The Literary Canon and New Criticism
Most books on the development of literary theory in England
start with Matthew Arnold, because he ushered in an era in which literature was
to be considered by influential critics as the central repository of English culture
and values. These critics were to have lasting effects on the ways in which
many generations of students perceived the significance of literature. F R
Leavis and the poet T S Eliot, above all, established the notion of the
existence of a literary canon of undeniably great works of literature. I A
Richards, with his focus on close textual analysis, inspired the development of
the so-called New Criticism in America.
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
Arnold, an educator, poet and professor of poetry at Oxford
University, was of the opinion that literature, apart from its pleasing
aesthetic qualities, had an educational role in people’s lives. He believed
that the persistence of English culture was threatened by the growth of
Philistine values, which were being encouraged by the rise of a middle class
obsessed with material wealth. As he believed that religion had been undermined
by Darwin’s theory of evolution, he expressed the wish that poetry would take
its place in men’s hearts. Poetry would interpret life for us all and console
us, as indeed it had always done, dating back to antiquity. Arnold famously
defined culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Culture
and Anarchy, 1869).This culture was to be a bulwark against the chaotic
life of the working class and the illusions by which middle-class Protestants
lived. Through culture it was possible to be free from fanaticism and move
towards an existence of sweetness and light. Culture encouraged ‘the growth and
predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality’.
The problem with Arnold’s ideas for more recent theorists has
been that he thought the values of the culture, which he espoused, were
eternally true for every age and all conditions of human beings. All people, at
all times, were capable of aspiring to the same ideals. The essence of true
culture transcended history. Recent critics have found it difficult to go along
with his notion of poets as somehow having access to eternally valid wisdom
which they impart to others. Basically, Arnold saw literature as the domain of
high-minded intellectuals and his definition excluded the writing of a large
part of the populace.
T S Eliot (1888–1965)
After the First World War, the American-born poet, T S
Eliot, took up Arnold’s challenge and began to reassess the literary culture of
England. In the words of the British theorist Terry Eagleton, he set about
conducting ‘a wholesale salvage and demolition job on its literary traditions’
(Eagleton, 1983). Eliot was very largely responsible for formulating what
already existed as a loosely drawn up list: the canon of English literature
(the indisputably good and great works). He made poetry central to his theory
and focused specifically on the poem as a text. For him poetry should be
impersonal. In Traditional and the Individual Talent (1919), he asserted
that a poet did not have ‘a personality’ to express but a particular medium.
Poetry was to serve as an escape from the self: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality’ (ibid). The poet’s personal and social
circumstances were secondary to the poetry itself, and he/she should not
indulge in expressions of profound emotion, but seek what he called, in the
essay Hamlet (1919), an ‘objective correlative’: ‘a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion.’ Emotion should be conveyed indirectly. Through the awareness of an
ironic perception of the world and of paradoxes, the reader should be
challenged and made to think. This meant of course that Eliot’s canon of good
poetry was severely limited in scope: he found little use for most of the poets
in the previous two centuries!
Eliot considered literature (and especially poetry) to be in
direct opposition to the modern world. Poetry could provide the profound
experience that the modern world, with its utilitarian materialism, could not
offer. Poetry especially could recapture a lost ideal of wholeness and convey
complex meanings which we would otherwise simply not perceive. Eliot’s ideas
greatly influenced a group of academics at Cambridge University, including IA
Richards and F R Leavis, who, in turn, were to exert longlasting influence on
critical thinking about literature.
The Newbolt Report
The importance of government education policy on the study
of literature in schools should not be ignored. A government report entitled The
Teaching of English in England (1921), the author of which was Sir Henry Newbolt,
strongly encouraged the study of English literature in educational
institutions. It is full of sentiment which owes much to Arnold and Eliot:
‘Literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples
of the Human Spirit, in which all should worship’ and it is ‘an embodiment of
the best thoughts of the best minds, the most direct and lasting communication
of experience by man to man.’ For Newbolt, literature also had the function of
creating a sense of national identity, serving to ‘form a new element of
national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes’. All these
ideas, of course, were articulated in the aftermath of the First World War and
have to be viewed in that context.
