THE NEW ' PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS
ALEX PREMINGER AND T. V. F. BROGAN CO-EDITORS
FRANKJ. WARNKE,"* " O. B. HARDISON, AND EARL MINER ASSOCIATE EDITORS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University P r e s s
Published by Princeton University P r e s s 41 William Street, Princeton New J e r s e y 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University P r e s s , Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved
Preparation of this volume was made possible in part by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency dedicated to furthering the values of humane scholarship and culture in America, and by grants from other major foundations and private donors who wish to remain anonymous. Without their support this book would not have been possible. Publication has been aided by a grant from the Lacy Lockert Fund of Princeton University P r e s s .
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, co-editors; FrankJ. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN: 0-691-03271-8 (hardback edition) ISBN: 0-691-02123-6 (paperback edition) 1. Poetry—Dictionaries. 2. Poetics—Dictionaries. 3. Poetry—History and Criticism. I. Preminger, Alex. II. Brogan, T. V. F. (Terry V. F.) PN1021.P75 808.1'03—dc20 92-41887
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79 108 CRETIC
(1975); G. Yudice, Vicente Huidobro y la motivation IX. PHENOMENOLOGY del lenguaje (1978); M. Camurati, Poesia y poetica X. MYTH CRITICISM de Vicente Huidobro (1980); E. Busto Ogden, El XL READER-ORIENTED C R I T I C I S M creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro en sus relaciones con XII. LITERARY HISTORY la estetica cubista (1983). A.W.P.; K . N . M . XIII. DECONSTRUCTION XIV. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES CRETIC or amphimacer (Gr. "long at both ends"). XV. CONCLUSION In Cl. prosody, the metrical sequence — « - . — , sometimes felt as a segment of iambo-trochaic and I. EARLY I N T E R P R E T I V E PRACTICES. The practice of lit. crit. has its historical roots in the early used alongside iambs and trochees or, like iambic readings of H o m e r and Scripture, which were most and trochaic, in external compounding with aeolic often allegorical in method and philosophical in (q.v.) units. On other occasions, as is obvious from intent, as in Theagenes of Rhegium (6th c. B.C.), resolution of either long syllable, t h e cretic is r e a l l y the first known scholar to have interpreted Homer a form of the paeon (q.v.), and cretic-paeonic allegorically (none of his works survives), and in measures, though rare in the choruses of Gr. trag- the surviving Gr. Scholia to Homer. Often the edy, are not infrequent in comedy. The cretic me- allegorical readings were Neoplatonic, and in a ter, different from most other Gr. meters, is writer like Philojudaeus (ca. 50 A.D.), Neopla- thought to have been of foreign origin, from a Cretan poet named Thaletas in the 7th c. B.C. tonic tendencies appeared in allegorization of the Old Testament. The texts were regarded as h i s t o r i - Cretics occur in early Roman drama and are also cal, but history was presumed to present a total common in the clausulae of Cicero. An example in pattern of meaning. Frequently, however, myths the former is the song of Phaedromus in Plautus, were treated as decayed history, following the Curculio 147-54: method employed by Euhemerus (4th c. B.C.). This tendency to see myths and legends as histori- pessuli, heus pessuli, vos saluto lubens, cal accounts distorted by linguistic change and oral transmission persisted into the 18th c. (e.g. vos amo, vos volo, vos peto atque obsecro Samuel Shuckford [1694-1754]), and even had a 20th-c. practitioner in Robert Graves. By c o n t r a s t , the meaning and meter of which G. E. D u c k w o r t h the mode of ethical or moralistic interp., at least reproduces thus: "Bolts and bars, bolts and bars, in the Neoplatonic trad, that Porphyry (233-305 gladly I greetings bring, / Hear my love, hear my A.D.) and others followed, was atemporal and di- prayer, you I beg and entreat." Like most other of the more complex Gr. feet, dactic, reading myth and legend as allegories of some part of the Neoplatonic concept of the pas- cretics do not exist in the mod. vernaculars except sage into, through, and out of generation, as in as experiments, but some Ren. songs are in cretics, Porphyry's own elaborate treatment of the cave of and the song "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" attributed the nymphs scene in the Odyssey (see PLATONISM in 1985 to Shakespeare is in cretic dimeters. Cretic AND POETRY). lines appear in Tennyson's "The Oak." Cretics Early J e w i s h and Christian interps. of Scripture sometimes appear in proverbs, idioms, and slang: provide a contrast to each other, with some simi- "After while, crocodile." See PAEON.—G. E. Duck- larities in the Hellenistic period when both were worth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952); Maas; influenced by Neoplatonic allegorizing. However, Koster; Crusius; C. Questa, Introduzione alia met- the Jewish trad, tended to more creative play w i t h rica di Plauto (1967); Snell; West; G. T. Wright in texts (see HEBREW PROSODY AND P O E T I C S ) , while Eidos3,2 (1986). R.J.G.; A.T.C.; T.V.F.B. the Christian practice broke into two somewhat antagonistic methods: allegorization and typologi- CRISIS. See PLOT. cal reading (see ALLEGORY) . T h e contrast between the Jewish and Christian trads. is that between a CRITICISM. This article provides an overview of mode of reading that treats the text as rife with the practice of crit. in the West f r o m ancient times possibility, building reading on reading, and a down to the present. For fuller discussion of the mode that presumes a fundamentally i m i t a t i v e or theory of lit. crit., see METACRITICISM and THE- referential conception of lang. that either repre- ORY. sents actual events (see REPRESENTATION AND MI- I. E A R L Y I N T E R P R E T I V E P R A C T I C E S MESIS) or by allegorical interp. finds behind the II. M I M E S I S events the spiritual or moral significance that his- III. GENRE AND TRADITION tory displays (see INTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD IV. DIDACTICISM, AFFECT, AND TASTE METHOD) . Even 20th-c. biblical typologists such as V. IMPRESSIONISM AND OBJECTIVISM Jean Danielou still feared that strict allegorical VI. AUTHORIAL GENIUS, IMAGINATION, interp. would spirit away the historicity of Scrip- AND INTUITION ture, reducing it to mere moral philosophy giving VII. THE NEW C R I T I C I S M inadequate attention to God's plan of creation, VIII. CONTINENTAL STRUCTURALISM history, and apocalypse. E a r l y typologists, of w h o m
