Andy Hines quoting the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS--AN OUTSIDER QUOTES AN OKIE

 

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University

A Hines - 2022

… As Hershel Parker put it in commenting on the New Criticism’s tendency toward
unity, the New Critics “define their role as bringing order out of a chaos which they
insist is only apparent, not real. The order must be there, awaiting the sufficiently …

Hines adds: .

The problem as I recall it is that Jerry was afraid of Brodhead and Delbanco and their cohorts and undercut this extended gloss with one word, If.

"If Parker is right . . . ." Jerry of course knew I was right. After all at a cocktail party in LA at a convention he had accepted the book based on my conversation with him.

Hayford did not understand. In 1984 he recommended Don Cook as someone to write a blurb. I said no, I was thinking of Fred Crews or Stanley Fish. He said (without reading it) but it's textual and Don does textual. Well, I said no, that is not my kind of textual, and I got both Crews and Fish to comment. 

FROM AMAZON:

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.
 
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.