I just finished reading today the book In Plato’s Cave by Alvin Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Kernan, born in 1923, was a Professor of English Literature specializing in the Renaissance period. He first studied at Columbia University in 1944, where his education was free with a monthly allowance as a returned serviceman under the G.I. Bill. For some decades after World War Two, the USA seems to have put a lot of money into higher education, perhaps because of the idea that winning World War Two owed much to scientific research and advanced technology, and that it was necessary to out-do their Soviet competition.
Kernan’s graduate and teaching career took him took him to Williams, Oxford, Yale and Princeton universities.
It is a biography of a life in academia, with one of the main subjects being the changes that took place in the nature of academia with the introduction and spread of postmodern ideas about “truth” being nothing more than a kind social construct. In this respect, the book’s theme is similar to Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. I haven’t read Bloom’s book yet, but after skimming it, it looks to be more cantankerous in tone, and the biographical, story-telling, anecdotal nature of Kernan’s biographical volume I think may make it a more fun read than Bloom's book.
Literary criticism is for the most part rarely read other than by the academics whose job is to write it, and their students. A meta-analysis then of what literary criticism is and how it has changed over the decades might seem an unlikely subject of interest, I think Kernan’s book would be of interest to people interested in the sociology of how “postmodern” ideas have come into and spread throughout academia.
Kernan’s 1940s graduate studies were done at a time when “Formalism” was the current mode of literary criticism. It was thought that earlier literary criticism had been unscientific and undisciplined, and that the same rigorous methods used in the sciences should be used to study literature closely – the text was considered the only important subject, and criticism was about looking attentively at the text, and explaining exactly and methodically what effects it created, what it meant, and how it did this.
Formalism fell into disfavor when more historical methods became popular, such as taking into account the society at the time the text was created, the biography of the author, how texts related to other non-literary events like politics.
This then gave way to the more postmodern “new historicism”, a change which Kernan laments. Here to put it bluntly there is no particular real truth in the text itself, or in the surrounding historical factors, but you can write about anything at all and relate it to the text however you like, so a monograph on “The Seventh Book of The Odyssey considered as a narrative of perturbations in the orbit of the third moon of Saturn, and the oppression of fire-ants” would be perfectly acceptable.
The book also covers the declining “authoritarian” nature of the University, as activists, minority rights advocates and other special interest organizations came to have more power in determining matters affecting universities and the way they did business. These changes are related to key incidents like the killing four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.
Kernan is sympathetic to the idea that education should have some authoritarian and elitist (meritocratic) components. He recalls how in his earlier teaching career, he was able to ask his students points about the text they were supposed to have read, and then freely curse them for their stupidity if they could not answer.
In later decades, when student fees became much higher, the power resided more in students hands, and students who received low grades or were unable to find relevant work could even sue the university for not delivering on what they had been promised for their high fees.
Finally here are a couple of brief quotes from towards the end of the book:
Kernan, born in 1923, was a Professor of English Literature specializing in the Renaissance period. He first studied at Columbia University in 1944, where his education was free with a monthly allowance as a returned serviceman under the G.I. Bill. For some decades after World War Two, the USA seems to have put a lot of money into higher education, perhaps because of the idea that winning World War Two owed much to scientific research and advanced technology, and that it was necessary to out-do their Soviet competition.
– page 212.
Kernan’s graduate and teaching career took him took him to Williams, Oxford, Yale and Princeton universities.
It is a biography of a life in academia, with one of the main subjects being the changes that took place in the nature of academia with the introduction and spread of postmodern ideas about “truth” being nothing more than a kind social construct. In this respect, the book’s theme is similar to Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. I haven’t read Bloom’s book yet, but after skimming it, it looks to be more cantankerous in tone, and the biographical, story-telling, anecdotal nature of Kernan’s biographical volume I think may make it a more fun read than Bloom's book.
Literary criticism is for the most part rarely read other than by the academics whose job is to write it, and their students. A meta-analysis then of what literary criticism is and how it has changed over the decades might seem an unlikely subject of interest, I think Kernan’s book would be of interest to people interested in the sociology of how “postmodern” ideas have come into and spread throughout academia.
Kernan’s 1940s graduate studies were done at a time when “Formalism” was the current mode of literary criticism. It was thought that earlier literary criticism had been unscientific and undisciplined, and that the same rigorous methods used in the sciences should be used to study literature closely – the text was considered the only important subject, and criticism was about looking attentively at the text, and explaining exactly and methodically what effects it created, what it meant, and how it did this.
Formalism fell into disfavor when more historical methods became popular, such as taking into account the society at the time the text was created, the biography of the author, how texts related to other non-literary events like politics.
This then gave way to the more postmodern “new historicism”, a change which Kernan laments. Here to put it bluntly there is no particular real truth in the text itself, or in the surrounding historical factors, but you can write about anything at all and relate it to the text however you like, so a monograph on “The Seventh Book of The Odyssey considered as a narrative of perturbations in the orbit of the third moon of Saturn, and the oppression of fire-ants” would be perfectly acceptable.
The book also covers the declining “authoritarian” nature of the University, as activists, minority rights advocates and other special interest organizations came to have more power in determining matters affecting universities and the way they did business. These changes are related to key incidents like the killing four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.
Kernan is sympathetic to the idea that education should have some authoritarian and elitist (meritocratic) components. He recalls how in his earlier teaching career, he was able to ask his students points about the text they were supposed to have read, and then freely curse them for their stupidity if they could not answer.
In later decades, when student fees became much higher, the power resided more in students hands, and students who received low grades or were unable to find relevant work could even sue the university for not delivering on what they had been promised for their high fees.
Finally here are a couple of brief quotes from towards the end of the book:
- pp. 281-2.
- p. 286.