- [ 248 ] - CRITICISM St. John was certainly one, maintained both the appearances. The old war between philosophy historical and prophetic reliability of the Bible, and poetry to which Plato alluded was f or him the relating the text to the whole sweep of time and war of reality with appearance. refusing to reduce it to some ahistorical idea. The Even for Plato, however, poetry had charm. If method was to discover the events of the New he advocated, half-ironic a l l y through his mouth- Testament foreshadowed in the Old. It was to piece Socrates, banishment of poets from his Re- become incorporated into the fourfold mode of public, it was precisely on account of their per- interp. developed by J o h n Cassian (d. ca. 448) and ceived power to enchant and persuade. Here later St. Thomas Aquinas, and explicitly secular- arises the question of the roles of delight and ized in the letter to Can Grande prefixed to the instruction: in Ion and The Republic Plato's Socrates Paradiso and once attributed to Dante. was suspicious of the delight poets gave and be- Critical practice, therefore, began with strong lieved they taught that appearance was reality. In connections to moral philosophy and theology, addition, they were irrational, even though he and has never moved far from ethical concerns considered their irrationality divinely inspired (see ETHICS AND C R I T I C I S M ) , though at times mo- (see POETIC MADNESS). All of these Platonic short- rality narrowly conceived has been eschewed in comings were however turned into virtues by later favor of some form of aestheticism (q.v.). Such critics. moments often come to be understood as expres- Aristotle attempted to rescue the imitative func- sions of an ethic strongly opposed to dogma, as in tion in three ways. First, for Aristotle, poetic imi- the work of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Still, on the tation was not of the Platonic Idea. Second, it was whole, critical practice has tended toward secu- not of objects but of human actions. Third, it had larization. When relatively f r e e from any specific a creative aspect, giving it power to shape materi- moral or theological dogma, it admits a variety o f als into new wholes. Finally, against Plato's refusal practical problems and evolves numerous modes to allow the poem any being, always treating it as of behavior. When the earliest crit. was n o t d i r e c t l y an appearance of an appearance, twice removed concerned with poetry's being true to truth, from the idea of the object it copied, Aristotle whether Platonic or prophetic, it was concerned provided for the idea of the poem as inherent with its being true to life (see REALISM; VERISI- within itself: h e did not consign the idea to abstrac- MILITUDE). tion but allowed it to inhere in the object as its II. MIMESIS. The early importance of the con- principle of being or motion. In the opposition of cept of mimesis or imitation (qq.v.) as an artistic Aristotle to Plato there was established the long criterion is attested as early as the 7th c. B.C. in a quarrel between an objectifying formalism and an hymn to Apollo; and the connection between po- emphasis on separable content, a quarrel that has etry and painting, with its emphasis on accuracy had a variety of historical incarnations. of portrayal, was remarked as early as Simonides Aristotle's idea of formal unity (q.v.) did not, (6th c. B.C.; see VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY). The however, live as easily with the theory of imitation earliest extant Gr. poetry, Pindar's for example in later critics as it did in the fruitful ambiguities (522P-443 B.C.), is clearly interested in being of his own Poetics, w h e r e he clearly t r i e d to acknow- faithful to the facts. To this day, much reviewing ledge poetry's claims to both intrinsic order and presumes some form of accurate imitation of the also truth to the world. In Ren. Italy and France, external world or felt life as a criterion of value. after the rediscovery of the Poetics, unity became The concept is derived from the analogy with rigidly interpreted in terms of the need for a quite painting, where it long seemed to have more prac- literal imitation. Time, place, and action in a play tical use, though Aristotle early observed that "not were restricted in ways that answered to the strict- to know t h a t the hind has no horns is a less serious est realism. But even as Aristotle's views became matter than to paint it inartistically" (Poetics 25.5). hardened into the Classicist prescription of the Virtually every W e s t e r n critical theory possesses at so-called "unities," Plato was being subjected to least some trace of mimetic theory, if only by critical misreadings that liberalized his views and opposition to it. readmitted the poet to the commonwealth. This The first Western theory of imitation was Plato's. had begun as early as Plotinus (204-70 A.D.), His critique of poetry and visual art mounts an whose elaborate Neoplatonist theory of emana- attack on imitation based on his ontological and tions placed the image (q.v.) or appearance on a ethical concerns. He was interested in Truth or stairway upward to truth rather than downward to Being, i.e. Ideas or Forms. Poems and paintings, illusion. Ren. defenses of the image were com- tied to appearances, always failed adequately to mon, though probably none so ingenious as that represent the truth of the Idea. For Plato, the of Jacopo Mazzoni (1548-98) in his defense of poem had no Being, or only very diminished Be- Dante. The idea that the image might be an im- ing, because it was an imitation twice removed provement on nature, the "second nature" of Sir from the Idea, where reality and truth were lo- Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1583), rescued cated. Behind this view was the desire to identify poetry once again from Plato and also from a the ethical life with purely abstract thought, and theologically based (and Platonizing) fear that immorality with too great attention to material poetry bred only licentiousness and untruthful - [ 249 ] - CRITICISM fictiveness (see FICTION)—a view common in the DIDACTIC POETRY). Horace had seemed to treat Christian Middle Ages. Boethius (480-524) had poetry as a speaking picture (ut pictura poesis written of "seducing murmurs" and "poisonous [q.v.]) and had proposed a twofold aim for poetry sweets" in his Consolation of Philosophy, but by the that has been much repeated—poetry must de- time of Boccaccio (1313-75), poetry was de- light and instruct. This idea, frequently repeated fended on the ground that theology