The Use Value of Contemporary and Future Literary Criticism

Abstract

After the Death of Literary Criticism Everything is back to normal: literature is being produced to judge by the statistics, more abundantly than ever--and books on the market are finding reviewers. The situation is no different from ten, twenty or fifty years ago. The predicted demise of literature and literary criticism never did happen. Or so it would seem. Only occasionally do we recall 1968 and the horror with which one viewed the prophets predicting the destruction of the literature industry and the birth of a new and better literature. Gone are the New Left's dreams of restructuring advanced capitalist society through cultural revolution. Also forgotten, it seems, are the critical assaults on the institution of literary criticism. Was the so-called crisis of criticism nothing but a momentary collapse? number of the more recent statements on the subject suggest as much. Joachim Giinther asserts: Books are being written and printed, and, despite all the crises of authors and publishing houses, of a satiated public and overfilled libraries, it looks as though this unending process in the underground of the psyche and society, in the depths of the economy, culture, history and human life were not to be deterred or blocked, much less ever eliminated.1 The appeal to the eternally human, so familiar to us from pronouncements of the 1950s, finds its place once more in the arsenal of this 'surviving' criticism, and already they are saying that criticism is indeed as necessary as sun and water. A newspaper would simply not be able to compete financially if it let itself think that it could discard its literature and review section as antiquated and irrelevant.2 It is safe to say that this professional self-assurance will probably not be deterred by indications that American newspapers by no means sell fewer copies simply because they do not review books regularly; nor would they be bothered by the fact that even in West Germany the public demand for literary criticism is not all that great: the literary section of large newspapers is, on the average, read by only nine per cent of the readers. Some commentators even regard it as a success that peace and quiet prevail