The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by Terry Teachout

The Critics Bear It Away:, American Fiction and the Academy, by Frederick Crews (Random House, 211 pp., $20)

FREDERICK CREWS, professor of English at Berkeley and author of The Pooh Perplex, writes essays for The New York Review of Books in which he attacks literary theory from a vantage point "as far as possible from great-thoughts conservatism on one side and death-of-the-author theory on the other." Crews is deeply hostile to the "calculatedly progressive pap" of today's ultrapoliticized academic criticism, and The Critics Bear It Away--a collection of articles on Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, and their "theory-saturated" commentators--is a powerful assault on the enemy: "As this movement increases its sway, 'implicating' more and more authors in its indictment of the past for falling short of egalitarian rectitude, we can begin to feel like viewers of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, wondering which literary figure will be the next to be replaced by a hollow automaton." At the same time, Crews is no friend of such "cultural nostalgics" as William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, and Roger Kimball, at whom he directs a few gratuitously nasty ad-hominem cracks in his introduction. If he thinks this nervous nod to orthodoxy will keep the wolves of political correctness from his own office door, he may be in for a surprise. Skip the introduction, but read the book. --TERRY TEACHOUT