Reflecting on the recent death of the great cultural critic Terry Teachout, Micah Mattix contemplates the present state of criticism:
Sometimes it’s hard to shake the impression that many of today’s critics, fed a gruel of Derrida and Kristeva in graduate school, have either gone all-in on an approach to literary texts that gives us books like Chaucer’s Losers, Nintendo’s Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology (which traces the “intersection”—there’s always an intersection—of “narratology, ludology, and queer studies”) or rejected the whole business to make a buck in the growing literature-as-therapy genre. Readers and critics seem to lack judgment and taste. Our cultural battles are devoid of intellectual seriousness, and the sudden censoriousness of our social-media age has only made things worse.
But I am reminded that many excellent critics are still at work. Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Epstein, Gary Saul Morson, Paul Cantor, Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, Eric Ormsby, Craig Raine, and Anthony Daniels are just a few that come to mind. Among the critics of my generation, we have Dominic Green, Adam Kirsch, Brian Dillon, Ben Downing, and Michael Robbins, among others.
The existence of such critics, argues Mattix, refutes the contention of the leftist writer Jeet Heer, who mourned Teachout as one of the last exemplars of a certain “strain of conservatism.”
Heer praises Teachout for his “expansiveness” and “natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality,” but he also wishes Teachout would have done more political writing (despite praising his restraint earlier in the piece). What kind? The kind that is critical of conservatives, of course: “Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort.”
Heer, like some on the left, seems to believe one can easily be literary and progressive, but one can only be literary and conservative in a very limited sense and with great effort. It’s an odd belief lacking in imagination.
Read more on Spectator: https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/last-conservative-critic-terry-teachout/