It’s this question that has prompted perhaps the biggest schism in Lit Crit, one that will probably never be healed. On the one hand, there are those critics who consider that literature is an integral part of society whose business is to reflect and comment on it; and on the other hand those who think it has a far broader remit, and if that means the writer turns his back on society, so be it.
So the former group looks for engagement, and grows impatient with any meaning that exists, as they see it, for its own sake; the latter is happier to allow literature greater latitude to venture rightwards on our Meaning Line towards Significance.
Meaning.......................Significance
Society The Artist
Judgement Elucidation
Outside Inside
Straightforwardness Complexity
Two sets of thoughts, two conceptions of meaning, two critical imperatives. Here’s how they split apart.
Until the 1920’s, lit crit was almost entirely impressionistic and judgmental. It maybe didn’t know it was - it just was. There was no shortage of theory, just theory specific to literature that didn’t involve the wholesale importation of standards from other disciplines, as we’ll see in a moment. True, some critics stuck up for the idea that literature had an internal harmony which was not wholly dependent on extra-literary concerns, but they were in a distinct minority (Coleridge was one of the more notable examples).
But then along came Modernism, which, with its emphasis of technical innovation and wilfully pluralistic meanings, left traditional types of criticism looking curiously old-fashioned almost overnight. Faced with this increased technical sophistication, Lit Crit simply couldn’t cope, and certain critics reckoned a whole new way of looking at poetry was needed.
These were the so-called “New Critics”, a movement born in the Southern states of America, most of whose members were poets themselves. They believed:
1) A literary text is not a cultural artifact but a unified, self-contained, & self-defining piece of art. A reader needs no specialized nor special knowledge beyond the text itself to understand its meaning.
2) The meaning of a literary text is entirely contained within its structure. Meaning therefore has an “organic unity”.
3) Meaning doesn’t have to be simple.
So New Criticism had three major impacts on critical thought respectively:
Þ It was now OK for Judgement to take a back seat to Elucidation: if literature was to be governed by its own rules, it would help if we knew what they were. So in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of literature critics would of necessity have to judge less and appreciate more;
Þ If a text has an organic unity, it’s infinitely interconnected, at least potentially. All sorts of things are linking into other things whether on the surface or deep beneath the surface. So it was more commonly accepted that every component of a literary text is there for a reason, even if it doesn’t announce its purpose;
Þ Complex meaning is good; it’s not a sign of confusion, but of a rich appreciation of reality.
These impacts themselves generated their own legacy:
Þ Criticism aspired to the status of a science, since it needed to concern itself with how meaning worked as well as what it meant. This necessitated that the impressionistic Gentlemen Critics should be replaced by Professional Critics who would back up their opinions with theory rather than prejudice;
Þ Critics became more paranoid because they felt they ought to see things in the text;
Þ It was generally understood that literature that isn’t complex can’t be any good.
And these points of view laid the keel for much of the anal rubbish that has passed for Lit Crit in the last forty or so years. I’m not exclusively blaming the New Critics, but they must shoulder a fair proportion of the blame.
To be charitable to them, it was a perfectly respectable route to go down if you wanted, as they did, to rescue literature from the attentions of those who could only offer their unsubstantiated opinions as to what books meant. Meaning surely deserved better than naked prejudice from a bunch of old windbags, or how could it be held to be important? Opinion that has no basis in science or fact or best practice can only rely for its status on the literary cache of the critic, which waxes and wanes with fashion. So as long as Doctor Johnson is held to be a great critic, all well and good for the literature he promotes. But should he fall from favour, he’ll more than likely take that literature down with him. And that’s surely unfair. A more impersonal approach would preserve literature from the capriciousness of literary taste. It would deal in standards and principles rather than such empirically dodgy things as opinions and prejudices.
