Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the Trojan city, 1815
In April 1981, The New York Times Book Review published an essay by the literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman that proposed a whole different model of academic criticism. Whereas traditional criticism served the primary text, aiming to clarify, elucidate, and otherwise expound on the original, Hartman argued that “new kinds of commentary” possess an “expressive force” and mark an “inventive feat, a ‘creative’ rather than a definitive answer.” Older critics drew meanings out of poems, passed them on to readers, and retired, he stated, meeting the “plainer functions” of “reviewing and explaining.” The emerging interpreters are artists of language and thought in their own right, not “handmaiden[s] to more ‘creative’ modes of thinking like poems or novels,” and they deserve equal “dignity” and “will have to be read closely.” They have forged a “literature of criticism,” Hartman announces at the end, answering definitively the essay’s title, “How Creative Should Literary Criticism Be?”
Thirty years later, Hartman’s conception sounds fatuous and overdone, but it imparted well an advancing force in literary studies at the time. Hundreds of influential people claimed the same creativity in seminars and conferences, at the School of Criticism and Theory, and in the pages of Glyph, boundary 2, and other periodicals of High Theory. Outsiders may wonder how a collection of intelligent, learned professionals could have distinguished their practice with so much self-inflation, but the appeal was
