She Took Her Oral Exams. 45 Years Later, She Filed Her Dissertation.

Several years ago, while I was serving as the director of graduate studies in my department, a graduate student, who had taken an exceptionally long leave of absence, informed me that she was ready to file her dissertation at last. To be clear, when I say “exceptionally long leave,” I mean that it had been 45 years since she was a graduate student in good standing. She was now in her 70s, having passed her oral qualifying exam in 1969, and, though she had spent what at this point I can respectfully call her life at a number of staff positions within the university, she had also some years before returned to her dissertation on the writings of William Hazlitt, working informally with new advisers because her old advisers had died.

And now, in order to file, she had only to be reinstated as a candidate for her degree, but the problem was that the Graduate Council requires a valid qualifying examination for doctoral candidacy; her exam from 1969, exceeding the five-year limit for currency by over 40 years, was “invalid”; and the graduate deans “unanimously determined that a new qualifying exam would be required of her” before she could graduate.

Now this seemed like an undue burden for a septuagenarian who might not, all over again, have what it takes most graduate students to study for their field exams and who had, after almost half a century, resumed her doctoral studies for their own sake, or for Hazlitt’s sake, but in any case in retirement rather than as the means to employment. So I did what any DGS would do and petitioned. I petitioned for an exception to the time limit — I petitioned for a 40-year extension — but since I could not ask for an exemption from the policy itself, the only course of action was to argue to the deans that this student was still, half a century later, in compliance; that, actually, those field exams from 1969 remained “valid.”

This was to put myself in the compromised position of telling the deans at a time of disciplinary precarity — at a time when the function of literary criticism had become a referendum on the future of a discipline whose validity to these same deans may be its only hope — that the scholarship had not necessarily evolved since 1969, or rather that its evolution was irrelevant to the value of the knowledge the student had gained back then, which was no less valuable now.

Of course, I knew what they meant by “validity.” They were asking if the scholarship the student had studied still had authority in the way our request for an exception had none. I took it as meaning that institutions of knowledge like mine demand shifting sites of interest, with new knowledge superseding the truth and consequences of the old. Yet I was pretty sure, for example, that Jerome McGann’s 1969 book on Byron was still interesting enough, and true, even though his later criticism had brought even more within our range of appreciation and held out more for particular notice. So I’ve been thinking about validity, in the way the philosopher John Dewey does in describing criticism’s “validity by reference to its efficiency” in meeting a problem or answering to a need, as being thoroughly applicable to the circumstances. It wasn’t clear to me what the Graduate Council’s need was, but it was very clear to me that this student needed to file a dissertation on Hazlitt and that her knowledge of criticism was adequate to this need at the present time.

If they had asked whether a dissertation on Hazlitt was valid, too, I would have said it depended on the value the student found in Hazlitt, and the uses to which she put it. It seemed to me at least that she had taken Hazlitt seriously, having found a way to stay interested in her field over a lifetime and to make it dynamic and meaningful to herself and others.

If we look back to Matthew Arnold, we might say that, from the moment literature in English first became a field of study late in the 19th century, criticism set out to make this kind of distinction between value and knowledge. Criticism taught us that knowledge was never a neutral pursuit; that its validity is grounded, not in authority or objectivity, but in the realization of value, and that its work depends on this self-confidence, on the overwhelming sense that above all it is pursuing a valuable inquiry. This is what I take Arnold to mean when he writes that “the function of criticism at the present time” (in the essay of that title) is “to make the best ideas prevail” so that, when these ideas “reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere.” He means that the ideas that prevail are not truer, but practically better (the best we have) because, in touching on our lives, they might be of “real service” to us at the present time.

The critic seizes on a text, object, or occasion to bring forth these ideas with such clearness not so we might gain knowledge but that we might “value knowledge and thought as they approach this best,” that we might bother with that text to begin with and then see that it can make a positive difference in a way that is of interest to us. Criticism discloses what a text can do when approached in whatever way it takes to get the most out of it.

In the same essay, Arnold insists that the function of criticism is “to see the object as in itself it really is.” He associates “critical power” with the “disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake,” and with “keeping aloof” from “any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas” that others will surely attach to them. He says that it is of the last importance that criticism be disinterested.

But if we take Arnold’s claim for criticism to imply indifference to contemporary life or belief in a text’s autonomy, then we are not seeing his essay as it really is. Disinterestedness, for him, is pretty much the same as “curiosity,” a word he sets out, in Culture and Anarchy, to redeem from its “disparaging” sense — in English, though not other languages — of being “frivolous and unedifying.” He even describes disinterestedness in ways that sound a lot like its opposite: the exercise of the quality of a mind that is interested in everything. The critic’s “inflexible honesty” means that he follows curiosity where it goes and is faithful to what it finds. Criticism occurs, that is, whenever time is devoted to seeing what sort of value may be present elsewhere and likely to escape us in the “old rut” of adherence to “our business, and our fortune-making,” to social habits and norms.

