DEFINITION

Literature

according to Aristotle, is an art of mimesis, that is, imitation or representation, whose function
is to bring to the surface and cure the human passions.

refers to any kind of composition in prose or verse which has for its purpose not the
communication of act but the telling of a story or the giving of
pleasure through some use of the inventive imagination in the employment of words

distinction between criticism and literary theory

theory focuses on abstract methodological principles. It involves distance, perspective,
framing, representation, interpretation; it evinces awareness of looking, of its situatedness vis-vis its object. Its rules are, on the one hand, extracted from the discussion of the nature of texts as
either language or cultural products, and, on the other, applied in further analyses of texts.
Criticism applies the principles derived by theory, but focuses on its object rather than on its
own method; it usually proceeds deductively.
=> theory is generally metacritical (i.e., about criticism), reflexive and selfreferential (i.e., it
focuses on itself), while criticism is more obviously referential, transparent and critical of its object
rather than of itself, without however lacking self-consciousness.
Theory is e removed from the artistic product, and much more independent to devise its own
laws and principles by relying on extra-literary disciplines such as psychology, history, sociology,
and especially linguistics. Criticism is what Davis terms practical interpretation,the encounter
between literature and theory.

WHAT WRITERS DO
1. We look for some overall structural pattern that is, something that provides a structural
frame for the whole work.
2. We look for similarity beneath apparent dissimilarity, or vice-versa
3. We distinguish between OVERT and COVERT content that is, between apparent
content and real content.
4. We distinguish between meaning and significance meaning is like something inside
the work, whereas significance is about something we perceive in the work which is
changeable.
5. We think in terms of genre or literary type that is, we ask how the literary genre affects the
content of the work.
6. We frequently read the literal as metaphorical that is, especially in reading poems.
7. In spite of this, we read the surface of the work accurately in other words, we recognise
the importance of the precise literal words of the text and do not take liberties with them.
8. We look for patterns in literary works though we realise that often the most significant
part is where the pattern is broken.
9. We identify stages and phases within a literary work which line in a poem is the end of
the beginning, the moment where exposition slides into development?

10. Finally, as readers, we read in linguistic period, aware (among other things) of semantic
changes that is, changes in the meanings of words.
One way of approaching the two-and-a-half-millennia-long history of criticism is by drawing up
charts and classifications.
M.H. Abrams distinguished between 4 different types of theories:
- the mimetic theories: focused on the relationship between the outside world and the work of
art.; that poetry could best be understood as an imitation, a representation, a copy of the physical
world.
- the rhetorical, emphasized the relationship between the work of art and its audience
either how the literary work should be formed to please and instruct its audience, or what that
audience
should be like in order to appreciate literature correctly. These theories held that to attain its proper
effect,
the poem must be shaped by both the poets innate talent and the rules of art.
- expressive by Abrams, stressed the relationship between the work of art and the
artist, particularly the special faculties of mind and soul that the artist brings to the act of creation.
- formal theories stressed the purely aesthetic relationship between the parts of a work of
literature, analyzing its themes or motifs as if a literary text were a form of classical music or an
abstract painting, and strove for a quasiscientific objectivity.

The Platonic Dilemma

Platos objection to poetry is threefold:
1. Epistemological- being an imitation of the material world, poetry is twice removed from the world
of Ideal Forms, and therefore it isnt true.
2. Utilitarian/ practical: not only are painting and poetry imitations of imitations, but they are
devised by people who know neither how to use nor how to build the objects they represent.Art is
thus conceived in ignorance of truth
3. Moral: not only does the poet imitate life, but he usually chooses to imitate that which
appeals to
the basest faculties: he deals not with reality as it is, but chooses the extremes of human
behaviour.
The art nourishes and encourages the inferior passions of the soul.

The dilemma posed by Plato is double-sided: on the one hand, it is a matter of the
relationship of poetry to truth. On the other, it is the dilemma of the practical moralist and the
pragmatic man of business to whom any activity is suspect which cannot be directly related to the
production of an obvious good for society. Plato closes his indictment of poetry by launching a
challenge to whoever could prove him wrong to show that
poetry could redeem itself and make itself acceptable in the ideal city. That challenge was taken
up by
his apprentice, Aristotle, and the dilemma was provisionally resolved.
The Aristotelian Solution

- Aristotles account of the nature of literature pivots on his new understanding of mimesis
- The writers capacity to devise a self-sufficient world is the creators highest power; it is known as
mythopoeia
- Aristotle criticism becomes anindependent discipline which judges poetry not by the standards of
history or philosophy, but on its own terms
- high art (i.e., the epic and tragedy) has the capacity to produce fear and pity in the audience,
and thus to purge the audience of crippling passions-> katharsis, associated with the presentation
of characters who are unexceptional (and therefore easy for the audience to identify with) and
come to harm not by any act of wickedness.
- Aristotle assigns all arts of imitation to the realm of the beautiful rather than truth, and defines
aesthetic value not strictly in terms of informative accuracy and moral teaching, but also of
intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction, and of its producing a better state of mind (through
katharsis)
OTHER VIEWS
Cassius Longinus -On the Sublime like Aristotles Poetics, opens up a new line of criticism: it
proposes an affective theory of literature centred on the idea that high art moves the audience.
According to Longinus, the pleasurable sensation produced by poetry stems from the passionate
feeling, nobility, and grandeur of thought, but also from the mastery of the many devices of style
and method, acute sensitivity to the qualities of words and potentialities of imagery, and the
proclivity for rhythm and cadence, sonority and roundness, aural architecture and fluency, evinced
by the work
Horace - Ars Poetica , plea for decorum, propriety, and artistry.
- an epistle, Its effectiveness lies partly in its illustrative clarity and partly in its scattered
apothegms.
Plotinus established that art is not an imitation of an imitation, but of the world of Ideas itself. The
artist has in his mind a conception of the Beauty and Unity that are the attributes of the eternal
One of Being, and in creating the work of art he projects that conception onto his medium (stone,
language etc.), aiming to produce
pleasure, not truth.
St Augustine - every moment spent in enjoyment of artefacts is a moment taken away from the
true pursuit of the love for God.
Thomas Aquinas - beauty is as fundamental an attribute of Gods creation as good is, but while
the latter is the object of desire , the beautiful is the object of non-possessive knowledge.