And that approach would need to be more academically rigorous if it was to withstand detailed examination. If the critic was going to be dealing in standards and principles, he needed to put his serious thinking head on, not simply be vaguely negative or appreciative. So it would no longer be sufficient to talk in terms of “Fancy”, “Beauty”, “Nature”or “Imagination” as Pope, Dryden and Johnson did in the 18th century, because they’d accumulated so much baggage as to be meaningless.
Not only did a new approach have to be developed, but a new language forged. Hence all the various “syndromes” and adjectives dreamed up by the NC’s; “The Intentional Fallacy”, “The Affective Fallacy”, “The Historical Fallacy”, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, “Autotelic” are just some high concepts forged in the white heat of the New Criticism.
But an unfortunate by-product of this approach was that it became more difficult for critics to unreservedly “love” literature, because it let rather more daylight in on the magic than was commensurate with actually enjoying reading. And that can be passed down the food chain to us Recreational Readers, potentially blighting our enjoyment. Let me explain, in case there’s a danger of it happening to you.
Back in Part 2, I quoted the novelist Zadie Smith, who, from an early age was bitten by the literary bug to the point where she didn’t just read books, but subsequently progressed to writing and lecturing on them. And her analysis of what happened to that first infatuation with books as she grew more deeply enmeshed in “the industry of literature” makes for depressing reading. For Zadie reckons, to put it bluntly, that the act of applying literary criticism to literature sucks out all the energy that lies at the heart of meaning, which, of course, isn’t meant to happen. Quite the reverse in fact. It’s like taking the family pet and dissecting it in the name of scientific research; you’ve learned something about dogs, but you’ve killed the thing you loved.
And this happens, according to our Zadie, because love simply isn’t enough for the critical community. It’s almost a guilty pleasure, something to be ashamed of because it’s so nebulous and even sentimental. As she writes, “ . . . there is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy,” and the upshot is that they feel the need to continually justify that love using whatever means they can. It’s the legacy of the literary Puritanism we examined back in Part 3.
And this “shame” manifests itself in a desire to ‘validate’ literature: Smith uses the example of the critic FR Leavis, who wanted to anchor literature within the continuum of social history, moral philosophy, public policy - any discipline that could protect it from accusations of vagueness or irrelevance.
So in our list of critical approaches, we’re looking at 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 - those disciplines which are influenced by schools of thought which have a life independent of literature. What the appropriation and subsequent importation of these disciplines implies is that literature (and its attendant criticism) needs to feel it’s as good a way as any of understanding how us human beings tick. In short, Leavis could stand next to the Professor of, say, History in the SCR at Downing College Cambridge and chat to him on equal terms, with no fear of English Literature (which, as we’ve seen is a comparatively young university subject) being viewed as a second cousin to the more established ‘Greats’. And of course, we can trace this unease with the empirical value of meaning back to Big Theme #1, whether literary meaning is “real” or not. So literature’s onboard, hard-wired inferiority complex sees it climbing into bed with other subjects so it can feel better about itself. It’s meaning by association, fraternizing with disciplines that have been at it longer and therefore appear to be somehow more “solid”.
Then the New Critics came along, who sought to justify their love by revealing how wonderfully allusive and complex meaning was, demanding even more stringent standards that would involve major surgery on the text, for all their talk of its “organic” provenance. Suddenly, the sheer amount of meaning that could be extracted from a text grew almost exponentially - hence the boom in English Literature studies at tertiary level following World War Two. Critics were swarming all over literature, rediscovering, re-evaluating, leaving no stone unturned, weighing every nugget of text for its pound or ounce of meaning. And they yoked these techniques to their career trajectory: the more gold they panned, the more articles they wrote, the more they were published, the greater chance they had of being elected to the Professorship. So, down in the mine, academic critics travel deeper and deeper into the motherlode to scrape out ever smaller pieces of precious meaning. Much of it is fool’s gold, yet the desperate miner doesn’t see that in his quest to find The Big One that will guarantee his fame and fortune.