Arnold is trying to make the case for encountering ideas outside the preoccupations of the current moment, which, in England of the 1860s, he associates with liberalism and enterprise, a particularly English parochialism, and a technocratic pursuit of knowledge “requiring a chairman, a secretary, and advertisements” but “very little thought.” Criticism is the freedom to “withdraw” for a time from some things and “attach” ourselves to others, but the good of it really comes later — in the reattaching to current life, and in how those things might be “re-accepted, re-tasted, exquisitely re-assimilated, and re-enjoyed — believed in … for re-assertion of value,” as Henry James puts it.

This is why Arnold insists that the critic “must dwell much on foreign thought” and “try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better.” The critic turns to something that seems foreign, distant, or removed, and calls it out for particular notice. It is nothing new, having been there already, and the critic does not discover it, so much as “possess” it, by which Arnold only means own it, with all the “honesty” he describes, as worth taking: “There is so much inviting us! what are we to take?” Certainly, the critic makes choices, but the aim is admission, not exclusion, since more of the “best” might come to serve, “enlarging our stock” of current ideas.

I know that, with Arnold, there is little getting past the fact that the critic (himself) gets endowed with this ability to bring to light the ideas worth bringing out. Arnold understands these disclosures to be a kind of “power.” But, in this essay at least, criticism really never carries the weight of cultural authority. It is so much lighter than that — a release, actually, from authority and validity.

It claims no truth, only the “touch of truth” — “a light touch,” as the scholar David Russell calls it. “It is by communicating fresh knowledge,” Arnold says, “and letting his own judgment pass along with it, — but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract law-giver, — that the critic will generally do most good to his readers.” This is criticism as an unburdening and unencumbering from the imperatives of the present. Old materials turn out to be “ever fresh.” Arnold is trying to suggest that criticism is refreshing. It is, as he says in Culture and Anarchy, “sweetness and light.”

“The world is enlarged for us,” as Emerson writes, “not by new objects, but by finding more affinities and potencies in those we have.” Arnold admired Emerson and thought about “quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas” in ways similar to him. Criticism’s “importance at the present day” is to serve as “companion and clue” to unexamined ideas that have little importance now; let us act quietly, he says, to perpetuate their presence, though the “rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect,” drawing us “into its vortex.” The point is to “stock” up. One day these ideas just might prove adequate to the occasion, but it will be “slow and obscure” work until then. Most of all, Arnold takes from Emerson his sense of patience as what Arnold calls the “right tone and temper of mind” for the critic.

“Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends,” Emerson says. There might not be, in Arnold’s words, “an immediate political and practical application” for the “free speculative treatment of things.” This work is not exactly deliverable; it will not “rule” in the “street.” There must be periods of contemplation before periods of “expansion.” Criticism “must be patient, and know how to wait.” Still, in keeping for now “out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere,” criticism “may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere.”

Ideas will take if the moment is right for admitting them, and Arnold’s great faith comes in thinking that they will be rightly recognized and “irresistible” then. Ideas get around. Meanwhile, criticism “may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed.” It may shape the world for waiting and then maybe in, say, “50 years’ time,” it will be “an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly.” Or, in “20 years’ time it may, in English literature,” take the form of “an objection to a proposition that is absurd.” “That will be a change so vast,” Arnold says, “that the imagination almost fails to grasp it.” It may take years or decades — it may take nearly 50 years or even more — to make that object our objective, but it is only by criticism “resolutely doing its own work” (in its own “small circle,” Arnold feels the need to add) that “adequate ideas will ever get current at all.”

Will the moment arrive when this slow work on obscure objects gets admitted as “important” at the present time? Will it buy entrance “by a long probation,” as Emerson promises? I’m not so sure. But the idea of following the warmth of one’s interests beyond current interests, and then of articulating a “lively consciousness” of how these objects might be valuable and true for others, makes Arnold’s old essay worthwhile even now. It suggests that criticism can redistribute our attention even to things that seem obscure and “foreign,” and that this expression of interest might enable more interest and liking still.

It speaks, in other words, to the promise of revealing value, if not conferring validity. I like thinking about this in the very modest case of a graduate student whose slow work is no longer valid but who continues to find something satisfactory in Hazlitt. It reframes the question. Not, What new knowledge is tested and gained? Instead, How do we keep this old project of ours meaningful in unfolding circumstances?

Criticism does not vindicate knowledge for its own sake but tells us why certain knowledge is worth having when there is so much else we otherwise can do, read, and know. The distinction between value and knowledge is important because value implies choice — what induces us to attend to one thing and not another. Literary criticism was always up against this background of choice: of subjects, problems, emphasis, and accentuation, calling attention to some works or aspects of a work over others and intensifying the experience of those aspects instead.

