Literary Criticism

LITERARY CRITICISM. Socialist literary criticism in the United States dates to the origins of socialist movements. The stream of book reviews and literary manifestos begins with Orestes Brownson’s “American Literature” (1839) and George Lippard’s reviews in the Quaker City Weekly in the 1840s and continues through the nineteenth century. A distinctive body of English language socialist criticism does not emerge until the turn of the century along with the Debsian Socialist Party. In his Forces in American Criticism (1939), the first major Marxist history of American literary criticism, Bernard Smith points to the founding of the Comrade in 1901 and to Emma Goldman’s The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914).

Another, not entirely separate but distinct tradition flourished among readers of German or Yiddish socialist literature. The dense weekend cultural supplements to several German language dailies of the 1880s and after carried intense commentary, although mainly of literature in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. The Yiddish press of the 1890s and after devoted oceans of ink to discussions of literature, not only the evolving Yiddish literature but also American and European novels. The most notable of Yiddish journals, Di Tsukunft, was edited after 1913 by a distinguished poet Abraham Liessin and circulated through Yiddish-speaking populations around the world. Its pages were often filled with intense discussions of literature and culture.

At first, American Communist cultural production seemed to embrace Modernism, with a wide appreciation of new kinds of literature and art. Following Stalin’s consolidation of power, a turn toward what was conceived as truly proletarian literature and culture lasted until the rise of the Popular Front. The founding moments for developed, widely read leftwing literary criticism, riddling the sources of paradigms and dilemmas, lies mostly in the aftermath of 1935, as scholarship consolidated and then mostly outstripped the more simplistic views of polemical-minded critics. The famed literary controversies of the 1930s remained important even in later decades, in large part because the debates of the time shaped the early decades of modern university-based literary criticism.

There were three main tendencies in socialist and Marxist literary writing of the Great Depression. First, there were polemics and exchanges among writers and reviewers, announcing and denouncing strategies of literary production. The controversy over Mike Gold’s attack on Thornton Wilder, the debates over the creation of a “proletarian literature,” and the exchanges between a host of small magazine’s issued by the John Reed Clubs had the vitality and vitriol characteristic of literary avant-gardes. Second, there were several major attempts to write a literary history of the United States, all deeply influenced by progressive historiography, and particularly by V. L. Parrington’s monumental Main Currents in American Thought (1927). The essays of William Charvat and Granville Hicks’s The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War (1933) remain perhaps the most interesting of these works. Third, there were a few scattered attempts to develop a Marxist poetics, a theory of literary form and a method of reading and interpretation, notably in the essays of Kenneth Burke.

The years of the Cold War saw the institutionalization of professional literary criticism, and the general eclipse of socialist critics. Several of the literary critics associated with the journal Science and Society were victims of the anticommunist purge of the academy. The debates among writers and reviewers about socialist writing ceased; the proletarian literature “episode” of the early 1930s was caricatured and laid to rest. The Marxist literary histories, and indeed literary history itself, fell from favor, in the turn to the formalism of the “new criticism.” There were a few attempts by socialist critics to combine this technical criticism with a historical vision, notably in the American studies tradition inaugurated by F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1940), and in the work of Matthiesssen’s most polemical attacker, Irving Howe, himself among the remaining socialists among the “New York Intellectuals” drawn to literary criticism. For the most part, the literary criticism of the 1950s and 1960s had been built around the explicit and repeated exorcism of the themes and methods of socialist and Marxist criticism. These fell away, but in a most peculiar fashion.

The celebrated “takeover” of the Modern Language Association in 1968 might be taken as the inauguration of a new Left literary criticism, which increasingly found its home in the universities. In part this reflected the professionalization and scholarly consolidation of literary criticism and literary writing generally; in part, it was a result of the social struggles in the greatly expanded postwar university system; and in part it marked the general displacement of literary criticism among nonacademic Left cultural critics by a new critical writing about film, television, and rock music. Left literary criticism took two main directions in the 1970s and 1980s: one tendency, represented by the journal Radical Teacher and by Richard Ohmann’s influential English in America (1976), contested the teaching of English in schools and colleges, criticizing the technocratic ideologies of composition instruction, the exclusions of the accepted literary canon, and the politics of established ways of reading. Allied with the emerging programs in African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies, the work of these critics in recovering, republishing, and teaching working-class, minority, and women writers began to transform literary education in the United States and provoked one of the central cultural debates of the Reagan era, the controversy over the “canon.”

The other tendency, represented by the Marxist Literary Group and by Fredric Jameson’s groundbreaking Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981), introduced the literary and cultural theories of European Marxism to an American audience, developed a distinctive way of reading and interpreting literary texts, and sparked theoretical debates over culture and ideology in journals like Social Text, October, Cultural Critique, and ReThinking Marxism. This work, part of an unprecedented flowering of English-language Marxism in the two decades after 1968, reconstructed Marxist analysis of literary and film form by replacing the class analytic and realist aesthetic of earlier Marxist critics with a combination of the Frankfurt modernism of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, and Louis Althusser’s account of ideology. If the Marxist criticism of the 1930s devoted its energies to literary history, that of the 1980s concentrated on literary theory and interpretation.

Though contemporary socialist literary criticism at the end of the twentieth century was more than ever dominated by the work of university critics, a tradition of criticism written by poets, novelists, and playwrights remained powerfully incarnated in the essays of Tillie Olsen, Amiri Baraka, E. L. Doctorow, and June Jordan, among others. Unlike the university critics whose work addresses the politics of teaching literature and the place of literary scholarship in historical materialism, these essays addressed the relation of writers to political action, outline the genealogies of a usable past, and suggest the lineaments of a socialist aesthetic.

The new century brought a palpable decline of anything resembling deconstruction. Fredric Jameson continued to produce widely admired texts, but the “French School” in general fell upon hard times and found its devoted followers mainly in the senior academics. Younger scholars and teachers seemed more likely to land in the geography of popular cultures, although the vast proliferation of every kind of literary, aesthetic or other discussion on the Internet has made generalizations suspect.

Most intriguing for some scholars of popular culture has been the sudden growth of comic art studies. The reconfiguring of comics as “art” defied the entreaties of Irving Howe and others that comics can only be vulgar and they can only degrade the popular mind. Scholarly studies of popular film, then television, undercut the power of this argument, but the passage of generations proved more decisive. If reasonably serious and challenging graphic novels engaged student interest, then the genre would fit the academic curriculum. The 2010s saw a shift in older journals including Inks, previously more interested in animation, and the appearance of new journals in the United States and the United Kingdom mostly publishing the work of younger scholars who taught well-attended classes mostly based in English or American Studies departments. Recapitulating the rise of film studies in some ways, the new wave of comic art scholarship looked for canonical figures such as Spiegelman or Bechdel, analyzing art as well as narrative. Heavily feminist and gay in form, the modes of discussion seemed very familiar.

Bullock, Chris, and David Peck. Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Denning, Michael. “The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies.” American Quarterly 38 no. 3 (1986).

Kavanaugh, James H., and Fredric Jameson. “The Weakest Link: Marxism in Literary Studies.” In The Left Academy, edited by Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff, vol. 2. New York: Praeger, 1984.

Lauter, Paul, ed. Reconstructing American Literature. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983.

Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Newton, Judith, and Deborah Rosenfelt. Feminist Criticism and Social Change. New York: Methuen, 1986.