THE HUMAN HERITAGE

English criticism can be said to begin with the Venerable Bede. His books focus on distinguishing
and classifying literary genres, stylistic devices and prosodic elements that were already in use.
His main contribution was to revive the interest in Latin poetry and apply critical theory to the
books of the Bible.
Most of the subsequent English scholars well into the Renaissance insisted on the usefulness of
learning and understanding the Bible and on preserving the connection between England and the
ancient Latin culture. They all share a common concern for the enrichment and preservation of the

English language and the broadening of peoples minds through the reading of the works of the
past.
Renaisaance, classicism
The Critics of the Renaissance can roughly be divided into Educationists , Puritans and
Courtiers . The sixteenth was the first century of the printed book, and the Elizabethan Age was a
comparatively prolific one in writing and publishing, most of which was religious or educative in
purport, written either in Latin or in English. Many of these books were the production of
prestigious professors teaching at Oxford, Cambridge and the so-called Inns of Court in London.
Many Renaissance scholars were suspicious of literary productions written in the unstable
vernaculars. The religious Reformation pleaded for a wider accessibility of the written word that
contaminated the profane as well as the sacred text.
There is an increasing number of metatexts (i.e., texts about literature) dealing with the
principles of poetic composition. Hence, there were comparatively few readers and publishers of
books by our standards, and no professional men or women of letters. Elizabethan writers of rank,
thought of themselves as courtiers, statesmen, and landowners; they considered poetry a social
grace and a courtly pastime. Consequently, the primary aim of the careful study of the classics
was the appropriation of their resounding rhetoric and graceful language. Paradoxically,
nevertheless, Renaissance writers were not slavish imitators of the ancients. Rather, they looked
to classical and Continental works as models to learn from, emulate, transform, and if possible
surpass.

The Restoration , neoclasicism

Religious strife and civil tension, as well as the domination of the Puritan ethos, were not
conducive to much pertinent literary debate. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660),
literary productiveness returned, but the French fashion was leading the way, in criticism as much
as in the arts and entertainments of the reinstated court and aristocracy. The moral and theological
struggle between the Puritans and the Anglicans continued in the realm of literature and in
commentary upon it.
The age was rich in controversy, much of which was sparked by the relationship of poetry
either
to Christianity or to ancient antecedents, and was initiated on French soil. It seldom happened that
the
discussion was disentangled from the intellectual, moral and spiritual function of literature, and few
were as deeply aware of the fundamental autonomy of the aesthetic .
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth century began under the sign of Reason and ended under that of Sentiment. he
early decades of he eighteenth century represent a period of calm and prosperity after the dissensions
and turmoils of the previous century. It was an age when industry and commerce were expanding, when
agriculture, sheep-farming and woollen manufacture prospered. Puritanism was taking on a different
guise.
In the literary field the development of periodical journalism gave a new outlet for writers and soon
provided a platform for literary criticism. At thesame time, clubs and coffee-houses increasingly

provided centres of talk and sociability for those interested in politics or literature.

THE 19TH CENTURY

The Romantics
The Romantic age was an age of revolution, social and technological, philosophical and
literary. The harnessing of steam-power, the consequent development of mass-production, and the
movement of the population from rural areas to the growing urban areas of industry and
commerce, marked one of the crucial turning points in modern history. The Industrial Revolution
transformed the face of the countryside and thrust workers together in the new urban
environments, packed and smoky.
The French Revolution heartened and appalled the watching world. It fed two contrary
impulses, the demand for political and social reform, and the determination to avoid a bloodbath.
The rise of Napoleon and the war with France cast a shadow over many idealistic libertarian
movements in England. Yet the intellectual ferment of which the revolution was born infected
thinking men and women with disturbing uncertainties, not only about the inherited social fabric of
society, but also about the inherited fabrics of belief and morality.
Literary criticism cannot be expected to deal with all these issues explicitly, but they left an
indelible imprint on literary thinking. One of the major changes that resulted was a new
connotation for the concept of truth to nature: Nature is no longer primarily the principle of
simplicity It is the force which binds man to mother earth, which surrounds him with hills and
covers him with the sky. And what offends against it is the mill chimney and the steam engine,
factory labour and the city slum (218).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century literary criticism is dominated by the Romantic
poets => the subtle correspondences between the human spirit and nature.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Wordsworth is, above all, the poet of remembrance of things past, or as he himself
put it in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd ed., 1800), of emotion recollected in tranquillity.
Some object or
event in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in
youth; the result is a
poem exhibiting the sharp discrepancy between what Wordsworth called two
consciousnesses:
himself as he is now and himself as he once was. The past that he recollected was
one of moments of
luminous intensity, and of emotional turmoil which is ordered, in the calmer present,
into a hard-won
equilibrium. The result is a poetry of excitation in calm; genius, as Wordsworth says
in his masterpiece,
The Prelude (begun in 1798; published posthumously in 1850), is born to thrive by
interchange / Of
peace and excitation. As time went on, however, the precarious equilibrium of his
great creative period
became a habit, and Wordsworth finally gained what, in the Ode to Duty (written

1804), he longed for, a

32

Part One

repose which ever is the same but also a mannerism.