Certain works prevail because of their special contributions, what John Dewey calls their “consequences.” Dewey thinks that the point of criticism is to bring these consequences “to conscious perception” — to make clear just why “the object liked and preferred” is “significant, intelligent, and intelligible.” Its function is to make our preferences and discriminations consequential, to justify our likings by looking to see what sort of value is present or by raising “even a shadow of a question” about their worth or else modifying our sense of them “by even a passing estimate of” their “probable future.”

Dewey sounds exactly like Arnold when he says that criticism “has no stock of information or body of knowledge peculiarly its own,” but that its business is “to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available knowledge of its own time and place.” Criticism is purposeful knowledge. E.D. Hirsch — another critic who came to be associated with the cultural tradition, though against his choice— writes that criticism can never be axiologically neutral. To focus on one thing is to neglect another, though what is uncertain at any given moment is whether the best choices have been made. Valid knowledge is never enough. Some knowledge may be more worth having, and criticism’s purpose is to make it possible to like and choose with meaning, to let interest express itself in a responsible way.

For the philosopher Alain Locke, the discovery of value “was probably the greatest philosophical achievement of the 19th century,” though one of the last to receive recognition, if it ever did. “Value arises,” he says, “out of our mind’s practical attitude” toward the objects we choose to notice out of all possible objects. Value expresses those objects’ relationship to our purposes and needs — how they attract and interest us, why they come to matter to us. That the late-19th century’s greatest philosophical achievement was the concept of mattering for oneself and others, and that the rise of criticism, including literary criticism, was for these philosophers the exercise of that philosophy, is much more than I can discuss here. But I will say that Arnold, Locke, Dewey, and others thought that literary criticism was especially good at distinguishing, in Locke’s words, fact from value — at enlarging our appreciation of what counts as important and getting us to admit things that had been immaterial or alien to us — maybe as remote to us as the works of Hazlitt — into a significant relationship to ourselves and our present moment.

For Locke, “a sharpening of critical discrimination” reveals new worth and value in the “intrinsic” object as it really is, in what had been there waiting all along, something old and fossilized — in, let’s even say, a cultural tradition. Locke especially wants us to see it in African American and African cultural traditions, of particular importance in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, in which he was a central figure. He is calling for a “widening of the range of appreciation” through new acts of selective interest. His literary and art criticism was meant to pick up on objects that felt alien and unvital, art forms “that were dead letters to our eyes previously,” that we had never appreciated and that had never concerned us.

Locke wants us to see how so many objects that had not “obtained social recognition as valuable,” might “come to rank as objective values,” and this sense of coming to rank matters greatly to him. He wants these objects to rise into importance, to prevail. He wants it to be “clear that all objects can be valued by being included in a valuation-process,” being what he also calls “constructive criticism,” in which “foreign” art forms and knowledge are “reconstructed” in light of the needs of the present time. In this way, “critical discrimination” becomes the basis of what Locke calls “art pluralism.”

The critic’s discrimination is the opposite of oblivion, of obscurity. It is the opposite, for Locke, of social death: discrimination not as gatekeeping and the narrowing of ranks, but as the answer to prejudice. The moral function of the critic, writes Dewey, is to “remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing.” Criticism is the re-education of perception in order to recognize that there is value far beyond where we imagined it to be, and to make this valuable thing a newly perceptible part of life.

Some among us may say that criticism should be fundamentally against value, since value is also the measure of the audit culture that defines the institutions that fund it and that justifies the humanities as a personal investment — in future happiness or earning power, take your pick. This is what Maurice Blanchot means when he writes, “criticism — literature — seems to me to be associated with … the task of preserving and liberating thought from the notion of value.” But the moment we make a case for studying a work — the moment we ask ourselves why in the world an essay by William Hazlitt or Matthew Arnold could matter to us or to anyone else in the midst of a crisis, or what kind of problems or needs it might address or why an essay justifies the attention we seem to be giving it anyway — we are making value judgments that that essay is interesting and worth pursuing, even if the need it addresses is simply to complete a short piece for a journal, or to file a dissertation on Hazlitt after 45 years.

After seven months of bureaucratic impasse, my petitions were denied. Our very advanced graduate student had to sit for her qualifying exams again. Nearly half a century after entering the program, she passed for the second time. Though I’ll confide to you that, behind closed doors, no matter what we happened to ask, following normal procedures across three wide-ranging fields, it all seemed to come to bear on — only somehow to disclose something we had never before expected in — Hazlitt. The student was discriminating. We found it interesting.

I hope that someday I can be a critic and not a bureaucrat, waiting 45 years past deadlines, benchmarks, and thresholds, and taking there to be in the same objects I know at the present time more use and needfulness than I knew. I doubt this is valid, but may be adequate.

This essay is adapted from “Critical Enough,” which first appeared in American Literary History.