Sentimentality and the Academic Tradition

H. R. Swardson

doi:10.2307/376010

College English Apr 1976

Sentimentality and the Academic Tradition

H. R. Swardson

Abstract

What are we former students of the New Critics to think of Catch-22 and all the praise heaped on it, for more than a decade now, by English professors? If sentimentality means what we thought it did (invitation to unexamined response, indulgence of inappropriate emotion) and as bad as we thought it was (an insult to serious readers, an abomination to people in universities) then, if we are still able to read as we were taught to read, Catch-22 thoroughly sentimental and not worth teaching. But apparently most college teachers, like most American intellectuals, do not see the book this way. I have in my office three collections of Catch-22 criticism that have been offered to me, in the last two years, for classroom use. They hardly acknowledge that a reaction like mine, like ours, possible. The editor of one of them, Robert M. Scotto (Joseph Heller's Catch-22: A Critical Edition, New York: Dell, 1973), tells me in his first sentence that Catch-22 is our contemporary classic, and appends eight critical essays that show no sign of disagreement. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, editors of A 'Catch-22' Casebook (New York: Crowell, 1973), declare in their second sentence that they feel, without reservation, that Catch-22 a masterpiece. Of the forty-six entries in their collection only three or four, by my reckoning, could be called seriously unfavorable. This in a genre commonly devoted to dialectic. The third editor, James Nagel (Critical Essays on Catch-22, Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1974), advertises controversy in his collection, and says that nearly all the key issues remain unresolved and continue to be vigorously debated, but the controversy we see mainly over what the novel really about, or whether the disjointed time scheme functional or not, or whether Yossarian an epic or an existentialist hero, and so on. Though there some debate over how bad the writing and how stereotyped the characters are, and some discussion of how functional these crudities and stereotypes may be, Nagel's introduction heavy with respect for Heller's art, and only two of the nineteen essays he collects are unfavorable. One of these a one-page review. Through all these collections the student will hear little debate on the kind of question that seems, that once seemed, vital to me, to us-whether the novel will stand up to and reward a hard, critical reading, or whether it will break down, whether it sentimental. Instead he will hear many tributes and claims that link the novel to the questions he finds vital in our time: that Catch-22 a brilliantly comic attack, long before the Vietnam war, on all the stupidity and

Journal: College English
Published: 1976-04-01
DOI: 10.2307/376010
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: genre theory teacher development argument
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Sentimentality and the Academic Tradition

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