Cultural Criticism Is Alive and Well--No Matter What You Hear

George Cotkin, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (July 2, 2004):

The state of cultural criticism today, in the view of many, is debilitated, perhaps even moribund. For Birkerts, Alvin Kiernan, Russell Jacoby, and others, there once existed a lively, deep, public, and engaged cultural criticism. Great critics -- Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, and Dwight Macdonald -- roamed the roadways of criticism, stopping to dispense sage or impassioned judgments and to uphold standards. What happened?

According to this line of thought, our present generation of cultural critics, arriving after the assault of postmodernism and the increasingly widespread commercialization of culture, has been cast adrift, without any firm basis for judgments. Publications and institutions to support serious criticism, in this view, either no longer exist or are few in number.

Critics today, it is also claimed, are too cozy behind the ivied walls of academe, content to employ a prose style that is decipherable only to a handful of the cognoscenti. The deadly dive of university critics into the shallow depths of popular culture, moreover, reveals the unwillingness of these critics to uphold standards. Even if the reasons offered are contradictory, these Jeremiahs huddle around their sad conclusion that serious cultural criticism has fallen into a morass of petty bickering and bloated reputations.

Such narratives of declension, a staple of American intellectual life since the time of the Puritans, are misplaced, self-serving, and historically inaccurate. And difficult to prove. Has the level of criticism declined in the last 50 years? Have we toppled from the urbane and learned heights of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson into the cesspool of literary assassination or mere description? Of course the logic of such an opinion depends on the figures that are being contrasted with one another. Any number of cultural critics thriving today could be invoked to demonstrate that cultural criticism is alive and well.

Consider, for example, a comparison between the sainted Trilling and the ubiquitous Harold Bloom. Birkerts and others praise Trilling for his accessible style, his willingness to place his literary criticism at the"dark and bloody crossroads" where literature and criticism meet. Not only did Trilling revere the university and the ideals of humanism, but he also sought to reach out to the general public, through his activities with"high-brow" book clubs and with his famous anthology of literature, The Experience of Literature.

Yet Bloom, who is alive and kicking, has deeply influenced the study of literature in the academy with his ideas about"anxiety of influence." Most recently, in The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, he has continued his effort to make serious literature available to a wider public. Lest one respond that Trilling published a novel, well, so has Bloom. Finally, Trilling's political engagement, over all, was relatively limited and often abstract. Sometimes his single-minded animus to radicalism in the 1940s clouded his political judgments and commitments. Bloom, rather than being a reclusive academic, has entered heartily into the cultural wars, however much one may or may not approve of his opinions.

Is Bloom part of a vanishing breed of public intellectual? In fact, today's media outlets teem with public intellectuals....