was t h e poetry up to the time of Sidney's Apology and even be- of God and that poetry held within itself hidden yond, is the predecessor of later concerns with truth, more pleasing because acquired by toil and questions of readerly taste (q.v.) and affect that therefore better retained. This was an argument came into prominence when, with the rise of sci- which had the stamp of St. Thomas Aquinas ence in the 17th c., the ontological emphasis g a v e (1225-74). In the late Ren., the long period of the way to the epistemological. Plato, of course, had domination of ontological concerns ended, and been deeply concerned about readers, and his the emphasis on imitation began to wane. Aris- attack on Sophistic rhet. embodied his concern totle and Plato, through clever misreadings and that tropes were seductively deceptive and irra- selective appropriations, had almost been made tional. Aristotle's Rhetoric and the work of later Cl. to change places. rhetoricians sought to rescue rhet., but on grounds III. GENRE AND T R A D I T I O N . There is one other that Plato s u r e l y would have rejected (see R H E T O R I C notion of imitation that has also had considerable AND POETRY) . Rhet. was j u d g e d useful to both per- practical consequence. This can be traced back to suasion and delight. Pseudo-Longinus (1st c. A.D.) pronouncements like that of Horace (65-8 B.C.) saw rhet. as the vehicle of poetic transport (see that the imitation of great predecessors is impor- SUBLIME) . A century b e f o r e , Horace had seen noth- tant. Pope carried on this idea in his remark that ing at all wrong w i t h delighting while teaching, even Virgil discovered that to copy Homer was to copy as he accepted the idea of poetic imitation. nature (q.v.). The emphasis on poetic genealogy Affective theories in the 18th c. made more and tradition (q.v.) entailed by this remark is re- subtle what the effect in the reader might (ought flected in all critical practice that pays strong to) be. Thereafter, modes of critical discussion attention to the matter of genre (q.v). Genre crit. eventuated that were predicated on something has had a long history, in which poets have been happening in the reader attributable to specific either praised or attacked for their relation to or characteristics of the text. In the 18th c., critical remoteness from trad. In practice, genre crit. has theories were beginning to recognize a choice of been both classificatory and judgmental. Many location, or at least starting point, on one side or critics—e.g. Joseph Addison (1672-1719)—are the other of the scientific bifurcation of nature not comfortable until they can determine what into objective and subjective realms. Those choos- kind of poem they have before them. At t h a t point, ing the side of the object had the problem of classification can generate judgment according to explaining away the subjective; those choosing the some standard of decorum (q.v). subjective had the problem of escaping pure sol- The connection of genre to decorum, however, ipsism and relativism. To some extent, particularly did not survive the 18th c. unscathed, and since in matters of value but also in questions of interp., that time genre theory has been turned inside out. this division and these problems continued to One sees the demise of its classificatory role plague critical thought into the late 20th c., as for prophesied in the comically a b s u r d list of types o f example in reader-response crit. (q.v). drama in Hamlet. Rather than considering a work The issue with respect to taste was nicely put by as belonging to a genre, critics now t r y to imagine David Hume in his 1757 essay "Of the Standard of genre as an aspect of a work, and works may after Taste." His recourse was to "certain general prin- all include many generic suggestions. In recent ciple of approbation or blame, whose influence a times, both T. S. Eliot and Northrop Frye have careful eye may trace in all operations of the claimed that there is really no acceptable or even mind." Hume believed that there was a n o b j e c t i v e possible escape from trad.; indeed, Eliot held that standard of taste, but he was t o o shrewd to attempt real individuality occurs when the poet has set transference of this standard into a description of forth a relation to his or her predecessors. Sub- specific characteristics a work of art should have. sequently this idea was given an unexpected "Taste" had become a critical catchword by the twist—with a strong dash of Freudianism—n time Hume wrote. Joseph Addison had earlier Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence defined it in a Spectator essay (1712) as "that Fac- (see INFLUENCE) , where the relation of the strong ulty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an poet to the predecessor is one of w i l l f u l misreading Author with Pleasure and the Imperfections with and competition. Bloom's own c r i t i c a l p r a c t i c e has Dislike." The observation begs the question. H o w been to chart this Oedipal strife through the work is the alleged objective beauty of the work to be of those poets who make the most of i t — w h o stand connected with subjective p l e a s u r e ? This problem up, that is, to their strong predecessors. came to be treated as part of aesthetics, a term IV. DIDACTICISM, AFFECT, AND TASTE. In prac- coined by Alexander Baumgarten in midcentury tice, the concept of imitation has often had to be to mean the science of perception and sensuous squared with a presumed didactic function (see knowledge. Hume thought one had to presume - [250 ] - CRITICISM that a standard of taste existed somewhere, and constituted, in Kant's view, by the mind according cited the persistent high rank of the classics as to the categories of t h e understanding. In contrast, evidence. He had begun with the aim of demon- the judgment declares the object beautiful ac- strating that a rational discussion of a r t must begin cording to the principle of taste, which is "the as a discussion of h u m a n response, but ended w i t h faculty of judgment of an object or a method of the fiction of a standard that can never be directly representing it by a n entirely disinterested satisfac- apprehended or uttered in particulars; only the tion or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfac- results of its workings can be seen in the persist- tion is called beautiful." This idea was adopted in ence of what we now call the literary canon (q.v.). England by S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), and ever Hume was by no means a subjectivist, yet he set after, it has been a main element in the attempt to forth a problem