The rise of literary theory is often described in terms of an invasion. A commando team of French intellectuals landed on U.S. shores in the late 1960s to infiltrate the leading universities and blow up literary studies. Twenty years later, after much ink and invective, French theory had conquered the field, supplanting the dominant mode of American criticism from the 1940s to the 1970s, the New Criticism.
That story has some truth, but it obscures as much as it reveals. The rise of theory was not just a foreign intrusion but developed from the inside. The New Criticism was dismantled less by French insurgents than by its own students, notably Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, and Stephen Greenblatt. It was as much a family drama as a geopolitical one.
Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt are odd bedfellows, representing very different theoretical approaches, Bloom a theory of poetic influence as Oedipal struggle, Fish a theory of interpretation that places all meaning in “interpretive communities,” and Greenblatt the “New Historicism.” But all three were products of the New Critical world, centered on English rather than foreign languages, and dealing with the most canonical of British authors in traditional periods. What’s more, all three underwent graduate training at Yale when Yale was the acknowledged center of New Criticism. They learned the New Criticism at the source, but their theories came to rebut each of its main tenets.
Now the New Criticism seems crusty and conservative, the flat perspective of one’s ancestors before we discovered the earth is round. But in midcentury the New Criticism revolutionized literary study. It infused life into the reading of literary works, opening them up for a rising generation of college students. It shed the dry, arcane focus of much of the scholarship of the previous generation. It also dispelled the touchy-feely impressionism of much teaching. Like a biologist with an enhanced microscope, the New Critic zeroed in on the specific features of a poem or story. In turn, the New Criticism lent a scientific exactness and credibility to literary study.
The New Criticism started in the South in the 30s, fostered by John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt, but by the 1950s several leading practitioners, including Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Ransom’s prize students, had migrated to New Haven. There they joined allies such as William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Austin Warren. They tended to offer close readings of texts more than large theoretical statements, but Wimsatt, in his book The Verbal Icon (1954), codified two of the main principles of the New Criticism.
The principles were more about what you should not do than what you should. The most famous was the “intentional fallacy,” which rules out talking about the author; rather, one should talk only about the poem itself. An author’s intentions aren’t reliable; what matters is what’s manifest in the poem. Next was the “affective fallacy” (the two fallacy essays Wimsatt co-wrote with the aesthetician Monroe C. Beardsley). It rules out talking about the audience, whose responses are not reliable either. They can be fickle and don’t tell you about the inner workings of the engine of a poem.
The New Critics also ruled out talk about history and politics. They acknowledged their importance but conceded them to history and the rising disciplines of sociology and political science, prescribing that a literary critic should stick to the poetic qualities of a poem. Its historical qualities might have documentary value, but not literary value.
Those prohibitions narrow the purview of criticism, but the New Critics were trying to distinguish its special role in contrast to the social sciences, which had barely existed in 1900 but rose to prominence after World War II. Eschewing chitchat and asserting a more precise knowledge, the New Criticism took some of the fuzziness away from the discipline of literature, giving it a stronger base in the research university.
By 1960 the New Criticism had become commonplace—even Ransom remarking that much of it was “the merest exercises with words"—and was ripe for challenge. The rising generation obliged. Harold Bloom (Yale Ph.D., 1955) took on the keystone intentional fallacy, instead putting all the weight on the author and his psyche. In a series of books, notably The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), he developed a theory that literary history comprises Oedipal struggles that poets undergo with their precursors. A poem was not a verbal icon but a revenge plot.
Bloom himself expressed some Oedipal hostility about Yale. When asked in a 1985 interview about the atmosphere there during the 1950s, he didn’t mince his words, calling it a “nightmare,” in part because of the idolizing of T.S. Eliot, who was a hero of New Criticism. Bloom’s version of theory was a homegrown reaction to Anglo-American formalism.
The next Yale student to bite the hand of the New Criticism was Stanley Fish (Ph.D., 1962). Fish countered the affective fallacy, arguing that all meaning resided in the experience of the reader. With less hostility and more flourish, he one-upped the New Critics with “The Affective Fallacy Fallacy,” a section of a 1970 essay that was reprinted as the first chapter of his major theoretical statement, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980). There he further explained how the meaning of a poem derives from the interpretive community we inhabit, not some absolute object. Marxists find class, formalists find form.
