DOCSLIB.ORG

Rereading the New Criticism

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Rereading the New Criticism Rereading the New Criticism Rereading the New Criticism Edited by Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre The Ohio State University Press • Columbus Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rereading the New Criticism / Edited by Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1180-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1180-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9279-2 (cd) 1. New Criticism. I. Hickman, Miranda B., 1969 II. McIntyre, John D., 1966 PN98.N4R47 2012 801'.95—dc23 2011040340 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction Rereading the New Criticism 1 MIRANDA HICKMAN Part I: Rereading the New Criticism Preface 25 Chapter 1 Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU 29 Chapter 2 Eliot, the Agrarians, and the Political Subtext of New Critical Formalism ALASTAIR MORRISON 47 Chapter 3 Androgyny and Social Upheaval: The Gendered Pretext for John Crowe Ransom’s New Critical Approach AARON SHAHEEN 65 Chapter 4 The Fugitive and the Exile: Theodor W. Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, and The Kenyon Review JAMES MATTHEW WILSON 83 Part II: New Criticism and Modernism Preface 105 Chapter 5 No Two Ways about It: William Empson’s Enabling Modernist Ambiguities BRADLEY D. CLISSOLD 109 vi • Contents Chapter 6 In Pursuit of Understanding: Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, and “The Red Wheelbarrow” CONNOR BYRNE 134 Chapter 7 Through Fields of Cacophonous Modern Masters: James Baldwin and New Critical Modernism ADAM HAMMOND 151 Part III: Legacy and Future Directions Preface 171 Chapter 8 “Disagreeable Intellectual Distance”: Theory and Politics in the Old Regionalism of the New Critics ALEXANDER MACLEOD 173 Chapter 9 Teaching with Style: Brooks and Warren’s Literary Pedagogy TARA LOCKHART 195 Chapter 10 “A Kind of Dual Attentiveness”: Close Reading after the New Criticism CECILY DEVEREUX 218 Epilogue Toward a New Close Reading JOHN MCINTYRE AND MIRANDA HICKMAN 231 Suggested Readings 239 Contributors 241 Index 244 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HE PROJECT of this volume began with a panel, “Rereading the New T Criticism,” that we co-organized for the Modernist Studies Association conference of 2006. The responses to our call for papers were so numerous, varied, and interesting that, over the next two years, we followed with a sec- ond panel for the MSA in 2008 and then a more general call for papers for a collection, which yielded an even larger, more diverse set of strong essays. There was clearly keen interest in reevaluating the significance and legacy of the New Criticism, which has since the 1980s been regarded as superseded in literary studies—and has generally been read as emblematic of the apoliti- cal, ahistorical practices of the discipline that had to be overcome through the revolutions in theory, historical scholarship, and politically engaged criticism of the last four decades. But over e-mail and at conferences, people in con- versation with us underscored the value of revisiting a movement that was crucial to the foundation of the discipline as we know it now, especially to the development of “close reading” central to its development; and that merited reassessment toward reconsideration of the criticism, classroom practices, and commitments of our field. Ultimately, we had difficulty choosing the essays included in this volume from among the bounty that came our way. We greatly appreciate the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humani- ties Research Council of Canada, whose support facilitated the production of this collection. Our thanks go to the many colleagues who offered supportive vii viii • Acknowledgments commentary on this project as it evolved, including Tim Newcomb, Leonard Diepeveen, Jessica Pressman, John Tiedemann, Elizabeth Loizeaux, Stephen Adams, and Ted Bishop. Above all, we are grateful to the contributors to this volume, the excellence of whose essays far exceeded our initial hopes. Miranda B. Hickman, McGill University John D. McIntyre, University of Prince Edward Island INTRODUCTION Rereading the New Criticism MIRANDA HICKMAN N 2008, Garrick Davis published an edited volume entitled Praising it I New: The Best of the New Criticism, which gathers in one paperback a collection of landmark essays by leading figures of the New Criticism, the mid-twentieth century American movement in literary criticism fabled for its formalist approach to literature, and especially for its techniques of “close reading” that would become integral to academic literary studies in North America. The collection includes work by such major New Critics as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren. Noting the pub- lication in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein recognized the cultural currents against which Davis was swimming to bring out such a volume: the project turns back to critics central to the foundations of literary studies as we now know it in North America, before the rise of poststruc- turalist theory in the literary academy of the late 1960s displaced their work from prominence. By the 1970s, New Critical influence had waned; the next decades of the literary academy would belong to theorists associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism, such as Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and Lyotard. As of the 1980s, New Critical work, relegated to the status of superseded paradigm, was generally mentioned only in brief excerpts and caricatured shorthand terms. Davis’s book thus makes widely available many essays that have been difficult to come by for decades, espe- cially as an ensemble: its back cover frames the project as the “first anthology 1 2 • Introduction of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years.” Our volume of critical essays, Rereading the New Criticism, participates in the recent wave of renewed attention to the New Criticism that Davis’s project reflects. Contributors to this collection seek to reexamine in an interrogative spirit the development of the New Criticism, its significance, and its chief lines of thought, as well as to consider dimensions of its work relevant for contemporary literary and cultural studies. The tale of the New Critics’ ascent and decline is a familiar one: dur- ing the 1930s and 1940s, the New Criticism rose to preeminence in North American academic contexts during a time of rapid expansion and profes- sionalization for academic departments of English. As the essays in this vol- ume address, for more than two decades, New Critical methods would exert enormous influence in both criticism and classrooms across North America. The events of an international symposium on structuralism held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 are often used to exemplify the poststructural- ist turn in Anglo-American literary studies that would inaugurate the era, in Frank Lentricchia’s phrase, “after the New Criticism.” The widespread theorization of Anglo-American literary studies would follow—inspired by theoretical models from continental Europe and political developments of 1968 in France; informed by work in fields such as linguistics, psychoanaly- sis, philosophy, Marxism, and feminism; and fueling the rise of interest in deconstructionist and other forms of poststructuralist thought. As a wealth of new theoretical approaches in the literary academy sought to move, as Geoffrey Hartman’s put it 1970, “beyond formalism,” the New Criticism fell from authority; and as newer schools of thought often involved critique and even censure of New Critical techniques and assumptions, the New Criticism assumed a controversial status. In subsequent years, for many, the New Criti- cism came to emblematize irresponsibly formalist approaches to literature that showed critical practice at its narrowest. Focused on “the work itself,” and “literature qua literature,” New Critical methods were understood as unfortunately insensitive to authorial intentions and readerly response; to the historical conditions of literary production and reception; and to the cultural relevance and political significance of literary work. More recently, however, a diverse body of critics have issued calls for a reassessment of the New Criticism and its legacy. Historicist scholarship from commentators such as Gerald Graff (1979, 1987) and Mark Jancovich (1993) has enlisted rereadings of New Critical work in its original cultural contexts to contest widely circulated misrepresentations of its assumptions, politics, and projects. Newer work from commentators such as Camille Paglia in Break, Blow, Burn (2006), Terry Eagleton in How to Read a Poem Hickman, “Rereading the New Criticism” • 3 (2007), and Jane Gallop in “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading” (2007) likewise urges such reevaluation, emphasizing how New Critical methods of close reading inform contemporary practice in literary studies—often without acknowledgment—and considering how these might be adapted for today’s climate. Other groups associated with an effort called the “New Formalism” seek to redirect attention to literary form, which they read as neglected in literary study of recent decades, and often point to the work of
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Twentieth Century Criticism: Traditions and Concepts
    International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development Online ISSN: 2349-4182, Print ISSN: 2349-5979 Impact Factor: RJIF 5.72 Received: 05-08-2018; Accepted: 12-09-2018 www.allsubjectjournal.com Volume 5 Issue 9; September 2018; Page No. 78-81 Twentieth century criticism: Traditions and concepts Bishnu Prasad Pokharel PhD. Lecturer, Nepal Sanskrit University, Bijauri, Nepal Abstract Literary theory involves questioning of the most basic assumption of literary study, speculative practice, accounts of desires and language. Theory has brought many ideas from other field of knowledge to engage in a discussion on humanities, art and literature and different issues like race, identity, mythologies, signs and many other issues that are not directly linked to literature. Theory has made literary discourse interdisciplinary by welcoming ideas from other discipline. So, literary theory is not something that has been developed in a vacuum but has arisen for the most part in response to the problems encountered by readers, scholars and critics in their practical contact with the text. It also provides excellent tools that can not only show us our world and ourselves through new and valuable lenses but also can strengthen our ability and with a good deal of insight. Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Post structuralism/ Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Reader Response, Colonialism and New Historicism are the major theories discussed in this article. Keywords: theory, criticism, defamiliarization, text, interpretation, gender, meaning, context Introduction with the revolution” (603). The twentieth century encountered intensification of Russian Formalism was a departure from the prevailing rationalization, urbanization, secularization, increasingly Romantic Symbolism and Futurism.
