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.Kazin particularly disliked the degradation of psychoanalysis as found in its contemporary uses for perfecting techniques of market research, for encouraging adaptation to society, for enabling a mechanical psychoanalytical criticism, for licensing solipsistic searches for identity, and for disconnecting consciousness from external reality.Of Freudians, Kazin observed: “the world—the surrounding and not always friendly reality of nature, history, society—has disappeared for these writers, and has taken with it everything which has given measure and definition to man’s struggles in the world” (369).What Kazin generally deplored was any and all contemporary nihilism and solipsism—the flaccid refusal to engage nature and culture in struggle—which psychoanalysis had aided and abetted.Of Carl Jung, Kazin was especially critical.Whereas Freud was devoted to reality and truth, Jung was interested in needs and possibilities.Jung was a mere mystic; Freud a scientist.Jung turned psychoanalysis into a substitute religion for a godless age.The Jungian philosophy of life, derived from primordial impulses and attitudes, was useless for orientation in our alien, external world.Of the leading New York Intellectuals, Kazin was most severe in his criticisms of psychoanalysis, particularly of the Jungian variety.None of the New York writers relied more on psychoanalysis in his cultural criticism than Leslie Fiedler.In the 1959 Preface to his Love and Death in the American Novel (the title adapted Freud’s Eros and Thanatos), Fiedler stressed the usefulness of many critical approaches and the importance of not sacrificing the “sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, or generic” critical modes.22 Specifically, he acknowledged a contempt for formalist criticism, a high regard for Marxist analysis of the Partisan Review kind, and a deep indebtedness to Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis.“Readers familiar with orthodox Freudianism and Jungian revisionism will recognize the sources of much of my basic vocabulary; I cannot imagine myself beginning the kind of investigation I have undertaken without the concepts of the conscious and unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the archetypes, etc.Only my awareness of how syncretically I have yoked together and how cavalierly I have transformed my borrowings prevents my making more specific acknowledgments” (14).Given the intensity and breadth of his commitment to psychoanalysis, it was easy to regard Fiedler as mainly a psychological critic, as most readers did.Add to this his general thesis about the American novel between the 1780s and 1950s and readers got a particularly firm impression of his major interests as chiefly psychoanalytical.In Fiedler’s account, American fiction writers failed to come to terms with adult heterosexual love and became obsessed with death, incest, and homosexuality.Broached initially in the infamous essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” first published by Partisan Review in 1948 and collected later in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), Fiedler’s broad thesis appalled other New York Intellectuals, especially Kazin and Howe, who judged such archetypal or “myth” criticism to be reductive, ahistorical, and anti-aesthetic.To preserve the rich realism and poetic quality of literary work, Richard Chase proposed the special study of myth as a substitute for psychoanalysis in his Quest for Myth (1949) and The Democratic Vista (1958), where he took to task typical contemporary “myth criticism” for avoiding experience, history, and literariness.According to Chase, myth was story—literature—not religion, psychology, philosophy, or magic.However much he accepted unconscious themes and forms, Chase wanted to save the conscious, imaginative elements of literature as well as the social and historical specificities of it.At the close of his The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), he condemned the rigidity and abstractness of much myth criticism, which ignored “the whole reality of time and place and the whole illuminating cultural context.”23 Similar charges were registered earlier by Rahv in his landmark essay, “The Myth and The Powerhouse” (1953).As a group, the New York Intellectuals expressed disdain for monolithic Freudian, Jungian, and myth criticism.To counter such criticism, they insisted on the important roles of politics, sociology, history, morality, and aesthetics in the job of understanding and evaluating literature.Those New York Critics who did value psychoanalysis allotted it a subordinate place, seeking both to limit its applicability and to escape its errors.While they respected greatly the work of Freud, they reacted very negatively to Jung.Leslie Fiedler’sturnto and immersion in Jungianism marked for them his departure from the family.The focus on modern literatureSeveral months after Philip Rahv’s death, Mary McCarthy published on the front page of The New York Times Book Review a brief memoir that commenced “for him, literature began with Dostoevsky and stopped with Joyce, Proust and Eliot,” then quickly added: “he despised most contemporary writing” (ELP, vii).Speaking generally, the leading first-generation New York Critics focused on post-Enlightenment literature of Europe and on post-Romantic American literature.In addition, they gravitated toward fiction rather than poetry or drama, and they chiefly admired fiction produced in the great tradition of realism.Opposed to mass culture and advocates of elitist modernism, the New York Intellectuals frequently expressed dismay when the culture of modernism began to be quickly and widely institutionalized in universities from the 1950s onward.In a listing of two dozen of their favorite authors, there appear only four poets and eight Americans; the rest are European prose writers once considered avant-gardist and now part of the tradition: Bellow, Cummings, Dos Passos, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Faulkner, Freud, Gide, Henry James, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Malamud, Malraux, Thomas Mann, Marx, Nietzsche, Orwell, Proust, Silone, Stendhal, Stevens, Tolstoy, and Yeats.The literature preferred by the New York Intellectuals tended to be not only realistic and modern, but highly complex and serious, mature and difficult.In their enthusiasm for modernist literature, the New York Critics were about a decade behind Edmund Wilson and R.P.Blackmur, who in the 1920s were publishing critical estimates of Eliot, Lawrence, Stevens, Yeats, and others.The American study most memorably and fully scrutinizing modernism during those early days was Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931)—a lengthy text that defined the Symbolism of the period 1870 to 1930 and that examined specifically the works of Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.Wilson’s first critical book, Axel’s Castle, established him as a lucid stylist and an expert exegete of the avant-garde, a learned man and a leader with foresight [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]