I A Richards (1893–1979)
Following Eliot’s emphasis on the poem as text, Richards, an
academic at Cambridge, with a background in aesthetics, psychology and
semantics, published a widely influential book in 1924, Principles of
Literary Criticism. He argued that criticism should emulate the precision
of science and differentiate the ‘emotive’ language of poetry from the
‘referential’ language of non-literary works. For Richards, poets are able to
articulate the chaos of the world around them and gain control of it. They can
reconcile contradictions and transcend self-centredness. Literature helps us to
evaluate our personal experiences. It conveys a certain type of knowledge which
is not factual or scientific but concerned with values.
In his book Practical Criticism (1929), Richards
included examples of work by his students, in which they attempted to analyse
short unidentified poems. This exercise rapidly became the standard method of
training students in critical analysis, both in Great Britain and America. As
it involved the ruthless exclusion of any consideration of context, historical
or social, and of the biography of the author, its scope was limited but it did
have one positive effect. It nurtured the close reading of literary texts. Many
subsequent theorists have lamented the passing of this skill. Richards left
Cambridge in 1929 and settled at Harvard University. His subsequent work
greatly influenced the development of what became known as American New
Criticism.
William Empson (1906–1984)
William Empson was a student of Richards and he produced his
first and most famous work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), when he was
still a student. For Empson, ambiguity was the defining characteristic of poetic
language. He shared Richards’ passion for close reading of texts, which has led
many to ally him with the American New Critics, but, in many ways, he was
opposed to their major doctrines. He preferred to treat poetry as a type of
utterance which has much continuity with ordinary ways of speech. He also took
seriously into account what he conceived the author’s intentions to be. He did
not examine works in isolation but was concerned to consider how the words were
used in social contexts. For him, a final coherent interpretation of a poem was
impossible. The ambiguities he discovered in poetry could never be given a
specific final interpretation. Poetic language was suggestive of inexhaustible
meaning. For these reasons, his ideas have often found more sympathy with the
common reader than with academic critics, concerned as they are, for the most
part, with precise definition. Empson was a highly idiosyncratic thinker, not
really belonging to any school, and is doubtless long overdue for reassessment.
New Criticism
American New Criticism, which was active from the late 1930s
to the late 1950s, also took on most of the ideas of Eliot and Richards, as
well as those of Empson. The movement had its roots in the American South,
which had long been backward economically, but was then undergoing rapid
modernisation. The leading critics had much sympathy with similar reactions
against rapid modernisation among British critics. Prominent among the group
were John Crowe Ransom, W K Wimsatt, Monroe C Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks and
Mark Schorer.
For the New Critics, poetry was also central to their
concerns and seen as a quasi-religious defence against sterile scientific modes
of thought. An alienated world could be reanimated. Poetry could remain
untouched by the prevalent materialism all around. A poem existed as a
self-evident, unique entity. It could not be paraphrased, nor could it be expressed
other than as it was. Every element in a poem was in balanced integration with
every other element, leading to a coherence of the whole. A poem was considered
as an object in itself, cut off from both author and the world around it. This
view was, of course, completely compatible with Richards’ procedure of
‘practical criticism’.
Yet New Criticism did not consider the poem to be cut off
completely from reality. It was not, in other words, an entirely formalist
approach, which would involve examining only the form of an isolated entity.
The poem was seen somehow to incorporate the outside world within itself. In
practice, New Criticism concentrated on paradoxes and ambivalence which could
be established in the text.
For John Crowe Ransom, in an essay called Criticism. Inc (1937),
a poem creates harmony and coherence from the chaos of experience: ‘The poet
perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly
crumbling beneath his touch.’ In The Language of Paradox (1942), Cleanth
Brooks wrote that ‘it wields together the discordant and the contradictory’.
