Academic Capitalism and Literary Value

Confronting some of the most heated issues in the literary academy, Harold Fromm charges that the critical practices dominating the liberal arts over the past two decades have subordinated literature to unethical ends. In the hand of some feminists, Marxists, new historicists, African-Americanists and others, Fromm says, literature is a commodity over which exclusive, self-aggrandizing interests are struggling for monopolistic control. Beneath an aura of revolutionary virtue, these critics are as entrepreneurial and politically self-centred as the capitalistic and patriarchal systems they denounce. Their goal, says Fromm, is less often genuine reform than power and success in the academy. Although Fromm grants some brilliantly radical thinking has been taking place on the humanities, he is concerned nonethless that literature itself is being devalued. Power-seeking cultural critics have alienated actual and potential audiences for the arts, readers no less intelligent than they, by disparaging the idea of literary value in the interests of political correctness.
Most previous to Fromm - for it often serves no higher purpose than career advancement - critics have denigrated aesthetic pleasure and the enlargement of human experience as motivations for reading. In their place critics offer impossibly tendentious theories as a means of cornering their share of the academic market in ideas. Once literature is devalued to the role of political instrument, Fromm warns, the cultural rationale for its creation and appreciation disappears, and literary study becomes a pseudo-social science. Central to Fromm's detailed discussions of individual theorists and critics are his readings of what he calls the ethical subtexts of their writings. These subtexts, he says, can undermine the professed intentions of critics by betraying in them the same vices they castigate in others. In these subtexts Fromm finds suggestive evidence that much of the current ideological/literary enterprise is highly compromised by priestly resentments like those unmasked by Nietzsche.