Big Criticism
Evan Kindley
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well.
—THEODOR ADORNO, “Culture and Administration”
1
In 1946 John Marshall, the associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Humanities Division, began to explore new ways of subsidizing
literary culture in the United States. Since its inception in 1913, the foundation had funded major national and international projects in medicine,
public health, and rural and agricultural education. In common with the
other big American philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation had historically put the bulk of its energies and assets into scientific research,
including research into the military and national defense; from the 1930s
onwards, it had also been a crucial player in the development of the social
sciences.1 Support for the humanities, by contrast, was comparatively underdeveloped.2 What funding the foundation did provide for the humanities tended to take the form of grants to established academic institutions
in support of traditional scholarly disciplines like archaeology and classical
philology. The Rockefeller Foundation functioned as a supplement to the
administrative budgets of elite American universities but did little in the
I would like to thank the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections at Princeton University Library for access to the Richard Blackmur Papers and for
valuable research assistance. I am also grateful to Jeremy Braddock, Greg Londe, James
Longenbach, Tom Lutz, Lindsay Reckson, and Susan Stewart for their generous responses to
this essay.
1. My information on the Rockefeller Foundation’s history is drawn chiefly from
Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York, 1972); Abraham Flexner, Funds and
Foundations: Their Policies Past and Present (New York, 1952); and Patronizing the Public:
American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities, ed.
William J. Buxton (Lanham, Md., 2009).
2. William J. Buxton writes, “the Humanities Division lacked the prestige of the other
major Rockefeller Divisions. Its lower status was reflected in its modest budget [$750,000 per
year], which made it difficult for it to have an impact comparable with that of the better-funded
Divisions” (Buxton, “John Marshall and the Humanities in Europe: Shifting Patterns of
Rockefeller Foundation Support,” Minerva 41 [June 2003]: 133–34). The “neglect of the
humanities” was rued by one-time General Education Board director Abraham Flexner: “The
thoughtful reader of these pages must have been struck by the crying inadequacy of the funds
devoted to humanistic studies — to languages, literature, art, archaeology, philosophy, music,
history. . . . Can one imagine the triumphant shout of approval that would greet such action on
the part of a foundation in position to furnish the means for such a development?” (Flexner,
Funds and Foundations, pp. 129 –30).
Critical Inquiry 38 (Autumn 2011)
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way of actively shaping the institutional culture of the humanities in the
way it did that of the natural and social sciences.
By the mid-1930s, however, this conservative approach toward humanities funding was beginning to change. Marshall’s arrival at the foundation
in 1933 coincided with a larger shift, under the directorship of David H.
Stevens, away from the accumulation of traditional scholarship and toward the democratic goal of wide public dissemination of culture. Though
Marshall was himself a former academic (he received a doctorate from
Harvard and briefly taught medieval literature there), his focus as a foundation officer was not on the academy but on the public sphere and an
enlargement of the audience for the humanities outside the narrow
boundaries of elite academic institutions and specialized scholarship.3 In
Marshall’s words, “‘scholarship in our thinking was not an end in itself, but
a means to widening the appreciation of considerable numbers of people.’”4 This missionary attitude led to innovative ventures into commercial
media and mass communications, projects that took on a particular importance during the war years, when concern over the power of Nazi and
Communist propaganda drove a newfound concern with the public reception of information and ideas.5
In the postwar period, however, Marshall turned to a project closer to
the traditional domain of the humanities, while still retaining the emphasis
3. My emphasis on extra-academic projects, particularly in communications, follows
Buxton’s. Nielsen is less impressed by Stevens and Marshall’s attempts to expand the
humanities program beyond the academy: “The Division of the Arts and Humanities under
David H. Stevens inherited a rather academic tradition from its predecessor in the GEB and
dutifully perpetuated it. The program continued to emphasize archeology, scholarly research in
ancient cultures, and classical humanistic research. The general effect, as various observers,
including the director of the foundation’s program himself, remarked, was to buttress
‘scholasticism and antiquarianism in our universities’” (Nielsen, The Big Foundations, pp.
59 – 60).
4. Buxton, “John Marshall and the Humanities in Europe,” p. 141.
5. For an excellent overview and analysis of these Rockefeller projects that places them in
the context of a larger historical argument about the “revis[ion of] traditional democratic
theory by removing the idea of a competent public from its center, replacing it with
technocratic experts,” see chapter 3, “Mobilizing for the War on Words: The Rockefeller
Foundation, Communication Scholars, and the State,” of Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals:
Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York, 1999), p. 3.
E V A N K I N D L E Y , a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is completing a
dissertation entitled “Critics and Connoisseurs: Poet-Critics and the
Administration of Culture.” He works at Claremont McKenna College and is
managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His email address is
[email protected].
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
on public culture that had driven his communications work. This was the
revitalization of the American little magazine. As much of the best recent
scholarship on twentieth-century literature and culture over the course of
the past decade has confirmed, little magazines were absolutely crucial to
the development of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.6
Magazines like The Dial, The Little Review, Hound and Horn, and Poetry in
America and The Criterion, Scrutiny, and New Verse in England provided
publication outlets for new and innovative creative work, for important
critical arguments, and essential publicity for the various trends and tendencies that competed for dominance in those years. But, by the end of
World War II, most of the little magazines had folded, victims first of the
disastrous effects of the Depression on the economy and second of the
shifting focus of their core readership away from art and literature and
toward politics and the war effort— compounded, according to some accounts at least, by a decline in literacy and consequent decrease of public
interest in serious literature. By the mid-1940s, the rapid growth and potentially leveling effects of postwar consumer culture were already obvious
to most literary intellectuals, and the little magazine’s days appeared to be
numbered.
As it turned out, however, the little magazine would have a significant
role to play in the postwar growth of American intellectual culture as well.
The plight of the little magazine, ironically, was crucial in driving the
development of what I will call, by analogy with Big Science, Big Criticism.
As with the case of experimental science—though admittedly on a much
smaller scale—a number of large and powerful institutions began to take a
newfound interest in the development of American literature and literary
criticism in the postwar period.7
6. The first comprehensive history of the Anglo-American little magazine — Frederick J.
Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a
Bibliography (Princeton, N.J., 1946) — was published the same year the survey discussed in this
article was conducted. For excellent recent accounts of the little magazine and its role in the
development of modernism, see Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little
Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison, Wisc., 2000), and the Oxford Critical
and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford,
2009).