Yet his critical considerations are consistently democratic and open-minded.
Wordsworth
implicitly denies the traditional assumption that the poetic genres constitute a
hierarchy, from epic and
tragedy at the top down through comedy, satire, pastoral, to the short lyric at the
lower reaches of the
poetic scale; he also rejects the classical principle of decorum. He defines poetry as
the breath and finer
spirit of all knowledge. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge it is as
immortal as the heart of
man. The poet is a man speaking to men, imparting the richness of his heart and
giving immediate
pleasure to a human Being who also responds with his heart.
When Wordsworth asserted in the Preface that he deliberately chose to represent
incidents and
situations from common life, he translated his democratic sympathies into critical
terms, justifying his
use of peasants, outcasts, criminals, and idiot boys as serious subjects of poetic and
even tragic concern.
He also undertook to write in a selection of language really used by men, on the
grounds that
there can be no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical
composition i.e.,
no logical justification for decorum. The only criteria for the selection, according to
Wordsworth, are true
taste and feeling. The equivalence he found between the proper language of poems
and prose language
is not one of vocabulary or of syntax, but a sameness in emotional genesis. Instead of
consisting in
contrived and artful constructions, both forms of language originate spontaneously,
as the words and
figures that are the most faithful expression of feeling.
Wordsworths assertions about the materials and diction of poetry have been greatly
influential in

expanding the range of serious literature to include common people and ordinary
things and events, as
well as in justifying a poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice, expressed in the
ordinary language of its
time. Wordsworth also attributed to imaginative literature the primary role in
keeping human beings
emotionally alive and morally sensitive that is, keeping them essentially human in
the modern era.
The time of technological and increasingly urban society, with its mass media and
mass culture,
threatens, as he foresaw, to blunt the minds discriminatory powers and to reduce
it to a state of
almost savage torpor.
No other book of poems in English announces a new literary departure more plainly
than
Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads and its Preface. Yet, however radical their particular
application by
Wordsworth, the values that permeate his Preface are the central humanistic values
of the 18th-century
Enlightenment that is, the use, as a standard, of elements that he represents as
essential, simple,
universal, and permanent in human nature.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth changes the Christian spiritual history in a radical way,
by converting
any supernatural agency of creation into secular and humanistic terms. The true
protagonist of
Wordsworths poem turns out to be a power in his own mind, which is capable of
transforming the
natural world with which it interacts; he calls this power Imagination. This
faculty, he reveals in
the last book, hath been the feeding source / Of our long labour, and he goes on to
say that the
account of its appearance, development, loss, and restoration has constituted the
submerged plot of the
poem in its entirety. The Prelude has justly been called the greatest religious poem of
the 19th century,

upholding a faith in the redeeming power of the mind of man which, the closing
lines declare,
compared with the unchanging earth, In beauty exalted, as it is itself / Of quality
and fabric more
divine.

Percy Bisshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Daiches introduces Shelley as follows:
Shelleys Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 and published in 1840, was originally conceived
as the defense of
the value of poetry against the arguments brought forward by Thomas Love Peacock in The
Four Ages of
Poetry [1820] that poetry had outlived its usefulness and in an age of knowledge, reason, and
enlightenment
appealed only to obscurantism and superstition. But as the work developed the polemic
element
disappeared and the essay emerged as a large theoretical statement of the nature and value
of poetry
modeled in general style on Sidneys Defence though lacking the simple didacticism so
important to Sidneys
Part One 35

position. Shelleys argument is conducted in terms of passionate abstractions, and in this

respect is
reminiscent of some of the great renaissance critical documents. It is in a sense an
anachronism, for, though
Shelley follows Coleridge in his stress on the function of the imagination, he is not
developing Coleridges
position but re-interpreting it in the light of his own Platonic idealism. Shelleys interest as a
critic, indeed,
lies largely in his use of Platonic ideas to escape from the Platonic dilemma, and he does this
by recognizing
that the poet, through his use of the imagination, comes directly into contact with the world
of Platonic
ideas, and so with true reality, instead of simply imitating the reflections of those ideas, as
Plato himself
claimed. (111-2)

As for Coleridge, for Shelley any exercise of the imagination which brought one into
contact with the

Platonic idea underlying the ordinary phenomena of experience was, in the larger
sense, poetry (112).
He enthusiastically proclaims poetry to be of divine origin in the Platonic sense, and
to encompass the
best of human thought in all domains, legislation and politics included. Consequently,
the poem, here
too, is merely a species of poetry, but a privileged one, since its medium is language.
Language is the most effective servant of the imagination because the imagination itself
produces it for its
own needs, while the media of the other arts exist in the external world independently of the
artist and their
position in the external world limits their effectiveness as means of expressing an
imaginative vision.
Harmony of utterance, achieved by the proper choice of words and the relation of sound to
senseis part
of the way in which the imagination achieves a correspondence with the ideal order. Sound
and sense
come together as an organic whole (Daiches 115-6),

even though the great harmonising powers of the imagination may at times manifest
themselves in
individual words and phrases only.
It is by stimulating and strengthening imagination that the poet achieves moral good.
Poetry does
not teach morals directly, by providing examples of good behaviour; neither does it
purge the emotions
through pity and fear, as Aristotle would have it: such preoccupations defeat their
very purpose. But in
strengthening imagination, and thus the positive affections, poetry is both an
instrument of moral good
and of self-knowledge. Shelley does not carry these ideas to their logical conclusions
in aesthetic terms,
but proceeds to emphasise the relationship between poetry and society, and
especially the role of the
poet in imposing a vision of the ideal order as apprehended by imagination. He
speaks in grandiose
terms of poetry as the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and
best minds,

while poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. As Daiches explains,
this is a high
Platonic idealism turned against Platos attack on poetry to defend the very activity
which Plato valued
most (i.e., philosophical contemplation of the ideal order) (128). Shelleys value as a
literary
theoretician resides in his enthusiastic attempt to convey a sense of the significance
of poetry, an
attempt that joins the humanist spirit of the Renaissance with the sanguinary
idealism of the Romantic
age.
The poems of Shelleys maturity also show the influence of his study of Plato and the
Neoplatonists. Yet many of his poems reflect his sense of the limits of certain
knowledge and his
refusal to let his intuitions and hopes harden into a philosophical or religious creed.
To the sceptical
idealism of the mature Shelley, the hope in the ultimate redemption of life by love
and imagination is
not a certainty but a moral obligation. We must, he asserts, cling to hope because its
contrary, despair
about human potential, is self-fulfilling, by ensuring the permanence of the condition
before which the
mind has surrendered its aspirations. Hope does not guarantee achievement, but it
keeps open the
possibility of achievement and so releases the imagination and creative powers that
are the instruments
of moral good
The Other Romantics
Other major romantic poets expressed their views, though less systematically, on the
nature of
literature and the achievements of English poets. John Keats (1795-1821), for
instance, never
completed a critical work, but some of his pronouncements delivered in private
letters reflect quite
memorably the way in which he absorbed the intellectual atmosphere of his age and
gave it a personal