So the former group looks for engagement, and grows impatient with any meaning that exists, as they see it, for its own sake; the latter is happier to allow literature greater latitude to venture rightwards on our Meaning Line towards Significance.
Meaning.......................Significance
Society The Artist
Judgement Elucidation
Outside Inside
Straightforwardness Complexity
Two sets of thoughts, two conceptions of meaning, two critical imperatives. Here’s how they split apart.
Until the 1920’s, lit crit was almost entirely impressionistic and judgmental. It maybe didn’t know it was - it just was. There was no shortage of theory, just theory specific to literature that didn’t involve the wholesale importation of standards from other disciplines, as we’ll see in a moment. True, some critics stuck up for the idea that literature had an internal harmony which was not wholly dependent on extra-literary concerns, but they were in a distinct minority (Coleridge was one of the more notable examples).
But then along came Modernism, which, with its emphasis of technical innovation and wilfully pluralistic meanings, left traditional types of criticism looking curiously old-fashioned almost overnight. Faced with this increased technical sophistication, Lit Crit simply couldn’t cope, and certain critics reckoned a whole new way of looking at poetry was needed.
These were the so-called “New Critics”, a movement born in the Southern states of America, most of whose members were poets themselves. They believed:
1) A literary text is not a cultural artifact but a unified, self-contained, & self-defining piece of art. A reader needs no specialized nor special knowledge beyond the text itself to understand its meaning.
2) The meaning of a literary text is entirely contained within its structure. Meaning therefore has an “organic unity”.
3) Meaning doesn’t have to be simple.
So New Criticism had three major impacts on critical thought respectively:
Þ It was now OK for Judgement to take a back seat to Elucidation: if literature was to be governed by its own rules, it would help if we knew what they were. So in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of literature critics would of necessity have to judge less and appreciate more;
Þ If a text has an organic unity, it’s infinitely interconnected, at least potentially. All sorts of things are linking into other things whether on the surface or deep beneath the surface. So it was more commonly accepted that every component of a literary text is there for a reason, even if it doesn’t announce its purpose;
Þ Complex meaning is good; it’s not a sign of confusion, but of a rich appreciation of reality.
These impacts themselves generated their own legacy:
Þ Criticism aspired to the status of a science, since it needed to concern itself with how meaning worked as well as what it meant. This necessitated that the impressionistic Gentlemen Critics should be replaced by Professional Critics who would back up their opinions with theory rather than prejudice;
Þ Critics became more paranoid because they felt they ought to see things in the text;
Þ It was generally understood that literature that isn’t complex can’t be any good.
And these points of view laid the keel for much of the anal rubbish that has passed for Lit Crit in the last forty or so years. I’m not exclusively blaming the New Critics, but they must shoulder a fair proportion of the blame.
To be charitable to them, it was a perfectly respectable route to go down if you wanted, as they did, to rescue literature from the attentions of those who could only offer their unsubstantiated opinions as to what books meant. Meaning surely deserved better than naked prejudice from a bunch of old windbags, or how could it be held to be important? Opinion that has no basis in science or fact or best practice can only rely for its status on the literary cache of the critic, which waxes and wanes with fashion. So as long as Doctor Johnson is held to be a great critic, all well and good for the literature he promotes. But should he fall from favour, he’ll more than likely take that literature down with him. And that’s surely unfair. A more impersonal approach would preserve literature from the capriciousness of literary taste. It would deal in standards and principles rather than such empirically dodgy things as opinions and prejudices.
And that approach would need to be more academically rigorous if it was to withstand detailed examination. If the critic was going to be dealing in standards and principles, he needed to put his serious thinking head on, not simply be vaguely negative or appreciative. So it would no longer be sufficient to talk in terms of “Fancy”, “Beauty”, “Nature”or “Imagination” as Pope, Dryden and Johnson did in the 18th century, because they’d accumulated so much baggage as to be meaningless.
