The Challenges to Interpretation

Abstract

In a lecture given at Princeton University on the centenary of Wordsworth’s death in 1950, Lionel Trilling observed that ‘If Wordsworth were not kept in mind by the universities he would scarcely be remembered at all’.¹ Whether this was true or false, it is not something that seems to trouble the deconstructive interpreters of Wordsworth’s poetry. The fate of serious literature in the culture at large is, instead, a typical concern of the ‘man of letters’ who continues to champion the public function of criticism. Today’s public critics are frequently academics, but they view literature as a criticism of life addressed to the non-specialist reader rather than as a body of dark texts requiring tortuous, esoteric and plural interpretations. At the same time, the self-conscious man of letters (the male noun is appropriate) cannot help appearing as in some sense a traditionalist, and even as the obituarist of a form of culture in terminal decline.