twist. His most brilliant statements have the ring of mysticism about them. In a letter
to Benjamin
Bailey (22 November 1817), Keats wrote: I am certain of nothing but the holiness of
the hearts
affections and the truth of Imagination. He asserts that the product of sensual
intuition is superior to
that of rational intellect, and that what the imagination records as Beauty is not
illusion but truth an
authentic reality whether it existed before or not in the material sense. In a letter
to his brothers
George and Thomas Keats (21 December 1817) we find Keatss classic definition of
negative capability: when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason. This capability is evinced by Shakespeare at his
best, as for example in
King Lear, whose intensity stems from the depth of speculation excited in its
audience. Shakespeares
work offers a direct and emotional vision of the pain and evil of life without
attempting to comprehend
and explain it; its raw presentation demands the intellectual and emotional
participation of the viewer.
Blamires comments: There is a curious air of modernity about [Keatss] willingness
to theorise directly
from self, as poet and man of feeling, in a kind of philosophical vacuum (237).
William Blake (1787-1827), too, produced critical aphorisms, most of them directed
against what
he perceived as the hypocrisy of contemporary artists who attempted to define
poetry in terms of
imitation of nature. According to Blake, the poets imagination reaches outside the
world apprehended
by the senses into the spiritual sphere. Consequently, Wordsworth is adamantly
combated as the
Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually, and then he is No Poet
but a Heathen
philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration. In the words of Harry
Blamires, Blakes

emphasis on imagination and inspiration, and Wordsworths emphasis on the primacy

of feeling (the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling) acquired in the one case a mystical
dimension and in the
other case a moral dimension which introduced an element of self-discipline (236).
This self-discipline
was to a certain extent similar to that imposed by Shelleys anti-Platonic Platonism
and Coleridges
Christianity, but it was something that Keats wished to have no share in. Blakes
independence of mind
accounts for the influence he had on the aesthetic thinking of the late 19th century.
We have seen that Shelleys Defence of Poetry was written in a sacred rage
provoked by an essay by
the poet Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). In his Four Ages of Poetry (1820),
Peacock poses the
legitimate question of whether, in a modern scientific age when philosophers and
scientists can
investigate reality systematically and rigorously and people have outgrown the myths
of poetry, the poet
has not become an anachronism, a semi-barbarian in a civilised community.
Implicitly this raised the
issue of the function and truth of poetry, of the way in which it could be integrated in
the mindset of
modern society. His question was to be taken up with increased urgency throughout
the 19th and 20th
centuries.
The essay was a favourite literary form with the outstanding thinkers of the
nineteenth century. It
offered the possibility of tackling a great variety of topics: literary, political,
historical, economic, moral;
it allowed at the same time for a great freedom of expression. Many Romantic
journalists found it a
genuine medium for expressing opinions on literature. William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
wrote a variety of
unsystematic, impressionistic essays and lectures on particular writers and even
philosophers. His

descriptive approach is stimulating and infectious, and his style is characterised by

vitality, enthusiasm,
ardour, and gusto, although his opinions are not always correct or pertinent. Thomas
De Quincey
(1785-1859) was an equally readable journalist and essayist who tended to
encapsulate psychological
aspects of the writers he judged, and chose to do so with resort to a rich collection of
personal
Part One 37

anecdotes. He shared in the romantic reappraisal of the relationship between reason

and imagination,
and devised a principle of literary power which he called antagonism the result of
the collision of
the imagery of cities, crowds, and artistry, with that of rest, solitude and primal
innocence. A rather
inapt critic but enthusiastic journalist was Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), whose main
contribution was to
champion and acclaim the great poets among his contemporaries (chiefly Shelley,
Byron and Keats),
often in the face of ridicule and hostility. His Scottish counterpart, Francis Jeffrey
(1773-1850), was a
discerning and judicious reviewer, with a broad appreciative range. An equally
distinguished contributor
to the literary journals of the day, and especially to the Tory Scottish Quarterly
Review, was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). His Lives of the Novelists represents a
worthy successor of Dr Johnsons Lives of the
Poets in showing a comparable weight of good sense and literary sympathy brought
to bear on a variety
of writers, among whom most prominently figure Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
Sterne, and Jane
Austen. He follows Dr. Johnson in distinguishing between the novel, which deals with
the modern
state of society, and romance, which depicts marvellous and uncommon incidents,
yet he points out
that not all prose fiction fits neatly into these categories but there are also
combinations of the two

II. The Victorians

The Victorian Age, Blamires tells us, was a period of immense consolidation in terms
of peace
and prosperity, in terms of wealth and power, and in terms of artistic productivity
(259).
Consequently, the Victorian essay is a conversational, relaxed or persuasive,
rhetorical modality of
trying out in discursive prose an idea or of putting over moral reflections. It is a
spiritual adventure, an
excursion into various fields of human culture and thought.
The predominance of reason as against romanticism and emotion appeared as a
result of the
marked material and scientific progress of the Victorian age. The new theories in the
field of natural
sciences and psychology opened a new era for philosophic and scientific thought. It
was the age of
religious controversies and of the conflict between science and religion on account of
Darwinism and
scientific discovery. Utilitarianism as an ethical doctrine with economic, juridical and
social
implications had a considerable influence upon 19th-century thinking and was
basically formulated
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Part One 39