Not only did a new approach have to be developed, but a new language forged. Hence all the various “syndromes” and adjectives dreamed up by the NC’s; “The Intentional Fallacy”, “The Affective Fallacy”, “The Historical Fallacy”, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, “Autotelic” are just some high concepts forged in the white heat of the New Criticism.
But an unfortunate by-product of this approach was that it became more difficult for critics to unreservedly “love” literature, because it let rather more daylight in on the magic than was commensurate with actually enjoying reading. And that can be passed down the food chain to us Recreational Readers, potentially blighting our enjoyment. Let me explain, in case there’s a danger of it happening to you.
Back in Part 2, I quoted the novelist Zadie Smith, who, from an early age was bitten by the literary bug to the point where she didn’t just read books, but subsequently progressed to writing and lecturing on them. And her analysis of what happened to that first infatuation with books as she grew more deeply enmeshed in “the industry of literature” makes for depressing reading. For Zadie reckons, to put it bluntly, that the act of applying literary criticism to literature sucks out all the energy that lies at the heart of meaning, which, of course, isn’t meant to happen. Quite the reverse in fact. It’s like taking the family pet and dissecting it in the name of scientific research; you’ve learned something about dogs, but you’ve killed the thing you loved.
And this happens, according to our Zadie, because love simply isn’t enough for the critical community. It’s almost a guilty pleasure, something to be ashamed of because it’s so nebulous and even sentimental. As she writes, “ . . . there is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy,” and the upshot is that they feel the need to continually justify that love using whatever means they can. It’s the legacy of the literary Puritanism we examined back in Part 3.
And this “shame” manifests itself in a desire to ‘validate’ literature: Smith uses the example of the critic FR Leavis, who wanted to anchor literature within the continuum of social history, moral philosophy, public policy - any discipline that could protect it from accusations of vagueness or irrelevance.
So in our list of critical approaches, we’re looking at 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 - those disciplines which are influenced by schools of thought which have a life independent of literature. What the appropriation and subsequent importation of these disciplines implies is that literature (and its attendant criticism) needs to feel it’s as good a way as any of understanding how us human beings tick. In short, Leavis could stand next to the Professor of, say, History in the SCR at Downing College Cambridge and chat to him on equal terms, with no fear of English Literature (which, as we’ve seen is a comparatively young university subject) being viewed as a second cousin to the more established ‘Greats’. And of course, we can trace this unease with the empirical value of meaning back to Big Theme #1, whether literary meaning is “real” or not. So literature’s onboard, hard-wired inferiority complex sees it climbing into bed with other subjects so it can feel better about itself. It’s meaning by association, fraternizing with disciplines that have been at it longer and therefore appear to be somehow more “solid”.
Then the New Critics came along, who sought to justify their love by revealing how wonderfully allusive and complex meaning was, demanding even more stringent standards that would involve major surgery on the text, for all their talk of its “organic” provenance. Suddenly, the sheer amount of meaning that could be extracted from a text grew almost exponentially - hence the boom in English Literature studies at tertiary level following World War Two. Critics were swarming all over literature, rediscovering, re-evaluating, leaving no stone unturned, weighing every nugget of text for its pound or ounce of meaning. And they yoked these techniques to their career trajectory: the more gold they panned, the more articles they wrote, the more they were published, the greater chance they had of being elected to the Professorship. So, down in the mine, academic critics travel deeper and deeper into the motherlode to scrape out ever smaller pieces of precious meaning. Much of it is fool’s gold, yet the desperate miner doesn’t see that in his quest to find The Big One that will guarantee his fame and fortune.
The upshot of this ambition is that the unconditional love of the dedicated Recreational Reader is replaced by the conditional love of the professional reader. And this, I would argue, is why most Recreational Readers have little to do with Lit Crit. Neither group is talking the same language. One group is reacting to literature for what it is; the other for what it represents. And that’s a big gulf. Obvious, I suppose. But if it’s that obvious, I don’t know why there isn’t more Lit Crit that doesn’t tune in to the way the Recreational Reader approaches the text.
