RICHARD LEVIN

THE INCREASING POLARIZATION of literary studies over the past decade has cre-
ated a situation that is unique in the history of our discipline. This of course
is not the first time that we have been polarized. There was another major con-
flict some fifty years ago between the old historical scholars and what were
then called the New Critics; but it differed from the present conflict in two very
important respects. Although it obviously involved departmental politics, this
had no direct connection to politics outside the academy. The New Critics were
radical insurgents within their departments, but some of the early ones were
politically conservative, and in its heyday the movement covered virtually the
entire political spectrum. In the present conflict, however, the two sides are
clearly connected to external politics, which is why they are usually called the
Right and the Left. I am not happy with these labels because they contribute
to the polarization by conflating a number of different critical approaches at
the two political poles, as I will point out later, but I am going to use them since
I cannot think of better ones.

The second important difference, which is a result of this political connec-
tion, involves the power situation. In the earlier conflict that situation was per-
fectly clear--the old historicists had the power and were gradually losing it to
the New Critics. But in the present conflict a major argument centers on the
question of who has the power. Each side sees itself as the underdog oppressed
by the other side, which really has all the power, even though it claims that it
is the oppressed underdog. This is as if each side were crying out, "Help, the
paranoids are after us!" I think that both sides are sincere about this, ¹ and that
they are both correct, depending on how we contextualize the conflict. In the
context of the national political scene, the Left is correct: the right-wing critics
have the big money behind them, which is used to finance several institutes
and journals; they have the support of the Bush administration; and they have
most of the public press on their side in the attack on political correctness (PC).
(I should explain that I will not be mentioning PC here, except to mention that

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