Ruskin took art as his guide to the deficiencies of contemporary civilisation; Matthew
Arnold took
literature, and literature itself he considered to be the type of culture. Like Ruskin,
he deplored the
ugliness and unimaginative materialism of England, its lack of sweetness and light.
At the same time
he believed that the English middle classes represented the hope of civilisation, and
he therefore set
himself to educate them. Arnold was a humanist who devoted a large part of his life
to demonstrating
the central part that an adequate literary culture could and should play in society
and to rescuing

religion from the rationalist scoffing on the one hand and the rigid fundamentalists
and dogmatics on
the other by propounding a liberal Christianity based on a view of the Bible as
poetry rather than as
history or science, as morality touched by emotion rather than as an infallible book
of rules.
Unlike Carlyle or Tennyson, Arnold had to confine writing to his spare time. He was
an inspector
of schools for thirty-five years beginning in 1851, and between 1857 and 1867 he
was a professor of
poetry at Oxford. Later, like Dickens and Thackeray before him, he toured America to
make money by
lecturing. He was a poet in addition to being a thinker, and as such, like T.S. Eliot
and W.H. Auden,
Arnold provides a record of a sick individual in a sick society. As a prose writer, a
formulator of
ideas, he seeks the role of the healer of the sick society. He soon abandoned the
writing of poetry,
however, as he was dissatisfied with the kind of poetry he was writing. The role of
poetry as he sees it is
to bring joy, to inspirit and rejoice the reader, to convey a charm, and infuse
delight, and this does
not exclude tragedy. His own poetry had not met this standard; by turning to literary
criticism his
melancholy and morbid personality was subordinated to the resolutely cheerful and
purposeful persona
that he had created for himself by an effort of will.
In his two volumes of Essays on Criticism (1865 and 1888) Arnold theorised on the
virtues he
sought in good writing: lack of adornments, the quality of high seriousness,
didacticism. In The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) it is apparent that Arnold regarded
good literary
criticism, as he regarded literature itself, as a potent force in producing his ideal of a
civilised society.
The next step in his career was the criticism of society that culminated in Culture

and Anarchy (1869)

and Friendships Garland (1871). In this field his starting point was that the
Philistines were not so much
wicked as ignorant, narrow-minded, and suffering from the dullness of their private
lives. His view of
civilisation was pared down to a four-point formula of powers: conduct; intellect
and knowledge;
beauty; social life and manners. Applying this formula to his own country, Arnold
awarded
Victorianism an A for conduct, but a failing mark in the other three categories.
The term culture is perhaps Arnolds most important legacy, although what exactly
he meant by
it has sometimes been misunderstood. For him it mainly connotes the qualities of an
open-minded
intelligence, the refusal to take things on authority, as well as a full awareness of
humanitys past and a
capacity to enjoy the best works of art, literature, history and philosophy that have
come down to us.
According to him, history is cyclical, and as a way of viewing life in all its aspects,
including the social,
political, and religious, a true intellectual atmosphere is the most effective way of
curing the ills of a sick
society and of regenerating it.
Although Arnold quotes Aristotle profusely, David Richter observes,
[his] conception of literature is far from the gist and method of the Poetics. For Aristotle the
poems only
duty is to be good in the way of its kind, and he resolutely differentiated between the genres
of poetry and
between poetry and all other forms of creativity. Aristotles sense of the discreteness of
activities and the
primacy of form over content both intellectual and spiritual would be totally foreign to
Arnolds way of
thinking. For Arnold, form as an issue in itself never comes up. (394)

The same commentator notes that even the word criticism in The Function of
Criticism at the
Present Time does not mean strictly literary criticism: It denominates literature
itself as a criticism of

life. Literature and literary criticism alike engage in a comprehensive critique of the
entire culture.
Literature is of interest to him primarily as an index to and a banner of the society
that produced it
40

Part One

(394). Despite this exalted social awareness, however,

Arnold entirely inverts Plato, for he views art as one possible salvation for an inhumane
society rather than
as a potential source of pollution in a utopia. Instead of being, as in Plato, a distorting mirror
of reality, art
for Arnold is one way of increasing the accuracy of ones spiritual vision and a corrective
for the illusions
of political propaganda. (394-5)

Arnolds determination that we recognize the best production of the human spirit
inspired The
Study of Poetry (1880) and its doctrine of touchstones. The touchstones are lines
of poetry that
supposedly exemplify the highest flights of creativity. When we hear a line of poetry,
Arnold
recommends that we compare it immediately to those lines in literature that are
most sublim

Walter Pater (1839-1894) could have been the follower of either Ruskin, with whom
he shared an
interest in art, or of Arnold, as he was also interested in literature and had heard and
enjoyed Arnolds
lectures while a student at Oxford. Yet he soon turned, almost unawares, in a
completely different
direction. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of essays published
in 1873, was the first of
several volumes that established Walter Pater as the most important critical writer of
the late Victorian
age. He was surprised and even alarmed by the impact of his writings on young
readers such as Oscar
Wilde and George Moore. Indeed, his writings (especially his historical novel Marius
the Epicurean, 1885)

have much in common with the earnest-minded mid-Victorian predecessors. Yet to

his disciples his
work seemed more subversive in its quiet way than the head-on attacks against
traditional Victorianism
made by the writers Algernon Charles Swinburne or Samuel Butler.
Yet his life as a timid Oxford tutor of classics is not in contrast with the boldness of
his epicurean
philosophy, because it is a philosophy concerned in the last analysis with the
individual sensibility,
never with the world at large. The world for Pater existed to be absorbed into the
refining and refined
Part One 41

(and isolated) sensibility. Instead of recommending a continuation of the painful

quest for Truth that
had dominated Oxford in the days of Cardinal Newman, Pater assured his readers
that the quest was
pointless. Truth, he said, is relative. And instead of echoing Carlyles call to duty and
social
responsibility, Pater reminded his readers that life passes quickly and that our only
responsibility is to
enjoy fully this short day of frost and sun, to relish its sensations, especially those
sensations
provoked by works of art.
In addition to being a key figure in the transition from mid-Victorianism to the
decadence of the
1890s, Pater is the writer of exemplary impressionistic criticism. In each of his
essays he seeks to
communicate what he called the special unique impression of pleasure made on
him by the works of
some artist or writer, and in the first essay in the volume, entitled Style, he defines
the artist as the transcriber not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it.
His range of subjects includes
the dialogues of Plato, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, the plays of Shakespeare,
and the writings of
the French Romantic school of the 19th century. In the field of English literature,
particularly relevant
are his discriminating studies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Lamb in his volume of

