Sedgwick had some thoughts about this, but by and large that essay still remains to be written...

Perhaps we should worry more about doing what we do well and innovating in our studies rather than endless polemics, but if we are going to point fingers, I continue to think that the crisis in criticism was not induced by Marxism + psychoanalysis but by the (Foucauldian-inflected) New Historicism.

To evoke an old bugbear, this new desire for something pre-critical doesn't seem any less out of synch with postmodernism than did cultural studies and identity politics and so it seems to me that no continuum is actually endangered by what's currently on offer in these new methodological debates

To risk a hypothesis, much of what is associated with so-called post-critique and the new disciplinary "conservatism" (is it fair to relate these ?) seems to desire not a "conservative" return to criticism but a movement away from it and the creation instead of a new kind of pre-critical receptivity

This last point seems to problematize J. North's association of Williams (and Jameson) with a new kind of historicizing and politicized criticism that interferes with students/readers' experience of works of literature as supple aesthetic objects.

As one may notice from the quoted phrases above much that is innovative in R. Williams (i.e., the now celebrated concept of "the structure of feeling") is actually an extension of Leavis's project (albeit married to different political commitments and more rigorously sociological).

One advantage in Leavis is that he makes perfectly transparent his criterion of aesthetic judgment, which far from being purely formal (as some of the new disciplinary "conservatives" seem to desire) is actually the attunement of form to new "modes of experience" or "ways of feeling."

Contemporary criticism had indeed avoided such kinds of aesthetic judgment (but usually hypocritically since invariably the critic makes these kinds of judgment anyway).

The only thing that seems out of step with Leavis vis-a-vis contemporary criticism is his strong sense that good poetry can and must be distinguished from bad poetry and that this is the job of the critic.

This does not actually seem that at odds with what the new disciplinary "conservatives" decry in contemporary criticism (i.e., that it's overly politicized, contextualizing, and moralizing).

(c) profoundly moralizing about what poetry does or doesn't represent (so not value neutral) -- the whole argument in New Bearing is a condemnation of poetry that rejects dealing with the modern world and chooses instead the fantasy world Leavis associates with the pre-Raphaelites.

(b) sociologizing and contextualizing (modern poetry cannot be understood without reference to changes in the fabric of modern life; Yeats can't be understood without considering the marginalized position of Ireland; etc., etc.)

(a) saturated in his personal politics, for which a kind of "Red Toryism" seems the best shorthand (so not at all apolitical);

It's much better than expected. But I can't help feeling that the new disciplinary conservatism (identified by During) is harkening after something that isn't actually embodied in this criticism to the degree that it supposes. Leavis's vision of poetry and criticism is: