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The Lunar-Solar Connection: Looking at Literature--Naturally
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13467 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
5,422 Words |
| Author
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Milton Birnbaum
Milton Birnbaum is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and
professor of English at American International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts. |
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered on the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!
- Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi (1883)
In Abraham Joshua Heschel's Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (1951), he tells the story of a little girl who has been enjoying a lovely summer afternoon; she asks her father what there is beyond the sky. Her father, "an influential educator," gives her a scientific reply, "Ether, my child." Upon hearing this, the little girl exclaims, "Ether!" and holds her nose.
One may sometimes feel like holding one's nose when confronted with much of today's pseudo-scientific literary criticism: structuralism, poststructuralism Freudianism, post-Freudianism, Marxism, post- (or neo-) Marxism, deconstruction, not to mention the flickering embers of the New Criticism, neo-humanism etc., etc. In these pantings after nonliterary guidelines, there is little insight, less clarity, and even less wit. I for one yearn for the eighteenth-century literary interpreter Samuel Johnson and applaud his criticism of criticism (Idler, 60, June 9, 1759)
Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labor of learning those sciences which may by mere labor be obtained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
Samuel Johnson's animadversions against criticism, however, did not stop him from being a critic (probably one of the best in English); neither should the jargon in today's academia-based literary criticism inhibit a redirection in literary analysis. There are, of course, some lively discussions in publications like the New York Times Book Review and the American Scholar (not to mention THE WORLD & I), but I have become increasingly unhappy with the kind of literary criticism that has appeared in professional and academic journals (particularly PMLA and College English). What made me think of Samuel Johnson was an article
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