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American Literary Criticism in the Twentieth Century
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20648 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
5,026 Words |
| Author
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Walter Poznar
Walter Poznar is professor of humanities at Saint Leo College,
Florida. He has published numerous articles on higher
education and literature. |
The history of American literary criticism in this century is largely the history of warring factions and competing ideologies. The second and third decades witnessed the outbreak of controversy about the nature and function of literature and literary criticism in the contemporary world. The debates, conducted in an atmosphere of heated partisanship, rarely confined themselves to purely literary issues. The waning of impressionistic criticism opened the controversy to advocates of divergent creeds who took the field in a struggle viewed by many as far more than a parochial disagreement about aesthetic questions. Ludwig Lewisohn entitled one chapter in his Expression in America "The Great Critical Debate." In 1939 Bernard Smith observed that "these critical wars are not just esthetic debates. They have been passionate, they have often been acrimonious, because they involve social, political, moral and religious philosophies; they are conflicts between ways of life, between classes, and between cultures."
It is clear that the opposing forces were intransigently dogmatic in their claims and in their philosophical orientation. Joel Spingarn's celebrated address on "The New Criticism" at Columbia in 1910, in which he supported Croce's definition of art as expression, was vigorously; assaulted by other camps. The new Humanism of Babbitt, More, and their followers was met by fierce opposition from any number of modernist critics. The emerging school of psychoanalytic critics was sharply denounced by the New Humanists and others. Marxist critics were attacked for their doctrinaire approach to literature. H.L. Mencken's satiric broadsides added to the rising level of impassioned invective. Never before had our culture witnessed such an outpouring of vigorous argumentation, an atmosphere so surcharged with emotion that those, like Erasmus, of moderate temperament were barely heard.
Literature and Civilization
What was implicit and often explicit in the heat of controversy was the assumption by most critics that the outcome of these skirmishes was of vital importance to the preservation of civilized values. The contest was not about literature alone, but about the fate of man in the modern world. The combatants had no doubt that the future of civilization was at stake, that what was involved was not the aesthetic character of literature but fundamental questions about man and his destiny, that the dangers man faced in the twentieth century are somehow inextricably interwoven with the place of literature in a humane society.
The arguments of the
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