W K Wimsatt and Monroe C Beardsley wrote two highly
influential essays which advocated the importance of giving prime attention to
the text. They isolated two common fallacies in literary interpretation. In The
Intentional Fallacy (1946) they criticised the tendency to confuse what the
author intended in the writing of a work of literature with what is actually
there on the page. One should not speculate on what the writer may have wanted
to say. In The Affective Fallacy (1949), they criticized readers who
confuse their own emotional response to a work with what the poem itself really
tells them. The way a work affects readers can too easily blur their vision.
These views found echoes later in poststructuralist theory, though the latter
has a different concept of the nature of a text.
New Criticism clearly focused predominantly on poetry but
one writer, Mark Schorer, extended its main precepts to include analysis of
prose fiction. In an essay entitled Fiction and the Analogical Matrix (1949),
he concerns himself with the revelation of unconscious patterns of images and
symbols which are present in all forms of fiction and which clearly go beyond
authorial intentions. Meaning often contradicts surface sense but, while this
theory may seem to prefigure deconstructive approaches, in reality Schorer
emphasises the fact that prose fiction always ultimately manages to integrate
all apparent contradictions into a coherent whole.
The Chicago School
New Criticism also spawned a group of critics with similar
but fundamentally heretical views. They were known as ‘The Chicago School’ or
the ‘New Aristotelians’, and were active from the late 1930s through the 1940s
and 1950s.The central figure was R S Crane at the University of Chicago. They
derived their ideas basically from Aristotle and reacted against the principles
of New Criticism, with its prime concern for poetry and its rejection of
historical analysis. They believed in applying whatever method of analysis
seemed appropriate to a particular case and were most influential in the study
of narrative structure in the novel. Wayne C Booth, a later critic, in his book
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), acknowledged his debt to the ‘New Aristotelians.’
He examined the methods, or rhetorical devices, employed by the author to
communicate with readers, making an important distinction between the actual
author and the ‘authorial voice’ in the work. He distinguished between
‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narrators and promoted the view that authors do,
indeed, intend to impose their values on the reader through the presence of a
‘reliable’ narrator.
F R Leavis (1895–1978) and D H Lawrence (1885–1930)
Leavis was instrumental in putting English and the study of
English Literature at the heart of school and university curricula in England.
However one may view his critical legacy, the study of the humanities in
England owes much to his efforts. Especially important were his essays
published as Education and the University (1943). He was very much
concerned with the practical business of criticism and not with theorising
about it, and regarded criticism and philosophy as completely separate
activities. He adopted Richards’ methods of practical criticism as well as the
emphasis on the text stipulated by the New Critics. For Leavis, a text should
contain within it the full justification of why it is as it is and not
otherwise. The first stage in the process of analysis was close scrutiny of the
text (he gave the name Scrutiny to the journal he founded and edited
from 1932 to 1953). Such close scrutiny led ultimately to establishing the
‘Life’ (a term never defined) of the text, its closeness to experience and its
moral force.
In Revaluation (1936), Leavis delineated the ‘true’
English poetic tradition along the lines prescribed by Eliot, and in The
Great Tradition (1948) he established the Leavisite (the word has entered
common critical parlance) canon of great English novels. His great novelists
(Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Leavis’ near
contemporary D H Lawrence) promote, according to Leavis, full human awareness
in the face of materialism and technology. Unlike Richards and the New Critics,
Leavis brought a social and political awareness to bear in his analyses.
D H Lawrence, whom Leavis greatly admired, echoed Leavis’
sentiments. In his essay Morality and the Novel (1925) he wrote: ‘If a
novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what
the relationships may consist in.’ And in Why the Novel Matters (1936)
his concept of ‘Life’ is as mystically and vaguely defined as that of Leavis:
‘To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at
its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you.’ Many have regarded Leavis and the ideology of
Scrutiny as essentially elitist: your soul is only really safe if you
studied literature under Leavis, or at least under a Leavisite!
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