    [Show full text]
  • When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? a Reading of Robert Penn Warren’S “The Rb Iar Patch” Clare Byrne
    Robert Penn Warren Studies Volume 10 Robert Penn Warren Studies Article 2 2016 When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The rB iar Patch” Clare Byrne Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Byrne, Clare (2016) "When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The rB iar Patch”," Robert Penn Warren Studies: Vol. 10 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/vol10/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Robert Penn Warren Studies by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The Briar Patch” Clare Byrne King’s College, London Critics have tended to fall into one of two camps on the matter of Robert Penn Warren’s participation in the Southern Agrarian movement. They have either agreed with Hugh Ruppersburg that “Agrarianism is…the essential premise on which [Warren’s] American explorations have rested” (30), or with Paul Conkin that “never” did Warren “ever write a single essay in which he committed himself, philosophically, to any version of Agrarian ideology” (105). As a result, his literary output has often either been read as a direct expression of Southern Agrarianism, or exonerated from any connection to it. I propose that Warren’s relationship to Agrarianism was much more complex and conflicted than either of these positions allows, and that this is evident even in the essays he explicitly contributed to the movement.
    [Show full text]
  • HARLEM in SHAKESPEARE and SHAKESPEARE in HARLEM: the SONNETS of CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, and GWENDOLYN BROOKS David J
    Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2015 HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS David J. Leitner Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Leitner, David J., "HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS" (2015). Dissertations. Paper 1012. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS by David Leitner B.A., University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, 1999 M.A., Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Department of English in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale May 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS By David Leitner A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Approved by: Edward Brunner, Chair Robert Fox Mary Ellen Lamb Novotny Lawrence Ryan Netzley Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale April 10, 2015 AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF DAVID LEITNER, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in ENGLISH, presented on April 10, 2015, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
    [Show full text]
  • Applying Literary Theory: NEW CRITICISM
    Applying Literary Theory: NEW CRITICISM Theoretical Underpinnings In a nutshell, New Criticism: emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." rejects attention to biographical and sociological matters. examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary. asserts that the goal of literature is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. functions under the assumption that the work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page, and on the page only. advocated for treating the text as separate from the author’s intentions and the readers’ impressions. To Apply New Criticism: 1. Start by examining the text for its form. In other words, how is it structured? What aspects of how it’s written—literary devices, organization, point of view, etc.—are most important to creating meaning within the text? 2. Choose one or two specific aspects of the text to focus on. Be sure your focus isn’t too broad! (For example, you might focus on blindness/vision as a motif, or choose a couple of motifs, or one or two types of imagery that pop up often…but you DON’T want to focus on motifs in general, symbolism in general, imagery in general…) 3.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915
    Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915 by Yektan Turkyilmaz Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Orin Starn, Supervisor ___________________________ Baker, Lee ___________________________ Ewing, Katherine P. ___________________________ Horowitz, Donald L. ___________________________ Kurzman, Charles Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 i v ABSTRACT Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915 by Yektan Turkyilmaz Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Orin Starn, Supervisor ___________________________ Baker, Lee ___________________________ Ewing, Katherine P. ___________________________ Horowitz, Donald L. ___________________________ Kurzman, Charles An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Yektan Turkyilmaz 2011 Abstract This dissertation examines the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century and the memory politics around it. It shows how discourses of victimhood have been engines of grievance that power the politics of fear, hatred and competing, exclusionary
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism
    10 Postcolonialism The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination. Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations, December 11, 1964 he 1960s saw a revolutionary change in literary theory. Until this dec- Tade, New Criticism dominated literary theory and criticism, with its insistence that “the” one correct interpretation of a text could be discovered if critical readers follow the prescribed methodology asserted by the New Critics. Positing an autonomous text, New Critics paid little attention to a text’s historical context or to the feelings, beliefs, and ideas of a text’s read- ers. For New Critics, a text’s meaning is inextricably bound to ambiguity, irony, and paradox found within the structure of the text itself. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an astute critic can identify a text’s central paradox and explain how the text ultimately resolves that paradox while also supporting the text’s overarching theme. Into this seemingly self-assured system of hermeneutics marches philos- opher and literary critic Jacques Derrida along with similar-thinking scholar- critics in the late 1960s. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida, the chief spokesperson for deconstruction, disputes a text’s objective existence. Denying that a text is an autotelic artifact, he challenges the accepted definitions and assump- tions of both the reading and the writing processes. In addition, he insists on questioning what parts not only the text but also the reader and the author play in the interpretive process.
    [Show full text]
  • 43 Elaine SHOWALTER: 'TOWARDS a FEMINIST POETICS'
    216 TWENTIETH·CENTURY LITERARY THEORY 43 ElAINE SHOWALTER: 'TOWARDS A FEMINIST POETICS' Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as the con­ sumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideo­ logical assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male­ constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploita­ tion and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer - with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such a specialised discourse, and so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: 'gynocritics' (although the significance of the male pseudonym in the history of women's writing also suggested the term 'georgics').
    [Show full text]
  • Keep on Moving: Studying African Americans Movements by Malaika
    Keep on Moving: Studying African Americans Movements Malaika Rudolph-Fletcher Summer 2009 Dr. Gordon Education Policy and Leadership 834 An Interpretive History of African American Education Part II: 1950 to the Present 1 Purpose: The purpose of this year long theme is to challenge and empower young African American students for the future. It is my belief that academic achievement is related to a positive understanding of one’s identity and culture despite the majority’s attempts to malign and denigrate it through media stereotypes, majority perspectives, and lack of culturally representative texts. After reading several books in this class and much discussion, it became imperative for me to develop not just a unit for this class, but a theme that could be used for the entire year to engage my students. The title of this year long theme is “Keep on Moving” because as a group of people, African Americans have moved past obstacles and barriers to assert their position in America. Further, Peter Murrell (2002) stated that as part of the specific cultural practices in an African-Centered Pedagogy, teachers must employ a living curriculum, like a “movement history”, to help students address the historical and contemporary struggles of African American people. As Peter Murrell (2002) asserted there is a definitive cultural and intellectual history that has emerged from the collective experiences of African Americans…and it has an important relationship to what education truly means in the collective memory of descendants of Africans in America.
    [Show full text]
  • Othering Poetic Form Through Translation
    Amanda French Conference -- Art Both Ways: Translation, Restoration, and Re-creation American Literary Translators Association Panel -- Making it Auld: Translation and Philology Saturday, October 30, 2004 The Othering of Poetic Form Through Translation: Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) As the first villanelle, Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) is historically important for a number of reasons, among them the fact that contemporary Anglophone poems from Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" to Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and beyond have adopted and explored its form. I have found seven English verse translations of the poem, the first in 1906, all of which indicate a vested interest in keeping the poem historically "othered" through the use of archaic language. Archaic language for archaic works was de rigueur in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but since the modern fashion of translation is to render a work that seemed fresh and colloquial in its own day in language that seems fresh and colloquial to us, it is therefore interesting that translators of "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" resisted the trend of translation theory, continuing to render the poem in archaic language. I would argue that Passerat's poem has been othered in English translation so as to keep the idea of fixed poetic form strictly marginal in contemporary Anglophone poetry. Most of those involved with contemporary American poetry are aware that there has been a recent surge of interest in the villanelle. The timing of this revival suggests that it is partly due to Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art," which was first published 2 in the New Yorker in 1976 and also appeared that same year in her influential collection Geography III.
