Okay, it's the Wall Street Journal on a cultural issue, so, in my opinion, you really need to take it with a pound or two of salt.
However, this review of "Praising It New," a book about the New Criticism, is largely right when it says we took a serious wrong turn in literary criticism when we jettisoned formalism ("textual intensity") in favor of postmodernism.
But I think we took that wrong turn for some good reasons.
I would say that the reviewer (James Seaton) does not. I only read the review one time, but I didn't notice even a polite, let alone positive, word about the "death of the author" crowd. Instead, Seaton admiringly quotes Cleanth Brooks as saying that literature should be "not statements about what ought to be, but renditions of what is." This stands for the kind of commonsensical, emotionally-engaged literary criticism that we've lost in the past few decades.
And I agree with it! Brooks is right!
But here's the thing. At a certain point, you do need to ask, "But what does it MEAN to 'render what is?'" Yeah, yeah, we all know what it means, but...do we? It's worth asking the question. And while we're at it, what IS 'what is?' That's worth asking too.
The problem is that those questions were SO worth asking that they were too strong for us. They blew our tiny little minds into an illion billion pieces and we started taking people like Barthes and Derrida way too seriously and--as the WSJ review correctly charges--discussing the discussion instead of the work.
I say this because I love theory; in grad school, I spectacularly failed to endear myself to my professors by insisting on approaching art theoretically instead of historically. I know, or used to know, theory about as well as someone who can still make themselves understood when trying to order coffee CAN know theory.
(A true postmodernist would be there for half an hour: "The construct of 'self' which I perceive as coexistent with the singularity of what is commonly agreed upon as my physical presence at these particular coordinates of the invisible graph imposed upon us by our patriarchally-encoded perception is 'interested' in your 'pot' which 'contains' 'hot' 'liquid' 'flavored' by 'beans'...")
So I know its defects, and they are steep. But I also know that...Well, you parents out there. Your kids ever gone through a phase? I bet they have. And what are phases? Phases might as well be defined as "developmental manifestations which annoy parents to no end, but we have to suck it up, because they have a purpose."
Literary criticism's awkward swan dive into copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy land ("...could maybe transfer the liquid currently oppressively restricted by the confines of your patriarchally-defined vessel across a gap in both 'space' and the perception of space into the empty, smaller vessel that I am currently holding--not that you should read anything symbolic into my possession of such a vessel even though I'm physically configured in a way that has been defined as 'biologically female'...") is a PHASE.
We will get through it, and over it, and hopefully, we will be better for it.
Because the truth is..."what is 'what is'" is a serious question. And even if it pulls you off course for four decades and makes you churn out hundreds of thousands of pages of unprintable crap, alienate everyone, and possibly even have difficulty ordering coffee...
...it's worth asking.
