Notes toward a History of Anti-Criticism

Abstract

NUMBER OF SCHOLARS, including Gerald Graff, Frank Lentricchia, and Richard Ohmann, have written (or are in midst of writing) exemplary histories of modern criticism.1 Thinking about these histories of however, prompts me to speculate whether there is a related, but not identical, history that consists of a range of ideas, attitudes, practices, and values that we would not exactly want to label criticism, but something else. I am intrigued as much, if not more, by what I tentatively call anti-criticism, that other which isn't criticism and from which criticism distinguishes itself. This brief formulation begins to indicate what anti-criticism is or at least might be, but relation between criticism and anti-criticism is more complicated and puzzling than a simple opposition or polarity implies. One could imagine an unlettered or untutored soul who claims to be against who doesn't see need for it (it kills books), who opts instead for a hearty impressionism and untrammeled subjectivity, who is, in a word, a kind of anti-critic. But it may be harder to imagine a practicing critic or scholar who openly professes, in a paradoxical sort of enabling and disabling gesture, that his analysis is neither impressionistic nor subjective but is, nevertheless, feeble and self-defeating, cannot come close to success, does not and could never go far enoughor sternly ought not be allowed to go farther than it should. Such a person believes, even as he explicates texts and applies isolable technology that is modern criticism,2 that what he is doing cannot and possibly should not really be done. Numerous critics, past and present, properly belong in histories of but just as many (they are often same people) would also figure in a history of anti-criticism. Here is a sentence from first page of a recent essay by Helen Vendler on the study and teaching of literature: Perhaps only true thing to say about study and teaching of literature is that it is impossible.3 We might be inclined to pass by this sentence without paying it much heed, regarding it as a winning expression of critical modesty. But sentence is more beguiling than that if one lingers over it for a moment. Surely it is somewhat perplexing that a critic of Vendler's stature and