that eventually led to numerous universalize a specifically artistic value. It was be- positions of radical subjectivism, n o t only in j u d g - cause of this attempt that the New C r i t i c i s m (q.v.), ment but also in interp. despite its commitment to objectivist practical Driven relentlessly to its extreme, subjectivism analysis and to some of I. A. Richards' anti-Kantian results in solipsism of response, such as we find in psychologism, tended to be friendly to Kantian Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), w h e r e aesthetics (conspicuous in John Crowe Ransom), isolated experience simply for the sake of the while at the same time it was deeply suspicious of experience is praised as the end of life. Under readerly orientations (as in W. K. Wimsatt). such conditions the opportunity for the triumph Grit, as practiced by Coleridge and some other of power, i.e. for someone to make arbitrary deci- romantic writers implied the Kantian position that sions about value, is virtually assured. Pater per- an aestheticjudgment is subjectively universal and haps recognized this when he suppressed his con- assumes the agreement of others (principally be- clusion. Part of his response, and later that of cause it is detached from purposiveness). Cole- Anatole France, was due to his hatred of the ma- ridge's analytic implied that there was a difference terialistic scientific philosophies of the time. between the good and the beautiful (or the sub- However, subjectivity has no meaning apart from lime). He held that texts were discussible by re- objectivity—these antinomies define each other— course to analysis (q.v.) of their organic form (see and there is therefore a sense in which the subjec- ORGANICISM) , thereby avoiding the complete rela- tive impressionists had been captured by the tivity later practiced by Pater and France (the terms of the enemy. Grit, based on analogy with latter of whom was t o declare that the critic ought science went to the opposite pole. So the 19th c. to say " G e n t l e m e n , I am going to talk about m y s e l f produced not only Pater but also Emile Zola on the subject of Shakespeare"). (1840-1902), who would treat writing a novel as if V. IMPRESSIONISM AND OBJECTIVISM. The im- it were a medical experiment, and Hippolyte pressionistic mode of crit. was p o p u l a r for a period Taine (1828-93), who would devise a "science" of in the latter 19th c., but its opposite reared up lit. hist, (see SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY) . again in the 20th c., with some mediation by the The philosopher who had early attempted to art-for-art's-sake movement of the fin de siecle, in mediate—albeit starting from the position of the which the poetic object was declared not merely subject—between these oppositions was Im- able to affect the reader as beautiful without re- manuel Kant (1724-1804). His Critique of Judg- gard to its use, but actually had to be useless (see ment (1790) was a monumental effort to deal with DECADENCE). This latter view was fairly short the problems rapidly accruing to words like lived, though it did exert some influence on the "taste," "satisfaction," " b e a u t y , " and "sublime." No objectivist crit. which developed out of the work modern theory of poetry is entirely untouched by of T. S. Eliot and eventuated in the New C r i t i c i s m . Kant's effort to traverse what William Blake later A parallel but quite different mode of objectifl- named a "cloven fiction." Beginning with the sim- cation was meanwhile developing on the Conti- ple notions of pleasure and pain, Kant attempted nent, first in Rus. Formalism (q.v.), then in a to dissociate the sense of aesthetic value—beauty marriage of linguistic theory and crit. known as and the sublime—from pleasure and pain on the structuralism (q.v.). But these new m o v e m e n t s did ground that the aesthetic sense was "disinter- not hold sway in America until the 1950s and '60s, ested" while pleasure and pain were not (see DIS- when Eng. trs. first became available. Prior to that INTERESTEDNESS). Kant meant that the sense of time, the other version of s u b j e c t i v i st crit. revealed beauty or sublimity could not be referred to any itself—a biographical crit. emphasizing authorial personally desirable end. The object, as art, had rather than readerly subjectivity. Much crit. writ- only "purposiveness without purpose" or "internal ten in the 19th c., and indeed still written today, purposiveness." moves from interest in the work to interest in the Kant was well aware that in making such a dec- author. Wordsworth, for example, declared poetry laration he was a p p e a r i n g to attribute qualities to to be the inner made outer and the "spontaneous the object which, to be rigorous, had to be located overflow of powerful emotion." And in reading Cole- in the reader or auditor; his own position did not ridge on Shakespeare's genius, it is difficult to de- admit the possibility of knowledge of the "thing in termine whether "Shakespeare" refers to the poems itself." What we think of as the object is always and plays or the person or to both indiscriminately. - [ 251 ] - CRITICISM VI. AUTHORIAL GENIUS, IMAGINATION, AND IN- objective correlative (q.v.) of an emotion (q.v.). TUITION. The presence of the author was given But this emotion was detached from both reader more philosophical expression in Coleridge's fa- and author and lodged in the work. I. A. Richards mous definition of "imagination" (Biographia liter- in his influential early books (esp. Practical Crit. aria, ch. 13), which became the central term in [1929]—the title coined the phrase) also avoided this type of theory until Benedetto Croce sought reference to authors and treated harshly the sub- to replace it with "intuition" (q.v.). In Croce's jective responses of his students. Poems were for Aesthetic (1902), intuition does not exist apart him not the inner made outer but "pieces" of lang. from expression (q.v.). In his view, there never The New Critical attacks on the so-called inten- have been any mute inglorious Miltons. One does tional and affective "fallacies" (see INTENTION; not have intuitions that are not expressed, though AFFECTIVE FALLACY) exemplified further the ten- they may be expressed only to oneself. Artists are dency to consider a poem an object with a particu- different only in externalizing their intuitions; t h i s lar technical structure (q.v.). is what art is. Here Croce ran up against one of the The same cutting of lines between poem and problems fundamental to all modern critical the- author on the one hand and poem and reader on ory, the problem of the relation of f o r m to content. the other characterized the analytic practices of In claiming that intuition and expression were Continental structuralism. An important differ- indivisible, Croce closed the gap between the two, ence from the New Crit. was t h a t structuralist crit. a problem since the invention of the idea of imi- arose out of linguistics, while the orientation of tation. That concept seemed to imply t h a t content Richards and his followers arose out of semantics was one thing—the thing imitated or the idea (see SEMANTICS AND POETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC) . conveyed—and the means by which conveyance New Critical practice, arising mostly out of a very was achieved another. But Croce reopened the uneasy and sometimes contradictory relationship gap in another place when he introduced his between the ideas of Eliot and Richards, and in notion of externalization. For poetry, the form of reaction also to both impressionism and a positiv- externalization was the oral performance or pro- istic literary historicism, avoided the didactic and duction of a written text. To w h a t extent, however, moralistic and identified itself ultimately w i t h as- was lang. indivisible from intuition? Was intuition pects of Kantian and Coleridgean aesthetics. possible apart from lang.? Or was lang. constitu- VII. THE NEW C R I T I C I S M . The concept of the tive in the Kantian sense? Were other forms also poem held by the New Criticism was of an objec- constitutive—music, painting, sculpture? Croce's tive structure with its own internal relations, vari- intuitive expressionism raised these problems but ously described as objectified feelings, emotions, did not solve them. Ernst Cassirer's Neo-Kantian a density of metaphorical relations, a pattern of theory of a multiplicity of constitutive symbolic irony or paradox or ambiguity (qq.v.), a tension forms sought to bring intuition and externaliza- (q.v.), a structure and a texture (qq.v.), or state- tion closer together. Of these forms, lang. was one, ments not strictly prepositional but rather but Cassirer (1874-1945) was e q u i v o c a l about the "pseudo-statements" (q.v.), in nature dramatic status of lang. vis a vis the others—myth, art, rather than discursive. Always the lang. of the science, history, religion. Was it fundamental to all poem was treated as fundamentally different from or only one form among many? the discourse of science in terms of both structure Emphasis on authorial expression, usually i d e n - and ends (see SCIENCE AND P O E T R Y ) . Much prac- tified with feeling as opposed to reason, generated tical analysis came to conclude that poems were interest as well in literary biography, where the expressions of their own nature, including their author's life and works are treated in close rela- difference from other uses of lang.; sometimes tion. Such a connection is quite in contrast to Dr. poems were characterized as producing an en- Johnson's earlier Lives oftheEng. Poets (1779-81), tirely separate form of knowledge (see MEANING, where the two subjects were kept separate, or POETIC) outside the usual categories of belief Izaak Walton's still earlier life of John Donne (q.v.). Much emphasis was put on beginning with (1670), where Donne's poems are not mentioned the formal or technical aspects of the poem, incl. at all. In the 20th c., the devel. of p s y c h o a n a l y s i s its prosody and tropological structure, before at- after Freud provided a specific method for treat- tempting to state the theme (q.v.) of the poem, ing poems as externalizations of inner life, though though many New Critics held that it was in fact some varieties of psychological crit. (q.v.) inter- impossible to articulate what the poem is "about" ested themselves, rather, in the characters in the (see PARAPHRASE, HERESY OF). Any suggestion of text, and still others concentrated on the reader. a split between form and content was assiduously The 20th-c. objectivist reaction to impression- denied on organicist principles, and the poem istic and biographical crit. was l o d g e d against both came to be seen as having a unique mode of b e i n g . authorial and readerly forms of critical practice. New Critics continued to employ the terminology There is a little more implied about authors and of genre, but the terms no longer denoted strict readers in Eliot's crit. than might be expected, categories into which literary works had to fit. given his claims that writing ought to be an extin- The objectivism of the New Critics was not, guishing of the personality and a striving for the however, a scientific objectivism in which the ob- - [25 2 ] - CRITICISM ject was stripped of all its nonmeasureable or referent, and later theorists abandoned the refer- so-called secondary qualities. Indeed, the New ent entirely as having no demonstrable (other Criticism was violently opposed to any such reduc- than arbitrary) relation to the sign. The disap- tion. The New C r i t i c a l object was s o named because pearance of t h e referent seemed to spirit material of its alleged independence from reduction of any reality away into a lang. that was a l l system, lacking sort. The movement's e n e m y w a s p o s i t i v i s m , despite even the substance it had had under the concept the fact that Richards, one of its forbears, can be of the elite object. said to have employed at least pseudoscientific For the structuralists and their successors, how- methods. ever, the notion of differential structure was for VIII. CONTINENTAL STRUCTURALISM. By Contrast, the most part regarded as radically liberating. Its the Continental structuralists considered them- fundamental principles were the following: (1) selves practitioners of a "human science." Neither the arbitrary relation between the sound or w r i t t e n the philosophy of symbolic logic nor that of poetic appearance of a word and what it signified; (2) the logic was the ground for the rise of structuralist diacritical nature of the sign, its division into s i g - attitudes toward lang., which came to dominate nifier and signified; (3) the view that a sign is such the scene on the Continent esp. i n the 1960s and by virtue of its difference not only within itself but 1970s. Structuralism is often, and perhaps too also from every other sign in the system, which is simply, traced back to the posthumously publish- a chain of such differences; (4) the positing of two ed work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in Gen- kinds of linguistic investigation, synchronic and eral Linguistics (1913), actually a compilation of diachronic (the structuralists emphasized syn- lecture notes by his students. In