Appreciations (1889),
and his essay on the poetry of William Morris titled Aesthetic Poetry (1868). The final
sentences of his
Appreciations volume are a revealing indication of Paters critical position. After
having attempted to
show the differences between the classical and the romantic schools of art, he
concludes that most
great artists combine the qualities of both

The American Scene

At the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean not only was literature coming into its
own, but
writers were conducting their share of enquiring into the nature of literature, the
creative mind of the
poet, the springs of inspiration and imagination, and the comparative artistic and
social value of past
and current literary productions. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), the most coherent
proponent of
an original American philosophy, commonly known as Transcendentalism, was also
amongst the first
to tackle such issues. In The American Scholar (1837), he pleads that the truth that
the reader finds in
a text is not intrinsic, lying dormant in it; rather, the right kind of reading is the
result of the truth that
readers bring with them. This proposition was to re-emerge in the twentieth century
in ReaderResponse Criticism. Yet the scholars proper occupation according to
Emerson is not reading but
writing, which is a form of contemplation, of truth seeking. Emersons most explicit
literary tract is
entitled The Poet. It was published in his second series of Essays (1844), and like
many of his
effusions, it preaches rather than analyses its topic. The Poet quickly expands from
its ostensible
subject to include many of Emersons central ideas, which strongly resemble the

mystical views of
Plotinus.
In this context, the poet is defined as the individual who can transcend individuality,
who through the
professional manipulation of symbols and figures understands best the highest truths
about the
relationship between matter and spirit

The Early Twentieth Century;

Formalisms I. Liberal Humanism
The early twentieth century was a period of remarkable literary productivity, rich in
quantity and
quality, in experimentation and innovation. The entire conception of the nature and
function of
literature, as well as of the relationship between literature and reality, changed as a
result of the general
collapse of the old religious, philosophical, psychological and scientific certainties.
There was a
demand to judge literature through approval or disapproval of the ways of living and
social values it
represented. This produced a secularised version of the old onslaught on unfettered
imaginative vision
(Blamires 304). Consequently, many of the most distinguished writers felt called
upon to explain and
justify their methods and techniques. Among them, the novelists Henry James, E.M.
Forster, Ford
Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry, and the poets
W.B. Yeats, T.E.
Hulme, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, have left behind a truly valuable critical legacy

Remember!
Liberal Humanism moves away from traditional, 19th-century literary history and starts
isolating the literary work

from its historical, socio-economic environment. That is why some historians and critics
(among whom
Northrop Frye, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Peter Barry) include Practical and
New Criticism under
the generous aegis of Humanism. II. Practical Criticism Cambridge was the seat of

much deliberate theorising on the nature and provenance of poetry

and especially on the role of the critic in appraising it. I.A. Richards (1893-1979), the
earliest
proponent of close reading/ practical criticism, explores the relation between
literature and life by
bringing the new science of psychology to bear upon the criteria and technique for
judging literature.
He ridicules the imposition of metaphysical categories such as beauty or morality on
aesthetic criticism,
and pleads instead for adopting the reliability and rigor of experimental science. This
is achieved
through close attention to the text on the page. According to Richards, the most
important relationship
is that between text and reader, and he sets out to investigate the nature and kinds
of meaning that arise
from that encounter. In order to do so, he organises an experiment, in which readers
are given
fragments of text taken out of any context and required to comment on them. What
emerges is not
only a blatant demonstration of poor taste, but also of the lack of any systematic
approach to poetry.
He therefore distinguishes four levels or kinds of meaning: sense, feeling, tone and
intention, and
investigates the various sources of difficulty posed by criticis
The American New Criticism
The movement was started by critics educated at Cambridge (to a large extent in the
Romantic
critical tradition), who then militated for the introduction of literary criticism as a
discipline in
Part One 49

American universities. The criticism of I.A. Richards, William Empson, T.S. Eliot had

a great
contribution to shaping the New Critical movement. Its earliest promoters were
initially also involved
in social reform (as members of such groups as the Fugitives in the 1920s and then
the Agrarians in
the 1930s in the American South), though with far less success, in an unlikely
combination of formalist
and Christian interests, and conservative politics. On the other hand, these
organisations facilitated
their access to the press, and they founded prestigious scholarly journals such as the
Kenyon Review and
the Virginia Quarterly Review, which carried much of their criticism.
The analytical method proposed by this school, called again close reading, is the
American
counterpart of the British practical criticism. As opposed to the Cambridge variant,
however, New
Criticism rejects the reader-oriented formulation of Richards and Empson and resists
theorising in
favour of direct involvement with the text. Fundamentally, it focuses on the text on
the page at the
expense of any consideration of its author or of the historical or literary context in
which it was
produced. It was a crude species of Formalism, in the rather derogative sense of
disregarding matters
of content and response in favour of structure (or sometimes logic, or argument) and
texture (or
sometimes density, or particularity) (John Crowe Ransoms terms) and the way in
which they balance
and enable one another. As for the European Formalists, although form and content
are inseparable
and engaged in a dialectical relationship, form is the bearer of meaning, and is
therefore privileged over content. Their main concern is with those features of poetic
language which make it poetic, as
contradistinct from prose, and with what they called the literariness of literature.
They pursue these by laying bare the devices used by the author, or by showing how
writers defamiliarise reality in order

to achieve the effect of literariness.

