Why we need professional literary criticism

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Among the books entering the public domain in 2022: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, The Castle by Franz Kafka, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence, The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes and Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Oh yeah, and Winnie the Pooh and Bambi: A Life in the Woods.

It is the latter that is currently the subject of particular attention.

I urge you to write it all down and read Kathryn Shulz’s account of Bambi in The New Yorker, which strikes me as a model of a kind of literary criticism that fell by the wayside. And while you’re at it, you can also take a look at Robert Gottleib’s eloquent and deeply moving reconsideration of Sinclair Lewis, ‘The novelist who saw Middle America as it really was’, to mark the 100th anniversary from Babbitt’s publication.

What is Bambi, the novel? It’s certainly not Disney’s animated fantasy about a fawn in the forest and his furry friends, the precursor to Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Road Runner and Yogi Bear. It’s far too brutal for that.

We all remember the hunter heartlessly killing Bambi’s mother or human recklessness starting a forest fire, but the novel contains many other graphic bloody incidents, including a crow killing a young hare, a rabbit shooting and a fox dismembering a pheasant.

The novel also doesn’t celebrate family like the Disney movie does. Unlike the film’s celebration of domesticity, in the book, Bambi the male abandons the doe Faline.

If Bambi isn’t just an anthropomorphic forest fantasy, then what is? Is it best understood as one of many metaphorical tales of orphanage, abandonment and coming of age, a latter-day Bildungsroman set in a wooded Eden? Is this the precursor to the wave of children’s books that call for environmental awareness and expose human threats to the natural world?

Or, as the great scholar of myths, legends, fairy tales and folklore Jack Zipes recently argued, is the novel an accusation of anti-Semitism, an allegory of Jewish persecution, an anticipation of the Holocaust and a prophecy of the destruction of Europe? Jewish community?

Schultz’s essay, by contrast, treats Bambi as a social Darwinist parable told from the perspective of the victims. It becomes a story of dominance, power and ascendancy on one side, and terror, worry, vulnerability and helplessness on the other.

I suspect more readers are interested in commentary on fiction than in academic history, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the popular press. Just look at some recent issues of the Sunday New York Times Book Review or the Wall Street Journal.

Since the start of the new year, books reviewed in history include a study of the planning of the “Final Solution”, the German response to the defeat of World War II, the 1960 presidential election, the unsung participants of the American Revolution, the history of the post office, breaking letters to men in uniform, Jenkins’ War of the Ear, the spread of Hellenism, the march to World War II, the story of a legendary Muslim ruler and a study of the city of Concord, Massachusetts in the early 19th century.

In contrast, non-fiction works on literature consist of a literary biography (of Dante) and a historical study of how the English language took over the world. Hmm.

Works of history have not always taken precedence over works of literary criticism. By simply listing the names of MH Abrams, Harold Bloom, Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Alred Kazin, Frank Kermode, Mary McCarthy, Edward Said, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson remind us of a time when literary critics were not household names, but they were well known to anyone with intellectual pretensions.

Certainly, there are still literary critics who remain widely admired, such as William Deresiewicz, Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joyce Carol Oates, Elaine Showalter, Paul Theroux and Helen Vendler. Then there are Henry Louis Gates and David Reynolds, but they are now more associated with history than literature.

.As an undergrad, I majored in English and History, but when it came time to apply for graduate school, my English department mentor (a scholar of American Transcendentalism would later become a pioneer in the field of ecocriticism) advised me to study history, because there was no place for anyone with an interest in history in the theory-oriented literature departments of the time . (We hardly knew that the glimmers of New Historicism were already emerging).

Please don’t take this as an implicit critique of the theoretical turn in literature as being unduly abstract or filled with jargon, or as mere frivolous skepticism. I spent my graduate years at ground zero of deconstruction, Yale, and even though my friends in comparative literature dismissed me as a “dustball empiricist,” their insights stuck with me:

that metaphysical texts, words and concepts do not have fixed meanings but rather possess multiple, often conflicting or contradictory meanings. that the construction of meaning and concepts is contingent, relational, dialogical and contextual. that binary dichotomies and dialectical oppositions are inevitably value-laden with one term implicitly privileged over the other. that language and even reason and logic must be understood as instruments of power.

By treating “common sense” as naive and unsophisticated, deconstruction has challenged historians, in particular, to question the reliability of frequently cited “facts”, to problematize data, and to treat evidence with much more of skepticism. It also taught us to pay much more attention to postmodern concerns about subjectivity, intertextuality, intersectionality, and indeterminacy, to question essentialism, and to view cultural institutions and categories as constructs. social.

However, for all its conceptual advances, literary criticism has lost much of its popular audience, a readership that yearns for expert, scholarly, and fresh readings of older and newer texts, with interpretations grounded in rich research and informed by ideas drawn from feminism, psychoanalysis, and written with clarity and panache

Before the emergence of the social sciences in the 19th century, whatever else it provided, literature offered the most profound understanding of the human condition, human emotions, and human relationships. In its pages, one finds a mixture of philosophy, psychology and sociology (and sometimes history).

Don’t seek your understanding of grief, love, friendship, or sexuality exclusively in the social sciences. Also turn to literature.

But just as Dante needed Virgil to guide his journey through the underworld, readers also need expert advice to make sense of what they read.

Lay readers benefit from understanding:

How an author uses language, style, tone, and characterization to shape a reader’s response. How an author uses subtexts, allusions and symbolism to give a text deeper meanings. How a literary work examines the human condition, provides insight into human nature, love, family or growth. The politics or ideological system of beliefs, values ​​and ideas that resides in a text. Cultural assumptions, about femininity or masculinity, whiteness or blackness, civilization or nature, race or class, and whether the text supports the dominant views of its time or subverts them. The various ways in which different readers might read and experience the text. The social, political and cultural context that reinforces the meaning of a text.

To my literary friends, do not renounce this responsibility. Recover your readership. Essays by Kathryn Schulz and Robert Gottleib will show you the way.

Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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