making lang. a chrony against virtually all linguistics that pre- system of differences to be scientifically studied ceded them); and (5 ) the use of terminology that apart from speaker or auditor (though still claim- called the lang. system "langue" and smaller p a t - ing it to be speech), Saussure opened the way in terns of usage within it "paroles." Structuralist literary theory to the dismissal of both the expres- literary theory tended to treat poems as "paroles" sive subject and the responding reader. Lang, was (see SEMIOTICS, POETIC) which were to be re- only itself. The disappearance of the subject (and vealed as differential structures by stylistic a n a l y s i s the object inasmuch as lang. was a self-containing (see STYLISTICS) , as injakobson and Levi-Strauss's differential system) was also desired later by a exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of Baude- political mode of crit. that identified the subject laire's "Les Chats" (1962) or J a k o b s o n and J o n e s ' s with bourgeois individualism and the object—at of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 (1970). least the literary object—with elitist aestheticism. These principles made it possible to call in The concept of the differential system took question—or simply ignore—some of the most many disciplines on the Continent by storm and fundamental concepts in Western critical theory. became virtually the defining characteristic of In addition to dispensing with both subjects— what came to be known as the "human sciences." reader and author—structuralism rejected imita- Lang., seen as the differential system par excel- tion, or, in its terms, representation. Rather than lence, came to be the model even for psychoanaly- the referent being seen as present to lang., it was sis when J a c q u e s Lacan dissolved the human s u b - regarded as absent. The old idea of unity was also ject into lang. or, as he called it, the "symbolic." threatened; rather than a literary work being a Michel Foucault (1926-84 ) in his historical analy- confluence of parts, it was a pattern of differences, sis of W e s t e r n culture declared the disappearance with its boundaries therefore problematic. But in of Man, in the sense that "Man" had meant the spite of its wholesale commitment to difference, epistemological subject and bourgeois individual. structuralism was monolithic in rejecting a differ- This disappearance appealed to and helped to ence that crit. had, in one way or another, always give new life to Marxist crit. (q.v.), which had insisted on: for structuralism there was no funda- always been at odds with Neo-Kantian theories mental difference between lit. and any other use that emphasized the autonomy (q.v.) of the text. of lang., i.e. between modes of discourse (see The disappearance of "man" in this sense was also TEXTUALITY). In some quarters, it is true, space not inimical to the interests of feminist crit., w h i c h was allowed for the poem's transgression of cer- would attack the establishment of the literary tain linguistic "rules" (see LINGUISTICS AND POET- canon (see F E M I N I S T POETICS). ICS; SYNTAX, POETIC), resulting in a concept of For a Marxist, the problem with a purely struc- "the literary" after all, most conspicuously in the turalist argument would be that the concept of a Prague School notion of "literariness." On the differential structure, where the empty spaces be- whole, however, one rule applied to all (here was tween words were more important than any idea another attack on so-called elitism), and therefore of the substantial nature of words, did not j u s t call the term "text" came to signify any linguistic phe- into question the human subject; it also raised nomenon at all, then any p h e n o m e n o n whatsoever questions about the material referent of lang. that happened to fall within t h e structuralist gaze. Saussure had proposed the linguistic sign as com- The methods of linguistic analysis, analogically posed of a signifier (sound image) and a s i g n i f i e d applied beyond lang., reduced the world itself to (concept), but he had been equivocal about the a text. Lang, was now not like the world, as in the - [ 25 3 ] - CRITICISM doctrine of imitation; the world was like lang. from epistemological questions to linguistic ones. Structuralist poetics tended, therefore, toward The devel. of modern myth crit. (q.v.) bears a the purely descriptive and ground no axe against more complex relation to the shift toward linguis- science, certainly not linguistic science. Indeed, tic interests. Its sources go back to the many s y n - structuralist crit. was never divided from struc- cretic mythographers of the 18th and early 19th turalist practice in other fields such as anthropol- cs. and the convergence of mythological research ogy; and out of this homogeneity there grew a with the linguistic scholarship of the time, per- tendency to reject the notion of lit. itself, both on haps best represented by Wilhelm von Humboldt grounds that the notion was politically elitist and (1767-1835). A precursor whose importance that linguistics had once and for all leveled such came to be realized was G i a m b a t t i s t a Vico (1668- hierarchical views of lang. Structuralism did not, 1744), whose New Science (1 725) set forth a theory in short, try to discover in poetry a culture-saving of poetic logic embedded in myth (q.v.). The opposition of poetics to science, as the New Criti- principal modern theorist of myth, aside from cism had done. structuralist anthropologists like Levi-Strauss, w a s IX. PHENOMENOLOGY. However, the Continen- Cassirer, known for his definition of man as the tal opponent of structuralism, the pheno- animal symbolicum and for his philosophy of sym- menological crit. of the Geneva School (q.v.), w i t h bolic forms. its connections to the philosophers Edmund In the realm of critical practice, the most note- Husserl and Martin Heidegger, certainly did. Phe- worthy proponent of myth crit. was N o r t h r o p Frye nomenological crit. based its practices on a notion (1912-91), particularly in his works on Blake, of intersubjectivity, the medium of which was the Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, though his poem, which connected authorial consciousness Anatomy of Crit. (1957), unquestionabl y one of the to readerly consciousness without a tour through most important critical works of the century, re- anything that might be described as an object. In garded myth crit. as but one (though a fundamen- one sense this was a return to a kind of romantic tal one) of four critical modes. Although myth expressivism, and in another it foregrounded crit. has been