New Criticism is not, however, a faithful American copy of Russian Formalism. The
main
difference between the two schools is that the former is not the decoding of stylistic
devices and
linguistic mechanisms in search of the meaning beyond, but the conviction that
literature contains an
intrinsic universal meaning. The New Critics infused the study of literature with a
concern for traditional
Christian and idealistic aesthetic values, but asserted the absolute autonomy of the
aesthetic. The role of
socio-biographical context in the coming into being of the text is discounted, and so
is mimesis, referentiality being regarded as irrelevant to literary interpretation.
Instead, the New Critics focus on
specific literary works as iconic and organically growing out of natural processes in
the phenomenal
world, whereas the Formalists construe and theorise literary works as part of literary
history, examining
the evolution of literary forms, their appurtenance to specific genres, with a view to
account for the
progress in literary representation. Unlike the New Critics, the Formalists grant the
work a certain
degree of mimetic value. Another crucial distinction between the Formalists and New
Critics is that the
latter evince no interest in the latest developments in linguistics and semiotics;
instead, their approach
to poetic language is informed by rhetoric. Consequently, their stress on the text as
text raises
concepts such as paradox, irony, ambiguity to the status of a critical holy trinity and
consecrates a
specialised terminology that includes: unity, coherence, pattern, analogy, objective
correlative, symbol, tension, overlapping, discrepancy, contradiction,
Other Formalisms

Archetypal/ Anthropological/ Myth Criticism: a thorough consideration of the

impact of
various mythologies, myths, superstitions and mentalities on literature and implicitly

on the psyche of
the writers, resulting in literary genres and recognisable plot, character, and symbol
patterns. The basic
assumption of anthropological criticism is that the growth of meaning in a literary
work is independent
of the poets conscious intention
The New York Intellectuals: a very large school, bringing together critics as diverse
as: Richard
Chase, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Leslie A. Fiedler,
Susan Sontag, to
name only a few. Their work was published in the most prestigious journals and
reviews, and their
common denominator was Marxs examination of society.
Neo-Aristotelianism/ The Chicago Critics: they reshaped the literature curriculum at
the
University of Chicago so as to accommodate a type of teaching based on close
reading, textual
explication and aesthetics. This critical school coagulated around R.S. Crane (18861967), head of the
English Department there, and shaped their theory around Aristotles Metaphysics
rather than his Poetics,
a positivistic, differential, dynamic method. The works power comes from the
inferred sense of the
whole, not from the parts; in fact, our sense of the whole as a pattern is what
governs the perceived
meaning of the parts. Language and form are important only to the extent to which
they are conducive
to a sense of a concrete whole.

The Second Half of the Century:

Structuralism and Post-Structuralisms
I. Structuralism
The special insight of the structuralist approach is that, though language may not be

everything, practically
everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language. Most obviously we
communicate with
one another in hundreds of natural languages, whose conventions predate any human
memory; and in
recent decades we have become dependent upon computers, whose functioning is based on
the creation of
artificial languages for sorting and processing data, and for solving problems. (Richter 809)

Moreover, most of our daily activities depend on a variety of other codes: music,
fashion, manners,
body language, the exchange of labour and goods for symbols (cash, cheques, stock
certificates), the
exchange of women between families (in marriage see Lvi-Strauss), etc.
Structuralism is
fundamentally an approach that aims at the systematicity of science and stresses the
discovery of inherent unity and coherence, of organising principles which make
symbols/ signs converge towards a
message. The message is not always immediately obvious but it is gradually
disclosed through a series of semiotic transformations performed by the reader.
Structuralism required a method of analysing systems of symbols, and this was
provided by two
developments. One was the theory of the nineteenth-century American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce, which is termed semiotics. Peirce divided sign systems into
three general types:
(1) iconic signs, in which the signifier resembles the thing signified (such as the stick
figures on
washroom doors that signify Men or Women);
(2) indexes, in which the signifier is a reliable indicator of the presence of the
signified (like smoke
and fire);
(3) true symbols, in which the signifiers relation to the thing signified is completely
arbitrary and
conventional (just as the sound /kat/ or the written word cat are conventional signs
for the
familiar feline).
The other development was the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913), who

established that the special symbol systems of the natural languages are systems
based on differences
As Roland Barthes (1915-80) said in The Structuralist Activity (1964), structuralism
is not a set
of beliefs, but two complementary practices: analysis and synthesis. The structuralist
analyses (i.e.,
divides) the products of human making into their smallest significant component
parts, then tries to
discover the principles of their articulation (how the parts fit together and function).
In this very
broad sense, the first structuralist was Aristotle, and the Poetics the first work of
structuralist literary
criticism. It would not be odd to consider formalist critics like R.S. Crane and
Northrop Frye as
structuralists, and conversely, many historians of literary criticism consider
structuralism to be another
kind of formalism. But today the term is usually restricted to those whose prac
Perhaps the chief human vector for the spread of structuralism was Roman Jakobson
(18961982), one of the great linguists of the twentieth century. In his paper on Linguistics
and Poetics
(translated in 1960), Jakobson presented the following model of the act of
communication: A sender,
having made contact with a receiver, sends a message about some external context
using a code. These six
factors sender, contact, receiver, message, context, and code define six functions
of
communication. Most normal communication is referential, i.e., it emphasizes the
context, the content
that is to be conveyed. The emotive function of communication emphasizes the
sender, while the conative
emphasises the receiver. The phatic function is that of establishing contact. The
metalinguistic function is
to investigate the code that sender and receiver are both using to clear up
disagreements and

