LITERARY CRITICISM: A CONCISE POLITICAL HISTORY By Joseph North Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $39.95

For all the debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. According to the standard narrative, mid-twentieth-century literary studies served a conservative agenda, fostering traditional values and upholding a canon of dead white men. The dominant school of interpretation was New Criticism, whose defining method—close reading—consisted of scrutinizing short passages of literary works detached from their political contex . A theory underwrote this method: that literature could be understood apart from politics; that its meaning and power transcended the social conditions within which it was produced. From roughly the 1940s through the early 1960s, this was the prevailing approach. But new schools of interpretation, energized by the anti-establishment political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s—poststructuralist, feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, postcolonial, new historicist, queer—rejected New Criticism’s conservatism and usurped its central position within literature departments. These new methodologies are committed to the notion that a work of literature should be understood as responsive to its time.



But now, many scholars are saying that the discipline should take another new direction. Some have called for a return to the formalist concerns championed by the New Critics. Others have questioned what they regard as an attitude of suspicion adopted in political criticism, favoring the more affirmative, emotional responses to literature of readers outside the academy. Still others have advocated for a quantitative, data-driven approach enabled by new digital technology. What distinguishes Joseph North’s shrewd new polemic Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History from other these other efforts is his refusal to accept the conventional narrative of the discipline’s history. To recognize where literary studies should go, North says, we need to rethink where it has been.

A troubling question propels North’s account: How, he asks, did literary scholarship take a leftward turn during the 1970s, when neoliberalism and austerity were ascendant? “How did literary studies manage, not merely to hold firm against the tide, but to move strongly against it? Everywhere else, the left in retreat; but within literary studies, a historic advance.” The discipline regards itself as a righteous defender of progressive ideals within a hostile political climate, but North is unconvinced. Tracing the development of literary studies through the turbulent years between the two world wars, the mid-century “welfare-statist compromise,” the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, and finally the 2008 financial meltdown, North argues that literary studies, far from coming to embrace political activism, has gradually retreated from the interventionist mission that it seemed ready to adopt during its earlier phases.

The first period North considers, the 1920s and 1930s, witnesses a struggle between traditional scholars, caught up in obscure debates over etymology, and amateur belletristic critics concerned with shaping the sensibility of the general public. The hero in this drama is the British thinker I. A. Richards, who embraces the goal of using literature to educate readers outside the academy, but simultaneously introduces more rigorous critical methods which literature departments end up adopting. Richards’s most important contribution, says North, is his rejection of theories that isolate the experience of art from the practical concerns of everyday life. For Richards, reading poetry is a way of reorganizing people’s minds, enhancing their cognitive powers, and cultivating their “practical faculties.” A great poem imparts a greater psychic balance to readers, training their minds to accommodate and harmonize a multitude of competing urges, making them at once more sensitive and more self-possessed. By emphasizing the usefulness of aesthetic cultivation for non-scholarly lives, Richards pinpoints a means by which literary criticism can contribute to the transformation of society. Richards doesn’t imagine an explicit political function for literature, but according to North, his is the most feasible blueprint for turning criticism into an engine of political change.

But later, the New Critics and others hijack the method introduced by Richards—close reading—and make it serve precisely the conception of aesthetic value that he had sought to invalidate: that of beauty for beauty’s sake. It’s an understanding of aesthetics that places politics or social betterment beneath literature, as something that critics shouldn’t sully their hands with. In defending this view, the New Critics turn away from the project of cultivating minds, focusing instead on “objectively” ranking literary works, thereby propagating what North calls the “sterile concern with hierarchy and canonicity that will occupy much of Anglophone literary studies throughout the Cold War period.” The New Critics, in North’s account, are more interested in making absolute claims about the greatness of literary works than in using these works to improve readers’ lives.