7. While the analogy between Big Criticism and Big Science fails on the level of scale
(criticism, like the rest of the humanities, never attaining anything like the amount of funding
obtained by scientific and technological research), postwar literary criticism has other crucial
features in common with Big Science: it is funded for reasons of putative public interest by a
network of philanthropic organizations, universities, and the state, thus necessitating new
forms of rational justification. Peter Galison stresses the need for justification and public
oversight that the growth of Big Science demanded: “seen from the outside, big science has, by
its very scope, entered the realm of public debate. Questions are being asked about the
implication of the huge scientific/technological projects . . . for the rest of science and for their
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Not that modernism had lacked for powerful supporters in the past, of
course. The culture of literary and artistic experimentation cultivated in
the little magazines had always been sustained by the largesse of a few
wealthy patrons, as Lawrence Rainey shows in his Institutions of Modernism. In that book, Rainey influentially argues that Anglo-American literary
modernism, threatened with the hostility and indifference of a new mass
public, adopted the temporary solution of transforming itself into a luxury
commodity in order to compete in a market increasingly dominated by
popular culture. According to Rainey, this involved “a strategy whereby
the work of art invites and solicits its own commodification, but does so in
such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort . . . integrated
into a different economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation,
and investment.”8
Commodification, then, was the devil modernism knew, and the
limited-circulation little magazine, along with the private gallery and the
rare book dealer, was the institutional expression of modernism’s strategic
evasion of the free market. Big philanthropy, by contrast, was the devil
modernism didn’t know. The postwar idea that literature was a public
good in need of philanthropic support was new and, in some of its broader
implications, unsettling. According to Rainey, the modernists had already
been forced over the course of the first half of the twentieth century to
regard themselves as players in a largely symbolic economy with a material
base provided by a trade in luxury commodities for the very wealthy rather
than as participants in a republican-democratic public sphere. Philanthropy seemed to offer a more rational, substantial, and sustainable alternative to patronage, one that might allow American literary culture to
expand beyond its current limited dimensions.
But however attractive the attentions of the big foundations, the prospect of protecting and expanding the literary world through their help
presented both new opportunities and new risks. On the one hand, it
offered some hope for a reclamation of literature’s link to a larger public
sphere; on the other, in its tacit admission that the market would not
effect on society. . . . By its very size, big science cannot survive in isolation from the
nonscientific spheres of society. It has become an economic, political, and sociological entity in
its own right” (Peter Galison, “The Many Faces of Big Science,” in Big Science: The Growth of
Large-Scale Research, ed. Galison and Bruce Hevly [Stanford, Calif., 1992], pp. 1, 17). As we shall
see, similar considerations arise in the case of Big Criticism.
8. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New
Haven, Conn., 1998), p. 3. Another fascinating discussion of arts patronage, dealing with a
longer timespan than Rainey, which I unfortunately encountered too late to engage with here,
is given in Marjorie Garber, Patronizing the Arts (Princeton, N.J., 2009).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
support serious literature, it may have appeared as yet another step away
from the mass audience that literature felt itself to have lost in the modernist era. How, then, do we get from Rainey’s valuable account of modernism’s relation to commodity culture and the public sphere in the 1910s
and 1920s to the very different economic situation— defined not only by
the expansion of commodity culture but also by the growth of what Kenneth E. Boulding has called the “Grants Economy”9—that pertained after
1945? Put more simply and specifically: what are the new “institutions of
modernism” that emerge in the postwar period?
2
One of these institutions, oddly enough, turns out to be one of the
largest philanthropic organizations in US history. The Rockefeller Foundation’s campaign on behalf of the little magazines arose out of Marshall’s
personal friendship with the poet-critic R. P. Blackmur. The two men had
known each other since their adolescent years in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1920s, when Marshall was an undergraduate at Harvard
and Blackmur the owner of a bookstore that was a hub for Cambridge
literary life. In the 1930s, when Marshall moved on from his fledgling academic career to direct the Rockefeller Foundation’s Communications
Group, Blackmur was making his way as a freelance poet, critic, and coeditor of the little magazine Hound and Horn. In 1935 he published The
Double Agent, an exceptional book of critical essays that established his
reputation as one of the great close readers of modernist literature;10 in
1940 he was hired at Princeton University, where he would remain for the
rest of his career. So it was natural that, after the war, when Marshall
shifted the focus of his philanthropic attention to the humanities, he
would turn to Blackmur, who served as the foundation’s resident literary
expert in much the same way that prominent social scientists like Harold
Lasswell and Paul Lazarsfeld had served as communications experts before
and during the war.11
9. The grants economy is “that segment of the total economy which deals with one-way
transfers of exchangeables” rather than reciprocal exchange, upon which most economic theory
is based. He believed the rapid growth of the grants economy to be “a major structural change,
comparable in size to the decline of agriculture or the rise of the war-industry” (Kenneth E.
Boulding, “The Grants Economy,” Collected Papers, ed. Fred R. Glahe, 5 vols. [Boulder, Colo.,
1971], 2:477).
10. See Richard P. Blackmur, The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation (New York,
1935).
11. Blackmur’s assumption of this technocratic role may surprise those who associate him
primarily with close reading, but in fact his interest in matters of literary administration was
longstanding. See especially Blackmur’s response to the Partisan Review’s 1939 symposium on
“The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions,” his 1945 essay on “The Economy of the
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Rather than taking it upon himself to decide which magazines ought to
be supported, Blackmur opened up the question to the literary community. Through Blackmur, the foundation gained privileged access to a wide
circle of modernist writers, many of whom Blackmur had come to know
during his tenure at Hound and Horn. First Blackmur enlisted Malcolm
Cowley and Lionel Trilling, both of them frequent contributors to little
magazines themselves, to the cause. On 18 September, 1946 Marshall informed his superiors that Blackmur, Cowley, and Trilling were assembling
“a larger panel” of experts to “recommend a list of not more than eight
magazines which they regarded as worthy of RF assistance.” The selection
process was to be a matter of private administration, not public debate, as
Marshall specified that “this small panel would be protected throughout
by remaining unidentified and it would probably be desirable that even the
larger panel should not in any way be announced.” The support to the little
magazines would not be massive but would be enough to allow them to
raise the level of payment for their contributors: “as suggested by Blackmur, $7.50 for a page of 300 words of prose, $10.00 for a comparable page
of verse.”12
In October 1946, Blackmur drafted letters cosigned by Cowley, Trilling,
and himself to many of the most prominent literary figures in the United
States, including the critics Kenneth Burke, Eric Bentley, Granville Hicks,
Alfred Kazin, F. O. Matthiessen, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Winters, and Edmund Wilson, and the poets W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Randall Jarrell,
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Penn Warren, and William
Carlos Williams. The letters begin:
For reasons that will later become apparent, we should be very grateful for your best opinion as to what literary magazines now being
published in the United States are of the most use to literature. . . . On
the safe assumption that literary magazines like these always need
money and that their contributors are always paid too little, if at all,
the object of our question is, first, to take advice as to what existing
magazines most deserve such help and, on their record, why; and second, to devise methods of obtaining and distributing such help.
American Writer,” and his response to the Partisan’s 1948 survey on “The State of American
Writing,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (London, 1956), pp.
52– 60, and Outsider at the Heart of Things: Essays by R. P. Blackmur, ed. James T. Jones
(Urbana, Ill., 1989), pp. 138 – 42.
12. John Marshall, letter to David H. Stevens, 18 Sept. 1946, box 7, folder 17, R. P. Blackmur
Papers (RPBP), Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University
Library, Princeton, N.J.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
Blackmur goes on to specify four criteria to bear in mind with regard to a
little magazine’s quality: “Introduction of new writers; Support of talented
writers, young and older; Maintaining of critical standards; Interest in the
other arts and in society.” The letters end on a note of urgency: “Our
interest in what you may have to say could not be more serious or more
immediate. In short, we are writing to you in the belief that, with your aid,
genuine action might shortly become possible toward the consistent support of several literary magazines. Certainly any effort, not plainly futile, is
worth making.”13
The intention was thus both to compile a list of potential grantees and
to gather suggestions about how support could be best administered. This
kind of survey of the American literary intelligentsia wasn’t entirely unprecedented; the format in certain respects resembles symposia conducted
by the little magazines themselves, such as the one the Partisan Review
published in 1939 on “The Situation in American Writing.” However, the
flat bureaucratic tone of the letter, and the fact that it made no mention of
any future publication of the survey’s results, resulted in many of the writers contacted giving exceptionally candid responses. A few acknowledge
the unusual secrecy of the survey (Edmund Wilson refers to “your mysterious letter”14 and Eric Bentley calls it “nothing if not cryptic”),15 but it
seems to have been generally understood that some kind of foundation
support was involved— quite possibly because Blackmur’s links to Marshall and the Rockefeller Foundation were already known by his friends in
literary circles at this point.