ambiguities. Finally, the poetic function centres on the message qua message (see
Richter 812-3). While in
literature the poetic is the dominant, though not the sole, function, it acts as a
subsidiary, accessory
constituent in all other verbal activities. Three acts are combined in any utterance:
the phonic
enunciation, the extra-linguistic reference, and the act of stating, arguing, asking,
testifying etc. (i.e., the
locutionary, propositionary, illocutionary).
Structuralism bore the promise of a synthesis of all human knowledge (similar to the
humanism of
the Renaissance), based on the notion that by using the tools of semiotics and
linguistics structuralism
might be able to elucidate branches of knowledge as diverse as literature,
philosophy, history,
mathematics, politics, economics, etc.
. Poststructuralism(s)
The period after Structuralism went out of fashion is perhaps the most difficult to
describe, and
has gone under many different names. The rest of this chapter represents one
attempt to organise this
multiplicity; one of the essays in the second part of this book is another. At this point,
however, it
would be useful to sum it up in relation to one of the literary approaches that runs
through both
Structuralism and Poststructuralism, namely Narratology. Mark Currie, in a seminal
book on
Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998), explains the transition from Structuralism to
Poststructuralism along
the lines of the shifts undergone by theories concerning narrative in the 1980s. He
begins by showing
the widespread circulation attained of late by the concept of narrative, which has
come to encompass
the representation of identity, in personal memory and self-representation or in
collective identity of
groups such as religions, nations, race and gender (2) and has acquired a quality of

instability. Currie
explains this new quality as the result of the shifts from discovery to invention, from
coherence to complexity, and from poetics to politics (2). Thus, while Structuralism
hoped to deploy scientific
linguistics methods in order to discover the inherent structure that contains the
meaning of any
narrative, Poststructuralism insists that any structure that can be associated with a
certain narrative is in
fact put there (invented) by the reader as part of the reading (i.e., interpretive)
activity, and therefore
any number of different, even contradictory, meanings can be attached to any one
text. This amounts
to a deconstruction of earlier narratology; it involves the destruction of its scientific
authority and
[points] to a less reductive kind of reading which [is] not underpinned by notions like
the coherence of
the authorial project or the stability of the language system in general (3). The
number of possible
readings, deconstructionists and historicists alike argue, is only limited by the
ideological discourse
that surreptitiously informs language itself (see Michel Foucault). Poststructuralisms
effort to reinstate
historical perspective in literary studies could thus be said to have put the narrative
back in narratology.
Like the Deconstructive and Historicist trends, this subversion of structuralist
narratology began in the
late 1960s and attained its most coherent theoretical expression in the 1980s.
Another way of thinking of Poststructuralism is as an age of dissensus or differends,
in which the
apparently coherent critical discourse of Formalism(s) breaks down as a result of the
intense
politicisation of literary studies and is replaced by a plurality of discourses. To use
Jean-Franois Lyotards terms, the Grand Narratives or coherent worldviews (e.g.
history, ethics, aesthetics, etc.)
make room for the little narratives of day-to-day existence. This fragmentation of
discourse is
Part One 57

replicated by the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches in literary studies, that

in turn reflect the
pluralisation of academic disciplines in the wake of the Civil Rights Movements of
the 1960s. Phenomenological and Existentialist Criticism
Philosophical criticism came from Europe to America in two waves: one in the 1950s,
and the
second in the 1970s.xv The first wave was responsible for phenomenological and
existentialist awareness
and philosophical and cultural criticism, as well as for the co-implication of subject
(reader) and object
(text), although, under the powerful opposing influence of New Criticism and
Formalism, it did not
bring with it psychoanalysis. That was to come later, as Phenomenological criticism
evolved into
Reader-Response theory. However, it was the second wave that actually had a huge
impact on
American criticism and cultural theory, resulting in Poststructuralism.

Post-Structuralism/ Deconstruction
The inception of Poststructuralism is connected with Yale University in the late
1960s. According
to Steven Connor, [t]he passage from structuralism to post-structuralism can be
described as a passage
from centred to decentred or centreless structures. The compulsive orbiting
around this very
concept-metaphor in post-structuralist criticism (736-7) is also what made it an
insufficient,
transitional literary theory, although in the field of cultural theory it has had a longerlasting impact.
According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the originator of
this theoretical
movement, the centre, the focal point of any structure as promoted by structuralism,
does not have
concrete existence, and is therefore both inside and outside the structure it is
supposed to govern.

Deconstruction also started in the late 1960s and early 70s. Most of its
representatives with the
exception of Paul de Man (who believes there is no direct relation between language
and reality) were
influenced by Jacques Derridas theory of centres which cannot hold and margins
which can move
freely to the centre. Deconstruction is often regarded as a faction of
poststructuralism, given their
common interest in debunking traditional views of the world as rationally organised
around hierarchies
and centres. Other commentators believe that there is an almost exact coincidence
between
poststructuralism and deconstruction, while still others take the former denominator
to refer to a whole
new age, with the latter as its application in cultural and literary studies.
Deconstruction reads texts against the grain, revealing the instability of meaning and
the
inherent arbitrariness of hierarchies and preferences. It does not aim to reverse
hierarchies but to
topple and replace them with radical doubt about their legitimacy. The confusions
that deconstruction
unveils are those of the critical tradition, not of the text. Thus, deconstruction is
primarily meant as
58

Part One

critique, not criticism. It refuses to serve any system of values which enshrines a
certain power
distribution, but indicates instead the fundamental structure of ethics, a discourse of
self-resistance.
Hence, it is not a nihilistic enterprise, in that it does not deny the existence of value
and meaning, but
its primary concern is with what there is in language/ text that can constitute so
many meanings,
multiple and ambiguous, and then undermine them

Key concepts:

Saussures sense of difference Remember?

Diffrance (Derrida) = difference + deferral: the meaning of a sign is both

spatially/
synchronically different from that of other signs and deferred (temporally) until it
can be compounded
by the signs that precede and follow it.

There is nothing outside the text. / There is no outside the text. (Derrida)

i.e., there is
no objective position outside the text from which the text can be interpreted, because
there is no
position outside language from which language can be viewed objectively.

Trace (Derrida): any sign is embedded in a context and its meaning bears the trace

of the signs
that surround it; the meaning of a sign is never complete in itself.

Irony (de Man and Hartman) = the universal predicament of language, the eternal

problem of
understanding: the conflict between rhetorical and grammatical significations.

Aporia (de Man) = a true opposition which blocks, a paradox which ultimately

cannot be solved
and which cannot be assimilated by a trope, a conflict between the materiality and
phenomenality of
language.