effort, this “effacing of border lines,” reminded Blankenhagel of a secularized form of medieval Catholicism, and no wonder, given the Romantics’ admiration for the medieval romans, and their distaste for Enlightenment rationalism.

The German Romantic synthesis (to use a word they popularized) went beyond a synthesis of forms. “Poetry becomes a symbol of the infinite,” and “life is poetry” (3-4). Ergo, life is infinite: “The very soul of romanticism was infinite longing without goal, limit, or object” (6). Unlike medieval Catholicism, German Romanticism did not restrict the object of this longing to another, better world than this one. “To become God, to be man, to develop one’s faculties, are one and the same thing” to the German Romantics (6). In religion these impulses led to immanentism, as distinguished from Christian creationism. In politics, they led to nationalism; in Fichte and Kleist “the idea of totality and of organic development held by early romanticists was now applied in a new and more realistic manner to the state, society, and history” (9). In literary matters, the German Romantics held that “One of the finest flowers of creative imagination was the fairy tale”—’folkish’ and oral, not sophisticated and written-down (9). So much of this resembles the preoccupations of the PMLA today that it is likely that German Romanticism, as filtered through Heidegger and ‘synthesized’ with Marxism, deserves credit as a wellspring of PMLA sentiment. The nationalism is of course out of favor, but it has been replaced by what is effectively a democratized plethora of nationalisms called ‘multiculturalism.’

Much nearer to home was the 1962 Port Huron Statement, that seminal document of the New Left. The Statement excoriated “the hypocrisy of American ideals.” The American Founders’ declaration that all men are created equal “rang hollow” in a country where civil rights were denied to a racial minority; America’s “proclaimed peaceful intentions” were belied by “economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.” Americans’ “contentment amidst prosperity” was really “a glaze above deeply felt anxieties,” anxieties that could only be removed by “truly democratic” ways of life. “Participatory democracy,” unlike representative democracy or republicanism, could end the various existential maladies afflicting our “human relationships,” including “loneliness, estrangement, and isolation.” The authors of the Statement simultaneously insisted that their society could “be organized to encourage independence” and the “creative spirit” in individuals. Because “the university is located in a permanent place of social influence,” because it is “a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes,” the “new left” should recruit “younger people” there, while working toward a “political synthesis” of socialism and liberalism. The New Left “must import major public issues into the curriculum—research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example.” Then, “from its schools and colleges across the nation a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter” (emphasis added). Frederick Crews transferred these sentiments to the pages of PMLA, and they continue to fuel the agenda of today’s academic ‘Left.’

The New Left’s attempt to maximize liberty, equality, and fraternity all at the same time never made much sense, but neither did the even grander syntheses proposed by the German Romantics. Put in American terms, the professors love Whitman, the all-inclusive individual, but they resemble Emerson. Professors are of a priestly not a prophetic nature. Modern bourgeois life has been hard on priests because it tolerates them, neither fearing nor hating them. Seeing comedy in this is perhaps too easy. Surely there is also a certain poignancy in seeing persons so thoroughly unfitted for the modern world, bravely insisting that they can yet be unacknowledged or even acknowledged legislators of humanity. Be this as it may, it is fair to conclude that behind PMLA’s pluralism with respect to race, class, and gender resides a variegated but nonetheless thoroughgoing political monism, firmly left-wing. [9]

 

NOTES

1. For a recent, representative statement against “the multiculturalist imperative” among MLA members, see Roger Kimball, “The MLA in Chicago,” The New Criterion, Volume 9, Number 6, 8-17.
2. See Michael Abramowitz, “Literature Professors Look Inward and Find Scant Evidence of ‘PC,'” The Washington Post, January 3, 1992.
3. See John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and American Experience: Essays on Theory and Practice in the United States (Washington: The Washington Institute Press, 1986), p. 6.
4. For example, in the 1930 volume, Walter Clyde Curry suggests that Criseyde’s attempts to defy Fortune may be an expression of “feminine childishness” (Volume 45, Number 1, p. 149). (He less-than-evenhandedly refers to Troilus’ “childish railings”—but not ‘masculine childishness,’ a few pages later (p. 153). Forty years later, John I. Ades slights “middle-class morality” (Volume 85, Number 4, p. 526). Such passing remarks raise suspicions that ideology may be present, but in neither case does ideology govern the article as a whole.
5. See for example Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death” (Volume 105, Number 2) and Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson” (Volume 105, Number 5). Boehrer’s article is an especially flagrant example of the conflation of monarchism, the bourgeoisie, and “totalitarian politics” (p. 1078).
6. See for example Victoria Kahn on Habermas (Volume 105, Number 3). For a critique of Heidegger’s attempt to meld poetry and philosophy for political purposes see Nicholas Rand, “The Political Truth of Heidegger’s ‘Logos’: Hiding in Translation” (Volume 105, Number 3).
7. See Morris Eaves on William Blake and the Romantics’ “society of the imagination” (Volume 95, Number 5, p. 795). See also Elissa S. Guralnik on radio and the imagination (Volume 105, Number 2) and C. Christopher Soufas on Calderon’s La vida es sueño; the latter article opposes imagination, sensuality, and sociopolitical ‘participation’ to rationality (Volume 100, Number 4).
8. In an earlier article, Levin had criticized a particular strain of feminist critics he called “gender thematists,” who hold the view that women as such are healthy but men as such are sick (Volume 103, No. 1, pp. 125-137). He was chastised in a letter signed by 24 professors accusing him of committing “pseudohistory,” paternalism, and “crude Aristotelianism” (Volume 104, Number 1, p. 77). Among other points,  Levin noted in response that he was a member of the National Association of Women. The whole spectacle impelled Professor Ward Parks of Louisiana State University to write that Levin, “as an established academic and an unusually courageous man, maybe be able to survive such treatment, but new scholars who need to get published and to find jobs very probably could not” (Volume 108, Number 2, p. 353).
9. The 280-page study upon which this article is based is on file at the offices of the National Association of Scholars, Princeton, New Jersey.

 

2018 Note

After this article was published in a heavily-edited version by Academic Questions, the editor of PMLA, Domna C. Stanton, was quoted in a brief piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as calling it “pitiful,” a term egalitarians deploy when they really mean “contemptible” but, being egalitarians, prefer not to appear to enforce a social hierarchy. The Chronicle kindly published my reply in its April 7, 1993 issue:

To the Editor:

Thank you for publishing a report (‘In’ Box, March 3) on my article, “Ideology and Literary studies: PMLA 1930-1990,” which appeared in the most recent issue of Academic Questions. 

In the report, PMLA editor Domna C. Stanton was quoted as describing my article as “pitiful,” on the grounds that “Everyone from Euripides to Eudora Welty is ideological.” She added that PMLA employs more than 500 scholars in its peer-review process.

I am always grateful for any expression of human sympathy directed at my work, Mrs. Stanton’s pity included. I tenderly return the sentiment with respect to her comprehension of my article. I never claimed that prominent authors are not “ideological.” I claimed that articles about them need not be, and that most recent PMLA articles are.

To say “Euripides was a Socratic,” or “Eudora Welty was influenced by Southern Agrarianism,” is to make a non-ideological statement concerning ideology. Writers in PMLA once put perception and description ahead of ideological gesticulation. In increasing numbers they no longer do.

As for that demi-legion of peer reviewers, the demonstrable results of their efforts show just how ideologically motivated many in the profession have become.

So far, no one has made the really damning case against my article: that it betrays an inordinate expense of time and effort in attempting to prove the obvious.

Will Morrisey