Literary and social criticism
Until his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson solidified his reputation as one of America’s most versatile and distinguished men of letters. The novelist John Updike inherited Wilson’s chair at The New Yorker and turned out an extraordinary flow of critical reviews collected in volumes such as Hugging the Shore (1983) and Odd Jobs (1991). Gore Vidal brought together his briskly readable essays of four decades—critical, personal, and political—in United States (1993). Susan Sontag’s essays on difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. In A Second Flowering (1973) and The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), Malcolm Cowley looked back at the writers between the world wars who had always engaged him. Alfred Kazin wrote literary history (An American Procession [1984], God and the American Writer [1997]) and autobiography (Starting Out in the Thirties [1965], New York Jew [1978]), while Irving Howe produced studies at the crossroads of literature and politics, such as Politics and the Novel (1957), as well as a major history of Jewish immigrants in New York, World of Our Fathers (1976). The iconoclastic literary criticism of Leslie Fiedler, as, for example, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), was marked by its provocative application of Freudian ideas to American literature. In his later work he turned to popular culture as a source of revealing social and psychological patterns. A more-subtle Freudian, Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination (1950) and other works, rejected Vernon L. Parrington’s populist concept of literature as social reportage and insisted on the ability of literature to explore problematic human complexity. His criticism reflected the inward turn from politics toward “moral realism” that coincided with the Cold War. But the cultural and political conflicts of the 1960s revived the social approach among younger students of American literature, such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who emerged in the 1980s as a major critic, theorist, and editor of Black writers in studies such as Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988). In the 1990s Gates evolved into a wide-ranging essayist, along with Cornel West, Stanley Crouch, bell hooks, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, Gerald Early, Michele Wallace, and other Black social critics.
Literary biography and the “new journalism”
The waning of the New Criticism, with its strict emphasis on the text, led not only to a surge of historical criticism and cultural theory but also to a flowering of literary biography. Major works included Leon Edel’s five-volume study of Henry James (1953–72), Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), Richard Ellmann’s studies of James Joyce (1959) and Oscar Wilde (1988), R.W.B. Lewis’s revealing biography of Edith Wharton (1975), Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky (1976–2002), Paul Zweig’s brilliant study of Walt Whitman (1984), and Carol Brightman’s exhaustive life of Mary McCarthy (1992).
One positive result of the accelerating complexity of post-World War II life was a body of distinguished journalism and social commentary. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) was a deliberately controlled, unemotional account of atomic holocaust. In Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), the novelist James Baldwin published a body of the most eloquent essays written in the United States. Ralph Ellison’s essays on race and culture in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) were immensely influential. Norman Mailer’s “new journalism” proved especially effective in capturing the drama of political conventions and large protest demonstrations. The novelist Joan Didion published two collections of incisive social and literary commentary, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). The title essay of the first collection was an honest investigation of the forces that gave colour and significance to the counterculture of the 1960s, a subject also explored with stylistic flourish by journalists as different as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. The surreal atmosphere of the Vietnam War, infused with rock music and drugs, gave impetus to subjective journalism such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977). The mood of the period also encouraged strong works of autobiography, such as Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time (1967) and Lillian Hellman’s personal and political memoirs, including An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Scoundrel Time (1976). Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) defied all classification. Pirsig equated the emotional collapse of his central character with the disintegration of American workmanship and cultural values.
Theory
The major New Critics and New York critics were followed by major but difficult academic critics, who preferred theory to close reading. European structuralism found little echo in the United States, but poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida found a welcome in the less-political atmosphere, marked by skepticism and defeat, that followed the 1960s. Four Yale professors joined Derrida to publish a group of essays, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Two of the contributors, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, became leading exponents of deconstruction in the United States. The other two, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman, were more interested in the problematic relation of poets to their predecessors and to their own language. Bloom was especially concerned with the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on modern American poets. After developing a Freudian theory of literary influence in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), Bloom reached a wide audience with The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), both of which explored and defended the Western literary tradition.
Philosophers Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell and critic Richard Poirier found a native parallel to European theory in the philosophy of Emerson and the writings of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Emulating Dewey and Irving Howe, Rorty emerged as a social critic in Achieving Our Country (1998) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Other academic critics also took a more-political turn. Stephen Greenblatt’s work on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers and Edward Said’s essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) were influential in reviving historical approaches to literature that had long been neglected. Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) directed attention to the effects of colonialism on the arts and society. His essays were collected in Reflections on Exile (2000). Other critics deflected this historical approach into the field of cultural studies, which erased the lines between “high” (elite) and “low” (popular) culture and often subsumed discussion of the arts to questions of ideology. Meanwhile, a wide range of feminist critics, beginning with Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter, gave direction to new gender-based approaches to past and present writers. Critics who came to be known as queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, produced innovative work on texts dealing with homosexuality, both overt and implicit.
All these methods yielded new dimensions of critical understanding, but in less-adept hands they became so riddled with jargon or so intensely political and ideological that they lost touch with the general reader, with common sense itself, and with any tradition of accessible criticism. This drew the ire of both conservatives, such as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and writers on the left, such as Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Dogmatic Wisdom (1994). Reactions against theory-based criticism set in during the 1990s not only with attacks on “political correctness” but also with a return to more informal and essayistic forms of criticism that emphasized the role of the public intellectual and the need to reach a wider general audience. There was a revival of interest in literary journalism. Both older critics, such as Frank Lentricchia in The Edge of Night (1994) and Said in Out of Place (1999), and younger critics, including Alice Kaplan in French Lessons (1993), turned toward autobiography as a way of situating their own intellectual outlook and infusing personal expression into their work.
James R. Giles Morris Dickstein The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica