Volume 39, Number 15 · September 24, 1992
The New Americanists
By Frederick C. Crews
In putting together for a book a number of essays and reviews published mostly in these pages,[1] I was struck by how deeply their connecting theme—the way American novelists are being apprehended and misapprehended in the academy—has become involved in a larger and quite acrimonious debate. I mean, of course, the furor over 'political correctness' and the alleged betrayal of our cultural heritage by professor-theorists bent upon egalitarian leveling. Inevitably, some of the conclusions drawn in my book will be read as corollaries of a more general stand against the politicizing of literary study—a phenomenon I am on record as deploring. But though that book is indeed meant in part as a report to nonacademic readers about shifts of opinion in the English departments, it is driven by no conscious agenda other than a concern for understanding American fiction with as few illusions as possible. And the particular illusions I examine originate in conservative as well as radical impulses—in, for example, New Critical formalism, orthodox intentionalism, Christian or Agrarian moralism, and outright hero worship of the sort that transforms an Ernest Hemingway or a John Updike from a spiteful, ethically confused, yet often powerful writer into an icon of pure masculinity or matchless sophistication.
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