Unsurprisingly, there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm from
the respondents about the proposal. “Delighted to get your letter this
morning and to know that some movement is under way to help the magazines in this country that really care about literature,” Kazin wrote,16 and
Matthiessen agreed that “any coherent plan of subsidy for these or similar
magazines would have unmistakably profound value for our culture.”17
Penn Warren was equally laudatory: “If you all can see that some money
gets turned into the little magazines, I shall applaud. I think the country
would be a lot poorer without them.”18 Burke wrote: “I think your suggestion is a very good one indeed. And if carried out, it might well have quite
13. Blackmur, letter to various respondents, box 7, folder 17, RPBP.
14. Edmund Wilson, letter to Blackmur, 6 Nov. 1946, box 9, folder 12, RPBP.
15. Eric Bentley, letter to Blackmur, 10 Nov. 1946, box 1, folder 10, RPBP.
16. Alfred Kazin, letter to Blackmur, 1 Nov. 1946, box 5, folder 3, RPBP.
17. F. O. Matthiessen, letter to Blackmur, 10 Nov. [1946], box 5, folder 11, RPBP; hereafter
abbreviated “ML.”
18. Robert Penn Warren, letter to Blackmur, 11 Nov. 1946, box 9, folder 5, RPBP.
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a startling effect. At least, there is much to be gained by subsidizing serious
literature. And there is much to be gained by finding new ways of doing so
(ways that will have a certain jolt value). The same sums, expended in the
usual ways, would [probably have] a less stimulating effect than if thus
suddenly presented.”19
Of the existing little magazines, the clear favorite was the Partisan Review, the one publication mentioned approvingly—though sometimes
with reservations— by virtually every respondent. Stevens, for instance,
wrote: “Offhand . . . I should say that the Partisan Review is the best thing
we have. . . . [It] is a perfect illustration of the sort of magazine that helps to
create the future.”20 Randall Jarrell took a slightly more nuanced and cynical view but agreed on the Partisan’s preeminence: “Partisan has been the
best of these magazines for many reasons. For one thing, its editors have
much the best sense of literary market values, of what’s worth most just
now; this gives it a contemporary, cosmopolitan, ‘exciting’ feel that the
other magazines don’t have.”21
In second place behind Partisan we find John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon
Review, which Kazin remarks “shows a high level of taste, is scholarly
without being narrow, and has been particularly notable in its welcome to
serious critical writing.” Jarrell, while finding Kenyon “often innocently
academic,” nonetheless deemed it “the second best of these magazines—it
ought, very obviously, to be supported.” The Sewanee Review and Accent
come in a distant third and fourth, respectively. Eric Bentley— himself a
Kenyon editor—sums up the general consensus when he writes: “Very well
then, if you have a million dollars, divide into four equal portions for
Kenyon, Partisan, Accent, and Sewanee.”22
One predictable point of controversy, in these early years of the cold
war, was the Left political orientation of Partisan Review, which had originally aligned itself with the American Communist Party and, by the mid19. Kenneth Burke, letter to Blackmur, 18 Nov. 1946, box 2, folder 9, RPBP.
20. Wallace Stevens, letter to Blackmur, 4 Nov. 1946, box 8, folder 9, RPBP.
21. Randall Jarrell, letter to Blackmur, c. 1946, box 4, folder 17, RPBP hereafter abbreviated “L”.
22. In the end, Kenyon and Sewanee were the sole recipients of Rockefeller money, for
reasons that are not entirely clear but which the following discussion may illuminate. The
Kenyon Review had, in fact, already benefited from grants by the Rockefeller Foundation. In
1943, Marshall and Blackmur arranged a $185 per month stipend for a series of Kenyon
“Rockefeller Fellows” who would “assist editorially” and “confer endlessly with the Editor” and
then “go away to spread light in darkness.” Bentley’s association with the review began when he
became the second such fellow, succeeding Harold Whitehall. In 1944, the foundation made the
magazine a further gift of $7,500; and in April 1947, it contributed $22,500 to be administered
over a five-year period (Marian Janssen, “The Kenyon Review and the Rockefeller Foundation,”
Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center [Fall 1991]: 3– 4).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
1940s, was hewing to an anti-Stalinist Trotskyism. Marianne Moore’s short
response is mostly taken up with registering the fact that she “strongly
disliked the propagandist period of PARTISAN REVIEW (I have not seen
more than one or two issues since that time).”23 One may assume that
Moore, an outspoken proponent of American patriotism during World
War II, objected to the Partisan’s antinationalist position during the war.
But even those respondents closer to the magazine’s ideological position
express reservations about the Partisan’s politics. Jarrell, for instance, responding on Nation stationery, voices a representative suspicion of the
intermingling of aesthetics and politics in the little magazine:
Although its politics are doctrinaire and academic in that funny New
York professional-left way, they haven’t prevented it from printing
other groups, Stalinists excepted. It’s an awfully shrewd, professional,
competent magazine, so far as the editing is concerned. The worst
things about it are its extraordinary limitations and lack of imagination: everything is looked at from the point of view of someone
who’s semi-Marxist, fairly avant-garde, reasonably Bohemian, antibourgeois, cosmopolitan, anti-Stalinist, lives in New York, likes Mondrian, etc., etc., etc . . . [“L”]
Typically, Jarrell’s primary objection to the magazine’s “professional-left”
orientation is not its potential political influence but rather its distortion of
the existing literary field; Partisan’s politics are objectionable only because
they impose a limitation of authorial perspective and an overrepresentation of a particular group of writers and critics. Indeed, as Jarrell continues
his critique, it becomes clear that the problem is not so much ideology as it
is favoritism: “Partisan itself is too much of a movement: the editors will
print bad things by ‘our’ people that they wouldn’t consider from outsiders—take Paul Goodman, take Elizabeth Hardwick’s story about [Paul]
Tillich, etc.” Jarrell contrasts to this an ideal of perfect editorial disinterestedness, which he (perhaps surprisingly) associates with those who are or
have been practicing artists or writers themselves:
A thoroughly good magazine would require editors who like things
simply because they’re good; people who care for intrinsic values first
of all, and who understand better— either because of memory or because of imagination—what it’s like to make a work of art. [“L”]
This principled opposition between aesthetics and politics is not universal
among the survey’s respondents, however. Burke regrets that “there’s no
23. Marianne Moore, letter to Blackmur, 2 Nov. 1946, box 6, folder 8, RPBP.
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good Leftist magazine on the list (representing a decent attitude towards
Russia); but I suppose it couldn’t get support anyhow”;24 and Auden somewhat playfully defends the ideologically based approach of the Partisan
Review not as a contaminant but as a safeguard of editorial integrity, or at
least coherence:
Of the two kinds of [little magazine], those founded on a certain aesthetic taste and those founded as a Weltanschauung, I prefer on the
whole the latter as I think it wears better. The former is too dependent
on the editor who, except in rare cases, suffers the normal human fate
of starting off in youth as avant-garde and ending up . . . as an old
fuddy-duddy.25
The ever-outspoken Williams, on the other hand, takes the most radical
and uncompromising line, lumping the “big three” reviews together and
likening them, somewhat improbably, to organs of Soviet propaganda:
To hell with them all with their scholarly editors each with his prejudices and predilections, Kenyon, Sewanee and Partisan: each with
some sort of axe to grind. To me that is beyond the field of the arts,
this side of the field of the arts. . . . All the little magazines today seem
small imitations of some Soviet-like direction implicit in their editorial policies.26
For Williams, the “scholarly” and the political are equally pernicious in
that they imply a “direction” of the arts, and of literature in particular,
toward certain predetermined ends, with “axe[s] to grind” other than a
desire to showcase and stimulate artistic production. Presumably he
would favor an approach closer to the little magazines he was involved
with in the 1920s, such as Others and Contact, which took a relatively
hands-off approach to editorship. But while his response is clearly colored
by nostalgia for the period of high modernism, Williams’s use of the epithet “Soviet-like” suggests that the cold war conjuncture is not irrelevant
here. The respondents’ widespread suspicion of ideology was itself a kind
of ideology, and their concern for pure, disinterested taste—for “intrinsic
values” and an undirected “field of the arts”—was reflective of a more
general distrust of large institutions, epitomized by the Soviet Communist
state. While the issue under discussion here is private philanthropic and
24. Burke, letter to Blackmur.
25. W. H. Auden, letter to Blackmur, 11 Dec. 1946, box 1, folder 9, RPBP; hereafter
abbreviated “AL.”
26. William Carlos Williams, letter to Blackmur, 11 Nov. 1946, box 9, folder 11, RPBP;
hereafter abbreviated “CL.”
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
not government funding, many of the respondents appear distinctly uncomfortable with the very idea of funding for the arts by a large bureaucratic organization.27 The fear of ideology, of a “Soviet-like direction,”
displayed by Williams is in part a classically modernist gesture toward
autonomy, but also a distinctly postwar fear of bigness per se, of bureaucratic interference—whether from the state or from a foundation—in the
pristine, self-organizing “field of the arts.”
Indeed, it’s interesting to track the way the New Deal-era social democratic
ethos that underlies Blackmur and company’s concern for modernism—an
ethos which holds that the arts are a public good that must be supported—
confronts obstacles in the form of both a mandarin aristocratic worldview,
which rejects the vulgar economization of the aesthetic out of hand, as well
as what may be described as an evolving postwar liberalism founded on
distrust of bureaucratic administration and faith in efficient markets. The
common distrust of the big from all sides helps explain why even respondents less committed to the modernist concept of autonomy than Williams don’t imagine a bold new future for the little magazine in America,
or a reorganization of the existing literary field, but simply increased support for the regime they already know. A representative liberal attitude is
that of Auden, who proposes a kind of ratification of the literary economy
that already exists:
As I see it, there ought to be three kinds of magazines. The real little
mags, i.e. small mags [run] by little groups of intolerant eager
young men who all think each other geniuses and pay each other
almost nothing but get into print. Of these there should be as
many as possible.
The Middle magazines, like P. R. ! Kenyon who select the promising writers from the first group. Here I think the important thing is to
keep the number of such magazines down so that (a) the standard of
any one is not lowered too much by competition ! (b) Any capital
available for such a venture is concentrated and they can afford to pay
more for contributions which will keep the established writers with
them a little longer.
The Big magazines, e.g. New Yorker, Atlantic, Harpers, the fashion
mags etc. which really have the big money. Here the important thing
27. There was, of course, the example of the Federal Writers’ Project, operative from 1935
through 1939, though that was established under conditions of economic emergency and was
never intended to be a sustainable initiative. The National Endowment for the Arts was not
established until 1965.
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is ceaseless propaganda as their editorial policy to persuade them to
take more “highbrow” stuff. [“AL”]
It was widely assumed, and not just by Auden, that there would continue to
be a thriving upscale market for serious poetry and fiction in big magazines
like The New Yorker, and if the big magazines were going to continue to
publish the “best” writers, then the little magazine is little more than a
feeder or farm team for the bigger ones. In this sense, the perspectives
expressed by many of the survey’s respondents are uniformly, even classically conservative. The question is how to assure the continued existence of
the “good literature” that already exists, against the force of the market,
not to radically alter existing arrangements so as to produce an entirely
new and more equitable kind of literary society. Contrary to the pluralistic
intentions of Marshall, there is less concern here with democratization or
expansion of the literary field than there is with consolidation of the status
quo.
Such a consolidation does not necessarily entail an expansion of the
field of little magazines at all (though this was in fact what would happen,
especially in the 1950s and 60s, largely as a side-effect of the expansion of
the educational system). Rather, it might mean a winnowing of the field,
with available resources being divided between only a few little magazines
(the “biggest,” as it were). To some respondents, even the reduced field of
1946 looked overcrowded; Matthiessen, for instance, complains that “new
‘little magazines’ are always being started with the result that now the
danger is that too many of them cover the same ground and get in each
other’s way in point of circulation and chance for survival. It might well be
more effective if there were fewer of them and those few with far greater
subsidies” (“ML”). Auden, too, is dubious:
To be quite frank, I can’t read more than one or two contributions in
any of the magazines you mention. They all start off well in the first
few issues because all the fairly good writers rally round to give the
editor (whom they usually know personally) a rousing send-off. After
that they develop a cliquish cove [?] of constant contributors ! stray
new arrivals. It is obvious that no magazine, let alone several competing ones, can keep up a really high standard because there simply isn’t
enough first-rate stuff available at their prices. The established writer
is obviously going to sell his wares in the dearest market and once he
has a name, the little magazines can’t afford him. [“AL”]
While most of the respondents assert that the little magazines should be
protected, few of them relish the idea of there being any more of them than
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
there already are. And some don’t care if there are any at all. Louise Bogan
is the most dismissive of the overall project of reviving the glory days of the
modernist little magazine, which she sees as a relic of a vanished prewar
world:
Let me begin by saying that I believe the little magazine in America, at
the moment, is in a state of obsolescence. The whole literary situation
which prevailed during the period when the little mag. flourished has
changed to such an extent that new terms must be applied to new
conditions. Publishers of the commercial kind are now so eager to get
new writers of talent that they sign them up right out of the pages of
the periodicals . . . in which they first appear. I do not think that any
good poet appearing in America, just now, could fail to get some sort
of appreciation, almost immediately . . . The little magazine, therefore, now prints, almost exclusively, second-rate work.28
While Bogan feels little sympathy for the “little,” she does advocate a
medium-sized magazine “of a serious yet readable and lively kind” modeled on Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, which “demonstrate[s] how a kind of
worldly, informed, and witty approach can bring new material into being,
and give it an audience and a market.” Bogan, then, does imagine serious
literature growing bigger, in the sense of reaching more of the lay readers
modernism had lost or abandoned. Her lack of interest in the little magazine is in part, no doubt, an aesthetic one, grounded in a general distaste
for experimental literature: “The life has now gone out of rebellion and
experiment as such, in literature. What we need is widening and deepening
of a field already conquered.”29 “Good” American poetry, having been
nurtured by the coterie-based economy of the modernist little magazine, is
now finally in a position to compete in a wider literary market alongside
other cultural products. Thus the little magazine appears as, at best, a sort
of vestige of a previous stage in the evolution of American literature; the
goal should not be to preserve its former function but to “widen and
deepen” the literary culture it has allowed to come into being. In speaking
of a “field already conquered,” Bogan cleverly adapts a rhetorical figure
used by several other respondents—“field” in the originally agricultural
sense of a sphere of work—to suggest the completed activity of a successful
military action, invoking America’s still-recent victory on the “field of
battle” in the Second World War.
Expanding the market for literature was one way to grow bigger, a
28. Louise Bogan, letter to Blackmur, 21 Aug. 1946, box 1, folder 11, RPBP.
29. Ibid.
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venerable nineteenth-century way. Abandon fruitless “rebellion and
experiment” altogether (or let market forces kill them off “naturally”)
and concentrate on pleasing a larger, if not the largest, readership
rather than refining and advancing the state of the art further and
further beyond the horizons of public interest. There was, of course,
another way forward (or is that upwards? or outwards?) and that was
the way of the university. Two developments are significant here: the
institutional success of the New Criticism (strongly associated with
Ransom and the Kenyon Review) and the rise of creative writing as an
academic discipline, both of which can be linked to the enormous
postwar expansion of the educational system, the (continuing) period
of literary history that Mark McGurl has lately termed the Program
Era.30 By 1946, then, a version of Big Criticism was already well on its
way to hegemony in university literary departments, as was the progressive
interweaving of the literary and academic fields. (Not surprisingly, Blackmur
and Marshall’s next joint philanthropic venture would be to fund the Christian Gauss Seminars in Literary Criticism at Princeton.)
Still, the Rockefeller survey’s respondents were not quite ready to
embrace this university-centered model, or at least they were open to
other options; indeed, it’s surprising how infrequently the academy is
invoked as a potential savior or replacement for the culture of the little
magazines. While overt antiacademic sentiment was probably tempered by the fact that many of the respondents—and two of the signatories—were professors of literature, it does crop up in some responses,
notably Williams’s: “Certainly the colleges can’t be trusted. They have
too much in restrictive educational commitments at stake. They just
can’t foster REVOLUTION! But that would be one of the chief functions of any new little magazine—revolution in the arts.” (Just for
emphasis, he adds a scrawled postscript to his already quite lengthy
letter: “And no colleges to be mixed up in it. Individuals only” [“CL”].)
Of course by the mid-forties, as Stevens shrewdly recognized, the
academy was already closely involved with modernism via collegesponsored little magazines like the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review:
“During the last ten years, say, the academic and the literary have come
very close together and most of the things worth while today are essen30. See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, Mass., 2009). On the postwar expansion of the university system and its eventual
pitfalls, see Marvin Lazerson, “The Disappointments of Success: Higher Education after World
War II,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 559 (Sept. 1998): 64 –76,
and Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University
(New York, 2010).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
tially academic in origin.” But while these magazines bore an academic
imprimatur, they were still relatively autonomous organs, not just in
operation but also for the most part in funding, as Stevens also noted:
“I don’t know what Kenyon College and the University of the South
contribute except their names. These magazines may not even be academic extensions. . . . The universities probably contribute nothing, or
very little, in dollars and cents to their support.”31
As Stevens saw it, this was all to the good; that the arts maintain a
certain degree of financial autonomy and self-sufficiency was a matter
of vital importance to him. Stevens’s response to the survey, perhaps
the most considered and thought-provoking of all, is worth quoting at
some length. In the first of two separate letters written in response to
Blackmur’s inquiry, Stevens questions whether the proposed scheme of
revitalizing the little magazines could even be realistically accomplished without astronomical levels of capital:
Poetry as the beneficiary of a trust fund would require something like
$1,000,000.00 to carry on. . . . Even with all this, Poetry would be a
modest establishment. But no-one will write for it any longer for love.
The New Republic would discover that it was the tool of the luxurious.
Everyone would expect poets to buy the drinks, and so on. [“SL”]32
Stevens, like the sober-minded insurance executive he was, is closely attentive to the bottom line here, but also, more interestingly, to the possible
cultural effects of the private endowment of literature; that is, he considers
not merely whether the support for little magazines will be effective but
also whether that effect might transform literary culture beyond recognition. For Stevens, the work of literature is done, first and foremost, not for
money but “for love” and, to adopt a word he uses frequently in his second
letter, for “honor.” The introduction of a financial motive— or even just
the ability to make a viable living as a writer or editor— compromises the
basic terms of this archaic honor-based economy, making literature and
the little magazines into a “tool of the luxurious” rather than a preserve of
the aristocratic, precapitalist values of love and honor. Speaking as elo31. Stevens, letter to Blackmur, 12 Nov. 1946, box 8, folder 9, RPBP; hereafter abbreviated
“SL.”
32. Ironically, Poetry Chicago did in fact become the beneficiary of a much larger trust in
2003, when big pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly bequeathed $100 million to the Modern
Poetry Foundation (which publishes Poetry). For interesting analyses of the Lilly gift and its
effect on contemporary poetic culture, see Steve Evans, “Free (Market) Verse,” The Baffler 17
(2006): 26 – 40, and Dana Goodyear, “The Moneyed Muse: What Can Two Hundred Million
Dollars Do for Poetry?” The New Yorker, 19 and 26 Feb. 2007, www.newyorker.com/reporting/
2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_goodyear
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quently for the mandarins as Auden and Bogan had for the liberals, he
concludes his first letter thus:
let me wind the thing up for the present by saying that the objects in
the attic of life never seemed dearer to me than now when I see the
three of you approaching them with pots of gilding. I hope you won’t
think that I am not interested. Personally, I have a horror of the sort
of thing that is done for money. That is about all there is nowadays. It
has nothing whatever to do with what means anything to me nor, I
believe, to you and the other two men who signed your letter. [“SL”]
Granted, Stevens expresses his genteel abhorrence of market exchange in
rather gothic, and fetishistic, terms (regarding literature as a collection of
secret “objects” stashed in “the attic of life,” and money as an encroaching
“horror”). But it is interesting that he is the only respondent to consider
how the motivation of writers and the very constitution of literary culture
might be affected by the introduction of private subsidy. What’s more,
Stevens argues, it’s not only that writers might become greedy and selfinterested; the infusion of large amounts of money would dramatically
change literature’s fundamental relation to the public sphere—the very
one from which, on Rainey’s account, it had been forcibly alienated in the
late nineteenth century:
It is clear enough that an adequate endowment of merely the better
existing magazines would run into something fantastic. A lot of new
things now suppressed might be looked for and [people] would talk
about the privileged few, the social duty of the trustees, etc. A man
with any money at all is beset with other people’s plans for spending
it. [“SL”]
Here Stevens recognizes the danger of literature becoming beholden to a
sense of “social duty”—a familiar modernist anxiety about interaction
with public culture, but stated here in terms of obligation rather than contamination or leveling. For Stevens, this anxiety is commingled with practical problems of administration:
Everyone whom you asked to contribute would know in advance
that the universal practice in the administration of chests is to specialize in a group of donors. Who is going to contribute on such a
scale to such a project? What special claim have literary men to
such preference?33
33. Stevens, letter to Blackmur, 4 Nov. 1946, box 8, folder 9, RPBP.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
Very presciently, Stevens suggests that, in allying itself with the Rockefeller
Foundation and other charitable institutions, literature is taking on the
burden of having to justify itself, having to make a “special claim” for its
preeminent cultural status—and not just to a “public” but to a small number of “donors” who possess the economic capital necessary to underwrite
literary activity on this vast scale. Literature could perhaps become big
without selling out to the market— but at the cost of making itself explicable, rationalizable, justifiable.
3
Stevens’s response, ambivalent though it is, helps explain why so many
of the respondents focus so intently on the place of criticism in the little
magazines. We might pause to consider this emphasis, which was built
into the survey from the beginning. If the fundamental social problem
under consideration here was the fundamentally abstract one of “use to
literature,” why support literature through the little magazines at all? Why
not fund publishers, bookstores, or literary societies, or make monetary
grants directly to writers, as Stevens tentatively suggests?34 Publications like
the Partisan, the Kenyon Review, and the Sewanee Review—the “big three”
little magazines—were seen, first and foremost, as critical magazines; their
most important characteristics, for most of the survey’s respondents, were
their frequent publication of literary criticism (and cultural criticism, in
the case of the Partisan Review) and their maintenance of aesthetic standards. But if the ultimate goal was to promote American literature, why
fund criticism rather than literature itself?
There are a few plausible answers to this question. First of all, there
appears to be much less concern about the professionalization of criticism
than there typically is about that of literature. Whereas in the case of literature (especially poetry) the shift from an archaic, symbolic honor-based
economy to a more modern, rationalized exchange-based one always occasions the kind of anxieties Stevens so eloquently expresses, there is just
not the same sense of sacredness, and hence violability, attached to criti34. Stevens wrote to Blackmur: “why not try to [enlist] support for the contributors instead
of the magazines. . . . You would be getting more of what you want for your money and you
would still be leaving it necessary for the magazines themselves to show their good faith, not to
speak of many things just as fundamental, in their struggle for existence” (“SL”). From this
proposal, it should be clear that what bothers Stevens is not remuneration for writers per se—
he would have been fine with the patronage system of an earlier era, for instance— but
economic self-interest as a motive for producing literature. Funding writers directly, rather
than little magazines, would eliminate the need for calculation and allow them to produce as
they pleased—although in practice, the choice of which writers to support would still be a
matter of rationalization and justification.
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cism. Already the province of freelance journalists, moonlighting academics, artistes manqués, and other compromised outsiders, there was less risk
of damaging the symbolic economy of criticism by introducing a financial
motive. The thinking may have been, if you have to institutionalize something, institutionalize criticism— because it is in greater danger than imaginative literature—and because the establishment and promulgation of
sound “standards” will in turn inevitably produce better literature.
Another plausible, if cynical, explanation is group self-interest. Is it
really so surprising that these literary intellectuals—most of whom were
themselves critics of one kind or another—seized this philanthropic opportunity not only to seek support for writers or publishers but also for
critics and criticism? While several respondents point out that there is still
space for serious literature in major commercial publications like The New
Yorker and Vanity Fair (albeit only by famous writers whose reputations
have already been—somehow— established), there is no such space for
serious criticism in any venues other than the little magazines.35 Thus literary and cultural criticism—at that point not yet securely institutionalized in the universities—appeared to many of the respondents as a
marginalized practice that was being increasingly pushed out of the mainstream literary media. In Granville Hicks’s view, “the role of the little
magazine . . . [is] to provide space for a great deal of material, especially
critical studies, for which there is no place in the commercial magazine,
and the circulation of this material is of major importance in the development of critical standards.”36 (Also Matthiessen: “Only through such channels . . . do serious critical issues get real debate” [“ML”].) It seems to have
been widely felt that older “talented writers” were already taken care of by
the big magazines, that the really talented younger entrants would (somehow) get themselves introduced and (somehow) inevitably rise to the top,
and that the “other arts” were also pretty well covered; it was criticism that
really needed to be protected and nurtured, that was in danger of being
wiped out by the ravages of economic modernity. To put it perhaps too
bluntly and reductively, criticism needed the foundations to perpetuate
itself; literature didn’t.
Another related reason for the emphasis on critics and criticism is this:
35. Recall that at this time most scholarly journals, like most literature departments, were
still largely controlled by philological scholars rather than by literary critics. A magazine like
Critical Inquiry, for instance — that is, a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in
criticism — would have been unthinkable in the mid-1940s. For an account of literary
criticism’s struggle to gain a place in the university, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An
Institutional History (Chicago, 1987).
36. Granville Hicks, letter to Blackmur, 2 Nov. 1946, box 4, folder 1, RPBP.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
suppose the respondents all assumed that the literary field would, in fact,
inevitably grow bigger in the postwar years. As we have already seen, this
growth could take a number of forms, mediated by the market or by the
universities. Since, at the time the survey was conducted, literary critics
had serious influence upon neither realm, transforming the little magazine
into a big magazine might provide a kind of check on literary growth, a
countervailing power to regulate the tendency of commerce to inflate the
wrong authors and texts at the expense of more deserving candidates. To
support criticism via the little magazines, then, is not just to support the
growth of literature—which can be done in any number of ways— but the
controlled growth of literary culture as it already exists. It helps to ensure
that whatever growth the literary field undergoes, it will do so as a transformation of the relations and sets of values that already exist in place,
following the logic of what economics and social scientists call path dependence. To fund criticism is to ensure that literature benefits from capitalism’s explosive growth without being subjected to its creative destruction.
All of this is at stake in the constantly reasserted importance of “critical
standards,” mentioned in the original letter and echoed by everyone from
Hicks and Jarrell to Auden and Williams. The need for standards is made
clear, first of all, by the cautionary case of commercial fiction. “If one
believes that the great corrupting force in literary activity in this country is
that its object is to make money,” Stevens writes, “the successful writers of
fiction seem to support one” (“SL”). But it’s not only the perpetually beyond the pale world of popular fiction that needs more critical regulation;
the lack of standards is also felt in the current contents of little magazines
themselves, by the inconsistent quality of the creative work that appears in
smaller venues devoted wholly to new literature like Poetry, a magazine
invoked with a certain ambivalence bordering on distaste by several of the
respondents.37
On the other hand, a few respondents felt that there was too much
criticism in the little magazines. Auden writes that his “chief objection to
their contents is . . . too many heavy critical articles— good criticism is
even rarer than good poetry” (“AL”). This case is made more strenuously
37. “As for Poetry, it seems to lack a policy,” complains Penn Warren, “but that may be the
fate of any poetry magazine which tries to publish every month. It may always be at the mercy
of the morning mail” (Penn Warren, letter to Blackmur). Williams is even more vehement
about Poetry’s lack of critical standards: “We are not fostering kindergartens and there’s no use
paying good money for the sake of sentimentalizing over some new writer prodigy unless he
produces. . . . The critical standards involved are woefully sophomoric. I don’t see any sense in
paying good money for that. . . . Perhaps there is no other way to serve the newcomer— keep
the door open and all that. A hell of a lot of cheap stuff wanders in though. Certainly it’s
unattractive to me” (CL).
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by Jarrell, anticipating arguments he would later advance publicly in his
1953 essay “The Age of Criticism”:
In a magazine that prints stories, poems, and criticism, criticism
forces everything out because it’s the only one you can depend on—
you can depend on getting fairly good criticism regularly and having
your readers see that it’s fairly good. . . . This is a bad situation; but it
may be impossible to do anything about it, since readers want a magazine to have everything. But everything fosters criticism, criticism
about criticism, etc.—and this is very bad. (People are always bothering you to write articles and reviews about everything or anything;
but there is a pale polite warmth about their requests for poems.) If
you can in any way encourage a magazine that will care first about
works of art, and only second about their criticism, you will do a great
deal of good. [“L”]
Jarrell is thus arguing that, paradoxically, criticism as literary commodity
may be harmful to literary development, since it will compete with creative
work for space and even have an advantage over it, at least if we accept his
claim that it is easier for readers and editors to assess than create work.38
The collective disdain for Poetry—which prints almost entirely creative
work, much of it by unknown or not yet established writers—and praise
for Partisan Review—which prints almost entirely criticism, much of it by
firmly established writers—would seem to support Jarrell’s general point.
Furthermore, the wide agreement among the respondents on the social
value of criticism—its value as a public good but also its evaluability (“having your readers see that it’s fairly good”)—makes it easier to make a case
for funding it, for justifying its existence. Even if none of the respondents
to Blackmur’s survey would claim that literary criticism was more valuable
or important—more deserving of funding—than poetry or fiction, there
does seem to be a broad consensus that criticism, good and bad, is easier to
come to consensus about, more inherently justifiable, than literature.
This brings us to a final and, I believe, central feature of criticism that
38. Notable in this context is the following passage from Jarrell’s “The Age of Criticism,”
which reiterates his concerns about the overproduction of criticism while strategically reversing
his claim that criticism is easier to assess than literature: “People realize that almost all fiction or
poetry is bad or mediocre—it’s the nature of things. Almost all criticism is bad or mediocre too,
but it’s harder for people to tell; and even commonplace criticism can seem interesting or
important simply because of its subject matter. . . . There is no damned inspiration involved in
the writing of criticism, generally, and that is what the literary magazines like about it—there is
an inexhaustible, unexceptionable, indistinguishable supply. They are not interested in being
wildcat drillers for oil, but had rather have a hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls” (Jarrell,
Poetry and the Age [Gainesville, Fla., 2001], pp. 81– 82; emphasis mine).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
allowed it to be subsidized. The involvement of large bureaucratic agencies
in funding literary culture, as Stevens recognized, produces a newly urgent
need for critical justification, a need that no longer emerges out of a mere
philosophical sense of wonder- or market-driven need for publicity but
out of a practical sense of a need for accountability—a need to answer the
question, why should we pay for this? Freeing writers from the tyranny of
the open market would seem to allow literature greater autonomy than
ever before, and in certain ways it did. But it also tied literature to a different logic of rationalization, separate from the logic of the market economy
but, in its way, no less formidable. In his 1962 paper “A Theory of Philanthropy,” Boulding wondered
whether there is anything that might be called “rational” philanthropic behavior. What are the standards, in other words, by which
we can judge whether a man, or a foundation, or even a government
is giving away its money wisely. It is clear that in practice we do have
some standards and it therefore must make some kind of sense to talk
about rational philanthropy. Philanthropic donations, that is to say,
are not wholly random or arbitrary. They are capable of criticism according to some welfare function even though the function may be
very difficult to specify.39
Philanthropies posed a problem for economic theory, Boulding realized,
because their actions could not be rationalized according to the usual capitalist logic of profit maximization. The foundation, in other words, was a
big financial actor whose behavior could not be calculated in the same way
as the firm’s or the state’s. There was thus a rationalization vacuum when
it came to philanthropic support of a field of cultural production like
literature, which, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued, is ordered
not so much by material economic exchange per se as by a trade in symbolic goods (or “intangible transfers,” in Boulding’s parlance).40 Philanthropic donations still had to be “capable of criticism”—indeed, their
grants were at such a large scale that they demanded it more than ever—
but they weren’t subject to the kinds of rational criticisms economists and
politicians were used to making of purely capitalist, exchange-oriented
institutions. “A foundation,” Boulding points out, “must make choices
much as a firm does. It has to decide that A is worthy and B is not. It must
39. Boulding, “A Theory of Philanthropy,” Collected Papers, 2:238.
40. See especially Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or The Economic
World Reversed,” The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York, 1993), pp.
29 –74 and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel
(Stanford, Calif., 1996).
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develop a policy according to which it makes and, perhaps even more
important, justifies its decisions. Even though its purpose is to do good
rather than to make profits and even though profits have a certain objectivity of measurement which the good has not, nevertheless, it is presumably in the interest of a foundation to do more good in its own estimation
rather than less.”41 Therefore, since philanthropic foundations are aiming
at a “maximization of good” rather than a maximization of profit, they are
in need of rationales, of justification.
Justification, of course, is what criticism has historically been good at,
going back at least as far as Aristotle. Its function, typically viewed as supplemental to art and literature, is not just to judge but also to explain and
rationalize what otherwise risks appearing as a totally autonomous realm
of values, responsible to no authority but itself. Since criticism had long
been in the justification business, it was a natural fit for the grants economy
perpetuated by big bureaucratic institutions like philanthropic foundations, universities, and (to a lesser extent) the government, which were
subject to public scrutiny and needed clearly articulated rationales.
Whereas in a purely market-driven expansion of the literary field, the big
winners might simply be the best writers—that is, the most popular and
commercially successful, those whose work was in highest demand—this
philanthropic form of growth privileged the rationalizers, the explainers,
in a word, the critics.
We are beginning to see why criticism, which would seem to be a relic of
an older belletristic tradition unsuited to the brave new postwar world,
benefited so handsomely from the long literary boom, and why we’ve
come to know Big Criticism in the form we have. Its rise was born out of a
collective realization that American literary culture would need to grow
but also a collective fear that that growth would be wild, unrestricted, and
personally damaging to the literary intelligentsia of the prewar period and
the norms they had developed. (As Williams put it, deliberately invoking
Walt Whitman: “The vistas are limitless. But had damn well better be
limited if any good is to be done” [“CL”].)
4
The institutional and economic arrangements pursued by Blackmur
and company set the stage for something we might be inclined to call, at
the risk of multiplying actors unnecessarily, Big Theory. Often recounted
as a clash between the New Critics and other modernist-era scholars
(Blackmur, Trilling, Jarrell, and other Rockefeller survey respondents
41. Boulding, “A Theory of Philanthropy,” Collected Papers, 2:241.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
prominent among them) and a rising generation of American literary intellectuals trained in the academy and influenced by new currents in Continental philosophy (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
Louis Althusser, and so on), Big Theory is, from the sociological perspective I have been adopting here, less a separate phenomenon from Big Criticism than simply a further development of it. For Big Theory, too, though
more thoroughgoingly subversive and anti-institutional in its rhetoric
than first-wave Big Criticism, was (and is) funded by the same large bureaucracies and philanthropic organizations that provided support for Big
Criticism. The histories of theory-friendly institutions like the Gauss Seminars at Princeton (established in 1949 by Blackmur, again with Rockefeller
money), the School of Criticism and Theory (founded at UC Irvine in 1976
by Murray Krieger and subsequently moved to Cornell), and little magazines like SubStance, Glyph, and, indeed, Critical Inquiry itself provide
evidence, if any is needed, of the continuity of criticism’s objective situation over the course of time that so many commentators (detractors and
boosters alike) have preferred to narrate as a radical break.42
However different theory and criticism might be said to be, then, Big
Theory and Big Criticism, as institutional projects, can hardly be distinguished at all; both owe their existence to a standing need to justify literature and literary culture, which means, in a capitalist society, justifying
their subsidization. That practices as antiquated and nonaccretive as criticism and theory have thrived in the institutions of late capitalism is a
puzzle, from one perspective; surely the “disenchantment of the world”
that Max Weber identified over a century ago should have done away with
something as embarrassingly atavistic as the critical enterprise by now!43
Criticism’s miraculous survival in our present-day academies speaks not
only to the solidity of the networks built by modernists like Blackmur in
the early part of the century but also, I argue, to the urgent desire for
42. Historical accounts of the rise of theory have begun to proliferate in the last decade; my
consideration of these developments here is, of course, absurdly cursory. For two provocative,
well-researched, and sympathetically opposite examples, see François Cusset, French Theory:
How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States,
trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis, 2008), and Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry
33 (Autumn 2006): 78 –112. For the journals that sponsored theory, see Jeffrey J. Williams, “The
Rise of the Theory Journal,” New Literary History 40 (Autumn 2009): 683–702.
43. For another theory on why it hasn’t, see the work of Bruno Latour, particularly We
Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993) and the recent On
the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, N.C., 2010). For Latour, the project of criticism/
critique and the project of “the moderns” — post-Enlightenment Western rationality, in other
words — have always been one and the same. I depart from Latour in seeing criticism as
something called forth and supported by technocratic progress, but not coextensive with or
inextricable from it.
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Evan Kindley / Big Criticism
justification that becomes all the more pressing when there are vast
amounts of capital at stake. More private money spent subsidizing literature and literary culture means more talk about that culture, more arguments and counterarguments, more criticism, is needed, not less. Even Big
Theory, which would no doubt prefer not to regard itself as a handmaiden
to technocratic growth, is concerned above all with the project of justification, though it is likely to see such a project as interminable, impossible,
or ideologically suspect.44
In order for the defense of literary culture in the age of late capitalism to
appear more than merely sentimental and protectionist—for it to assume the
character of ironclad rationality that Weber argues is an essential feature of
modern bureaucratic organization—it needed the alibi of reason that only
criticism could provide. One could say, then, that big philanthropy went
from treating literary culture itself as a public good that needed to be
protected to treating criticism—the rational explanation, regulation, and
justification of that culture—as the good that needed to be protected. Big
Criticism thus fulfills a cynical instrumentalist, as well as a disinterested
humanist, function: it not only reassures us that our timeworn aesthetic
standards are being upheld it also allows us to make practical and economic decisions with some degree of rationality.
My intention in historicizing the emergence of Big Criticism, then, is
not to unmask, undermine, or critique the enterprise’s underlying assumptions (as the early proponents of Big Theory in the US were often
tempted to do—sometimes usefully, more often not). Rather, by seeing
Big Theory as essentially a continuation of the historical project of Big
Criticism, we arrive at a new way of justifying each one to the other precisely as modes of justification for a set of practices (literary culture) that is
perpetually and desperately in need of such justification in an era of capi44. For a relevant discussion of theory’s relation to justification, Terry Eagleton remarks:
The theoretical question always evinces something of the child’s puzzlement over practices
into which it has not yet been fully inserted. . . . Those adults will attempt to soothe the
child’s bemusement with a Wittgensteinian justification: ‘This is just what we do, dear’; but
the child who retains its wonderment will grow into the theoretician and political radical
who demands justification, not just for this or that practice, but for the whole form of
material life—the institutional infrastructure—which grounds them, and who does not
see why it may not be possible to do things differently for a change. [Terry Eagleton,
The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London, 1996),
pp. 88 – 89]
Theory’s much-vaunted radical antinomianism thus reverses the relationship of Big
Criticism to the philanthropic institution; if Big Criticism is funded so we will learn, in the end,
why we should fund it, Big Theory is funded so we learn that there is no end, and no
justification, possible and that further research is needed into the contours of this impossibility.
The difference, in other words, is between providing justifications and demanding them.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2011
talist realism and rationalization.45 I don’t, of course, claim that the impulse to fund criticism as if it were a common good is a wrong or
misguided one (to do so in the pages of Critical Inquiry would be a cynical
gesture indeed!). I only point to the fact that such an arrangement is the
product both of a very particular historical moment and very specific anxieties about the future of American literary culture on the part of an insecure intellectual elite and that we have inherited not only the arrangements
but the imperative to justify them. Big Criticism and Big Theory have their
problems, no question, but for all the oddities and inequities they have
produced, their dominance has helped enable the literary and intellectual
culture we know in the United States today, in which relatively autonomous cultural production exists on an enormous scale undreamt of by the
modernist defenders of the little magazine. Who would trade it for a
smaller, simpler, poorer, less contentious demimonde? Would you? Why
or why not?
45. I borrow my emphasis on the concept of justification from the economic sociologists
Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévénot. Boltanski and Thévénot argue that the social sciences,
which have traditionally sought the real truth of human interaction behind the veil of ideology,
illusio, or bad faith, must come to terms with the fact that human beings coproduce social
reality by adjusting their perceptions of a given situation or object to a common principle of
equivalence. Boltanski and Thévénot distinguish their concept of justification from “the notion
of ‘legitimization,’ which, in the wake of Max Weber’s work, tends to confuse justification with
deceit by rejecting the constraints of coordination and resorting to a relativism of values. . . .
People do not ordinarily seek to invent false pretexts after the fact so as to cover up some secret
motive, the way one comes up with an alibi; rather, they seek to carry out their actions in such a
way that these can withstand the test of justification” (Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On
Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Porter [Princeton, N.J., 2006], p. 37; hereafter
abbreviated OJ). (There is an obvious kinship here with the anticritical rhetoric of Bruno
Latour, a colleague of Boltanski and Thévénot’s whose work is explicitly acknowledged in the
preface; see OJ, p. 20). Also see Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry
30 [Winter 2004]: 225– 48). By searching for “the conditions [that can] allow a qualification of
persons and objects capable of framing an agreement or substantiating arguments in a
disagreement,” Thévénot and Boltanski “propose to take seriously the imperative to justify that
underlies the possibility of coordinating human behavior, and to examine the constraints that
weigh on agreement concerning a common good” (OJ, p. 37). What they stress is justification’s
embeddedness in a particular social situation, even as it seems to escape into the intellectual
ether: “To provide a basis for association, the parties involved . . . need to have access to a
principle that determines relations of equivalence,” Boltanski and Thévénot write. “This
process of shifting to a higher level of generality . . . could be pursued indefinitely in the quest
for an ever higher principle of agreement” (OJ, p. 33). But, as they note, this process of mutual
justification takes place not on a purely metaphysical or ethical level, but involves concrete
realities—what they call “stable and coherent arrangements”—as well: “Proofs oriented toward
the sense of what is just have in common with scientific proofs the fact that they both rely not
only on mental states, in the form of convictions or beliefs, but also on stable and coherent
arrangements, and thus on objects subject to general assessment” (OJ, p. 12). What is needed
for justification to take place are stable objects (texts, genres, authors, magazines, literatures)
and also ways of bringing those objects into relations of association with one another and with
multiple human actors.
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