The Death Of Literary Criticism

Whatever happened to literary criticism? Twenty years ago it seemed full of excitement, vibrant. It was where the intellectual energy was. Now, in the words of Martin Amis, it feels 'dead and gone'. Some, of course, is still being published. Traditional scholarship continues to generate monographs on Jane Austen, critical introductions to the Romantics, scholarly editions of Shakespeare. It persists, useful to students and specialists, but passes most of us by. There is also plenty of critical writing by non-academics for the general reader. People want to read literary essays by AS Byatt or James Fenton, many of which are published in broadsheet newspapers or small magazines. Accessible and interesting, this is part of the general cultural conversation.

'English' emerged as a formal university discipline during 'the age of criticism' from the 1920s to the 1970s; it had a core canon of great writers and an accepted method – a mixture of close reading and moral purpose. The criticism which grew up with this new subject took up a place at the heart of British culture, it was discussed in the Sunday papers and around dinner party tables. The intellectual historian Stefan Collini has written: 'By the 1950s, the imperial drive of criticism had become almost commonplace. “English” paraded its claims to be considered a kind of presiding discipline in the increasingly specialised universities, and the literary critic figured as the very model of the modern general intellectual.'

T S Eliot died in 1965, IA Richards, FR Leavis and Lionel Trilling in the 1970s, but the age of criticism did not end then: the expansion of further education in Britain meant that more people than ever were reading critics like Leavis and Williams; and 'theory' took Britain and America by storm. 'English Literature' became a way of talking about psychoanalysis, Marxism, colonialism, anthropology and continental philosophy. That is why mainstream culture in the form of Newsnight, Channel Four and The Times dipped its toe into literary criticism in the 1980s.

The 1960s and early 1970s also saw the re-discovery of seminal works by critics from revolutionary Russia, Italy and Weimar Germany. Into the 1980s much criticism was still driven by a sense of historical drama and cultural crisis.
Now that drama has gone. The afterglow of 1960s radicalism became increasingly confined to the universities, cut off from larger social movements. In 1968 Roland Barthes, for many years the best-known of the French literary theorists, spoke of 'the death of the author'. Thirty years on, it looks more like the death of the critic.

What happened? Many of the key figures died, some prematurely. A series of scandals also undermined the authority of theory. And academic critics retreated into arcane jargon. But jargon isn't the only problem. Even beyond the small world of literary theory, there has been a larger failure to tell stories or write great prose. How many of today's literary critics have written anything comparable to the chapter on 17th-century Amsterdam in Simon Schama's book on Rembrandt or Roy Porter's evocation of 1950s London?

Judging by book sales readers still want to engage with the world. But not through theory and jargon. Biography has never sold better. 'Big history' has produced Figes on 1917, Beevor on 1945. Case histories from psychoanalysis (Adam Phillips) or neuroscience (Oliver Sacks) have created a new genre. There are big audiences for science writers who tackle our minds and bodies and the universe beyond.

While the decline of literary criticism highlights a particular crisis in academia, it also belongs to a larger set of cultural changes. The first is a loss of interest in literature itself. This sounds absurd. Fiction is in demand, from Ian McEwan to JK Rowling. But behind the tower blocks of contemporary fiction at Waterstone's and Borders there is a massive loss of interest in pre-20th century literature. How many people today read Chaucer or Pope? How many readers of Flaubert's Parrot have read Madame Bovary?

There is a break in our culture. Our literary past looks remote, even incomprehensible. Most of us don't know the Bible, can't read Latin or Greek, don't know our ancient history or classical mythology. The kind of criticism which deals with pre-1960s literature is out of step with the larger culture. But as a discipline being formed in the 1920s and 1930s, English literature was in many ways defined in opposition to the facile and popular. It is not a coincidence that 20th-century literary criticism emerged at the same time as the paperback, mass media and mass culture. Allen Lane founded Penguin in 1935, the year before Leavis published Revaluation. Literary criticism became a way of talking about values which were felt to be threatened by what Leavis called a 'technologico-Benthamite civilisation'. There was a war going on – between literature and 'life' on the one hand, and commercialism and philistinism on the other.

The core audience for literary criticism comprised students, schoolteachers, autodidacts. Without this sense of a minority culture on the defensive, it is impossible to understand the ferocity of the 'two cultures' debate. As the critic René Wellek wrote in 1982: 'There is a gulf between a minority culture and the mass culture which more and more deserts the written word in favour of television, computers, video-games and spectator sports. It is the duty and the task of the professor to resist this trend.'

Such oppositions no longer trouble us in the same way. Who would now share Leavis's contempt for science and technology? It is not just that science books are popular. There is a larger sense that the sciences are changing our world for the better. And the lines between high culture and popular culture, once so clearly demarcated, have since become notoriously blurred.

There is a final context which has sped the decline of literary criticism in Britain. This is the crisis of Englishness itself. It is no coincidence that studying 'English' has long meant studying English literature.
But with American culture dominating, with relations to Europe growing ever-closer, with the creation of a multicultural society, our sense of what England is has changed.

The age of criticism was part of a movement to create an English literary tradition which ran from Beowulf to Shakespeare and on to Woolf and 20th-century modernism. Words like 'tradition' and 'community' echoed through mid-20th-century literary criticism. But if those ideas of England and Englishness no longer exist, what does that do to a literary criticism grounded in English literature?

The decline of literary criticism is not something we should celebrate. It is part of a larger story. What does it mean for a society to see the values of Leavis and Williams so completely overthrown? We need, more than ever, a strong and popular criticism, free of jargon, addressing major issues of our past, culture and identity.

From David Herman 'Silence of the Critics' Prospect Dec. 2002