SOURCE: “Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution,” in American Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, June, 1989, pp. 341-61.

In the following essay, Cheyfitz explicates and reconciles the contradictory images of Matthiessen in American literary critical theory.

In 1963, reviewing four books of criticism, including F. O. Matthiessen's posthumous The Responsibilities of the Critic, Leslie Fiedler marked a moment of critical exhaustion. Three of these works, including the Matthiessen, Fiedler told his audience in The Yale Review,

are the victims of our new canon—a brief series of literary works championed over and over in certain expected and unexciting ways. I have never been so aware how most of us, despite our differences, have become inmates of the same infernal cycle of taste; busily snapping at each other's skulls, we do not notice how we are all imprisoned from the waist down in the ice of our congealed enthusiasms. This ice, fixed at...