In an interview I conducted several years ago, Fish remarked that “Wimsatt was like Kingsfield in The Paper Chase: He was fierce.” (Fish also said it seemed like he was eight feet tall; Wimsatt was in fact nearly seven feet tall.) But Fish, learning the inside of formalism, turned it inside out, promoting a theory that drained meaning from a work and placed it in the audience.
If there is a family tree, the younger sibling is Stephen Greenblatt (Yale Ph.D., 1969), who made his mark inventing the New Historicism, which stresses “the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of history.” Rather than a verbal icon, Greenblatt declares in the introduction to his influential Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), “there can be no autonomous artifacts.”
Greenblatt noted in an interview I recently conducted that “the genius loci of Yale when I was there was William Wimsatt, and he thought … you are interested in the object insofar as you can detach it from the surroundings. That is the way I was trained, and I’m a product of that. But at a certain moment this approach seemed intolerable or grossly distorted, and so I and other people began to do something else.”
That something else varied and did sometimes tack toward French theory. Both Fish and Greenblatt talked in their interviews about encountering those on the Continental scene during the 1970s. And Yale of course was not the only nursery of theory (several prominent feminist critics attended Columbia, for instance). But the American New Criticism and its senators at Yale provided the ground from which a new generation of critics grew and departed.
Like most progeny, critics might rebel against their forebears but also bear their stamp. Despite their differences with the New Criticism, Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt more quietly carry on some of its features. When I asked him about these links, Greenblatt said he had never thought much about it but confessed that parts of his method are “consonant with the kind of education I had at Yale,” musing that “it often happens that the thing you are saying farewell to forever turns out to be the thing you are working slowly to arrive at.”
One way they are similar is that they all pay allegiance to literature, and especially to poetry, as the New Critics did. None of them have veered toward the modern realm of the novel, not to mention the newer realm of cultural studies or popular culture, and all of them are known for their work on major literary figures, Bloom on the Romantic poets, Fish on Milton, and Greenblatt on Shakespeare. They cover many of the same writers that Cleanth Brooks did in The Well-Wrought Urn.
Another way they are similar is that, though they draw theoretical surmises, they pay close attention to literature. While Wimsatt would grumble at the psychoanalytic language Bloom uses, he would recognize the attention to poems. Fish, though he shifts the site of meaning from the poem to the audience, does a close reading then of the poem in the audience; he remarked when I talked with him that “what heartens me through all of these changes is the commitment to close reading.” Greenblatt is more a teller of stories, but still he uses the toolbox of contextual facts to bear on a literary motif. As Cleanth Brooks examined the imagery of clothing and nakedness in Macbeth, Greenblatt examines the sliding portrayal of gender in the comedies.
A third way they don’t fall far from the tree is that they keep their distance from politics. In fact, Fish has a prohibition against it in his recent Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), where he holds that politics don’t belong in criticism; only literary matters do. Bloom excoriates those critics who avow radical politics in criticism as the “school of resentment.” Greenblatt is less cranky and admits to liberal leanings, but he desists from the headier claims of theory, saying, “I don’t know if I ever, even in my most heady moments, believed that regime change would take place through literary criticism.”
Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt’s stance toward politics dispels another common story about the rise of theory. A corollary to the notion that it was a French invasion is that it represented 60s counterculture, rendering the study of literature a “politics by other means.”
This points to the fact that many of the key participants in the rise of theory were not 60s radicals but of an earlier generation, what is called the “silent generation,” born after the “greatest generation” who fought World War II but before the boomers. Bloom (born in 1930) and Fish (born in 1938) were children of the 40s and 50s, not the 60s, and Greenblatt (born in 1943) was on the cusp, which perhaps explains his sympathy to history, although he too was more a child of the 50s.
Attending university in the 50s and early 60s, they were among the first beneficiaries of the postwar expansion of higher education. Unlike graduate students in literature now, who often teach as much as tenured professors, they all sailed through on the raft of postwar financing, finishing in their mid-20s and getting jobs, two of them at a rising state university.
Another element of postwar higher education is that it opened the Ivy gates to a more diverse demographic. Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt were not from the WASP elite but from Jewish families a generation or two from immigration. They got a boost from the meritocratic charge of the postwar university, and they entered a profession that was shedding its patrician adhesions. Theory, in other words, was cultivated in the rich loam of support for higher education, and the diversification of the demographic of its time. The new students, Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt, learned the lessons of their teachers, and, like most good students, also superseded them.