    [Show full text]
  • Vmagwtr03 P30-59.Final (Page 30
    By PAUL KINGSBURY, BA’80 The thorny legacy of Vanderbilt’s Fugitives and Agrarians Pride and Prejudice t’s one of the most famous and cherished photographs in Vanderbilt’s history. Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson. Five balding white men, dressed impeccably in suits and ties, are seated outdoors, Iobviously posed by photographer Joe Rudis to appear as if lost in con- versation. Despite the artifice, the subjects seem relaxed and even playful, what with Moore practically sitting on Tate’s lap, Warren lean- ing in as if to insert a word edgewise, and the entire group looking to Allen Tate as if expecting a clever remark. It was a happy moment for the old friends. It was 1956, and after three decades of being ignored by the University, the Fugitives had returned to campus in glory for a colloquium devoted to their literary work. V anderbilt Magazine 31 Heroes Fugitives and Agrarians he five writers photographed in 1956 “Nothing in Vanderbilt’s history has come devoted to the Fugitives and Agrarians. The undergraduate courses on southern litera- were Vanderbilt graduates. They were anywhere close to the Fugitives and Agrari- 1956 reunion was followed by an Agrarian ture to these writers. On the graduate level, Donald Davidson (1893–1968) known as “Fugitives” after The Fugi- ans in giving it a national reputation,”con- reunion and symposium in 1980. That event, Kreyling says master’s and doctoral students BA’17, MA’22; Vanderbilt Ttive, the widely praised but little purchased firms Paul Conkin, distinguished professor though, seemed to mark a high tide for the in his department read them only occasion- English department, poetry magazine they self-published, along of history, emeritus, and the author of defin- Agrarians and Fugitives on campus.
    [Show full text]
  • E New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?
    Max Brzezinski !e New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism? In their 2008 PMLA article “!e New Modernist Studies,” Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz simultaneously chart and promote the development of the New Modernist Studies (NMS), a critical movement of which they are the leading spokespeople and practi tion- ers. In the beginning of their piece, Mao and Walkowitz announce that “[w]ere one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modern literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (737; emphasis in original). !ey then go on to specify the signi"cance of these transformations for the study of modernism and modernity, honing in on what they call the NMS’s “spatial” and “vertical” expansion. By spatial expansion, they mean NMS critics’ move away from national traditions toward conceptu- alizations of transnational ones; by vertical expansion, a parallel move away from modernist elitism toward a pluralistic opening up of crit- icism to popular culture, “works by marginalized social groups,” and a new focus on “matters of production, dissemination, and reception” (738). Given that these critics claim new interest in the way institu- tional and empirical economic contexts have shaped modernist works, the time is nigh to consider how and why the work of the NMS has emerged out of our contemporary economic, political, and institu- tional academic situation. By doing so below, I politicize and extend Jennifer Wicke’s prescient (2001) suggestion that “[a]s revivers of its brand [modernism], a brand we cannot seem to do without, we re- brand ourselves as critics and theorists just as we rebrand modernist others” (395).
    [Show full text]
  • Refrain, Again: the Return of the Villanelle
    Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle Amanda Lowry French Charlottesville, VA B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1992, cum laude M.A., Concentration in Women's Studies, University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August 2004 ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ABSTRACT Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle's nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. My own research has discovered that the nineteenth-century "revival" of the villanelle stems from an 1844 treatise by a little- known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. My study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art" (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form.
    [Show full text]