criticized for reducing lit. to extrin- lang., but lang. now as the harboring mediator of sic patterns, it can answer that it brought some of consciousness itself. In practice, phenomenologi- what was ignored by strictly intrinsic formalism cal crit. tended not to close analysis, since there back into the text. This was true of its use of the was no object to analyze, b u t instead made contact concept of archetypal symbols (see ARCHETYPE) , with poetic consciousness. The result was fre- and also true of its revival of the idea of genres. quently a form of critical discourse verging on the One form of myth crit. extends into the analytic poetic and thereby blurring the boundary that the psychology of Carl Jung (1875-1961), though New Criticism and its historicist predecessors had Frye claimed that his own concept of literary ar- built up between crit. as a secondary and analytic chetypes did not require Jung, only an empirical activity (see THEORY) and poetry as a primary and survey of the literary field and attention to poetic creative one. Now, rather than lit. threatening to conventions (q.v.). This view connects Frye with disappear, as in structuralism, all discourse threat- Eliot's conception of literary trad, and presumes ened to become lit. something called "lit." with its own categories and Continental structuralism and phenomenology modes. Thus myth or archetypal crit. was a l w a y s proceeded along their opposed paths, for the making connections among works—sometimes, it most part uninterested in and often ignorant of the was complained, at the expense of differences. New Criticism in America and its sporadic out- Jungian crit., with its own e m p h a s i s on archetypes, breaks in England. Likewise, t h e New Critics k n e w is one form of psychological crit., but of course little of European critical practice; it was not until heretical from the point of view of Freudianism. the 1960s that the two movements appeared in Freudian critical practice emphasizes the psychol- America, quickly f o l l o w e d by their successor, v a r i - ogy of the author, of the characters in the text, and ously called poststructuralism or deconstruction of the reader. A revisionist b r a n d of psychoanalytic (q.v.). Am. New Criticism never did have its day theory developed by Jacques Lacan (1901-81) in Europe, where an academic trad, of explication emphasizes the role of lang. on principles derived d e texte (see EXPLICATION)—though not of the from structuralism. New Critical sort, with its emphasis on irony and XI. READER-ORIENTED CRITICISM. Critical prac- paradox and its antipositivism—had been influen- tice emphasizing the reader has not, however, tial. It can perhaps be said that influence from the been dominated by psychoanalytic t h i n k i n g ; it has Eng. lang. on Continental crit. came more through had a number of different facets, some of which literary artists like J a m e s Joyce than through prac- go back to 19th-c. hermeneutics (q.v.). Against a ticing critics, j u s t as it had come to the 19th-c. Fr. neopositivistic form of interpretation that declares symbolist theorists through the poetry of Edgar the meaning (q.v.) of a text to be that which Allan Poe not the crit. of Emerson. scholarship can reasonably show to be an intention X. MYTH CRITICISM. Structuralism, phenome- (q.v.) carried out by the author (so H i r s c h ) , there nology, and the New Criticism all reflected a pro- is the more historically o r i e n t e d attempt to estab- found shift of philosophical and critical concerns lish what a reader or community of readers con- -[254]- CRITICISM temporaneous with the author would have been distinction between primary and secondary quali- able to understand. This is the version of readerly ties of experience, called into question the possi- crit. known as reception theory or reader-response bility of knowing the privileged primary qualities crit. (q.v.). But all such attempts raise the ques- at all and thus emphasized the dilemma of s u b j e c - tion, which reader? The reader must be a fiction tivism. After 1967, much of Am. crit. was influ- constructed on some set of principles—either enced by J a c q u e s Derrida (b. 1930), the leader of some supposedly empirical, historical construct, the project of deconstruction, who attacked all or else an ideal form (so Iser), a displacement of notions of p r e s e n c e in the sense of referent, calling the older notion of the aesthetic object. In the in question any "origin" or "center" of meaning hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer and thereby seeking to undercut the entire ground (Truth an d Method [tr. 1960]), any such critical act of Western metaphysics—i.e. the concept of refer- bears with it its own historical position, so that ence, the relation of words to their referents in the what is read is the historical space between reader external world. and text, all recovery of the past being "thrown" The New Critics had held that the literary into time. work—or at least the successful literary work—was From Pater onward, all critical practice with a a formal unity. For the deconstructionist, there readerly orientation has had to struggle with the were no works, only "texts," and everything from problem of subjectivity and the threat of an uncon- poems to fashions in clothing were texts; the ver- trollable relativism. If contemp. Am. reader-re- bal medium was n o longer a criterion for t e x t u a l i ty sponse crit. has a locatable beginning, it is prob- (q.v.). The text was now a disseminating disunity ably with Louise Rosenblatt's Lit. as Exploration of differences. Things did not come together in a (1938); this work was interested principally in text, if it could be said that there were things pedagogy and began with the situation of a reader. (there weren't, strictly speaking). The hope of Subsequent, more theoretically oriented readerly closure (q.v.) slipped ever down the chain of sig- crit. is sometimes driven to embrace a thorough nifiers. Rather than a totality, the text offered up skepticism about objectively f i x e d meaning. Stan- only the endlessness of possibility, and one text ley Fish, for example, began his career by exam- flowed toward and into another. Derrida's practice ining how a text controls the reader as it proceeds was to analyze a variety of texts, usually not fictive and later came to conclude that the reader, or a or poetic, to demonstrate that what they seemed community of readers, controls what can be seen to profess as a structure of ideas was in fact contra- in a text. This control is interpretive power, w h i c h dicted by their own behavior, and that these con- is often invested by convention in those in Fish's tradictions were not superficial but fundamen- professional position, namely academic critics. tal—and finally inescapable. Out of deconstructive The text itself has none of the objectivity or power theory spread a critical practice that dismantled invested in it by the New Critics. texts down to their purportedly inevitable contra- XII. LITERARY HISTORY. Nevertheless, except dictions, though in some versions, texts were said where absolute subjectivity reigns, readerly crit. to deconstruct themselves. has an inevitable relation to historical scholarship Derrida had pointed out that structuralist the- because of a need, in several of its versions, to ory taken to its logical end required the abandon- establish the linguistic and semantic conventions ment not only o f the referent but also the signified, of a given period. Historical literary scholarship since every signifier signified but another signi- is, however, relatively new, being, in the forms fier, and so on endlessly. There could be no end to recognizable today, a product of the 19th c. (see the search for an origin or center, which Derrida HISTORICISM). Taine, for example, claimed to named the ever-absent "transcendental signified." treat all lit. in terms of race, milieu, and epoch. V. It could not be known a n y m o r e than could Locke's L. Parrington early in the 20th c. saw Am. lit. primary qualities according to Berkeley; perhaps through the lens of Jeffersonian values; Arthur it did not exist. There was l e f t only play among the Lovejoy brought into play the history of ideas. signifiers in a search for meaning that could be Subsequent historicist crit. has sought to develop carried on properly, in Derrida's view, only with the notion of reading communities. All through the knowledge that it could not be achieved. the modern period, there have been various forms There was some analogy here to the Paterian of Marxist crit. observing lit. and j u d g i n g it against championing of experience for experience's sake, the backdrop of the history of class struggle. More but Derrida's position posed an ethic of irony recently, Marxist crit. has been allied with other rather than a passion for exquisite moments. positions that claim all j u d g m e n t s to be historically This deconstructive view was not entirely in con- grounded, and in this sense relativist—and political. trast to that of the New Criticism, but there were XIII. DECONSTRUCTION. The taking of struc- very important differences. The New Critics em- turalist thought to its logical extreme was one of braced irony, and regarded it a positive principle the acts of the movement which became known as of literary structure that held the work together; deconstruction. It has played a key role in the age it was not just a principle of critical behavior or of linguistics s i m i l a r to that of Berkeleyan idealism attitude. They could imagine a fictive speaker of in the 18th c. Berkeley, b y expanding J o h n Locke's the text. They attacked the notion of fixed final - [ 25 5 ] - CRITICISM meaning on the ground that a paraphrase could On the other hand, it has been argued that decon- never contain a meaning coexistent with the struction's critique is so far-reaching, its skepti- poem's formal being, but did not imagine that cism so thorough, that it seems incapable of com- being itself was endlessly d e f e r r e d . In practice, the mitment to any specific action. Critics who New Critics t e n d e d to produce readings that some- propose certain political or ethical views have times violated their own strictures, resulting in sometimes been interested in deconstructive allegorization. Derrida had been quick to point method while at the same time expressing resis- out that certain structuralists' analyses i n e v i t a b l y tance to it on the ground that its endless irony implied the presence of the very "transcendental seems paradoxically to be a dead end. signified" that their concept of s t r u c t u r e could not In the wake of deconstruction, and frequently logically allow. When deconstruction came to A m e r - opposed to it while at the same time often influ- ica, deconstructionists attacked the New Critics on enced by its methods, came a variety o f p o l i t i c a l l y the same grounds. The work of Frye, which had oriented movements, most of which had their some characteristics close to structuralism, though roots in the political activities of the 1960s (see not the ground in linguistics, was criticized for c r e a t i n g POLITICS AND POETRY). Feminist crit. brought categories that were substantial rather than differen- about an examination of writing by women, past tial. Yet D e r r i d a himself never tired of observing that and present, and a critique of masculine or patri- it was i n the nature of lang. itself to presume existence archal attitudes not only in lit. and crit. but also of the "transcendental signified." throughout Western culture (see FEMINIST POET- The trick was t o keep one's discourse in motion ICS). In this, feminism in its own way paralleled in order to escape as long as possible this fixity. deconstruction's critique of Western m e t a p h y s i c s . With irony transferred from poetry to the activity The feminist attack was principally against the of critical theory itself, it began to appear, from so-called canon of great writers, v i r t u a l l y all male, this perspective, that deconstructive discourse w a s and was one of the forces setting in motion a no different from the discourse it gazed upon. The debate about canonicity in general. This in turn result was, on the one hand, either the disappear- revived debate about literary value, t h o u g h almost ance of lit. or the declaration that all discourse w a s entirely on political grounds, a debate which had literary, depending on how one felt about the been virtually obliterated earlier in this century b y elitist aura of the term "lit." At least in France, intense preoccupation with problems of interp. where these ideas had originated, it was r e g a r d e d XIV. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES. as elitist. On the other hand, there was a turning The New H i s t o r i c i s m , heavily u n d e r the influence in on itself of critical theory toward a degree of of the writings of Michel Foucault, attempted to self-consciousness of utterance and self-examina- reconstitute literary history as a study of power tion previously unknown. Hardly a theoretical relations (see HISTORICISM). This movement was statement could be made that was not quickly paralleled by "culture studies," particularly con- subjected to analysis. The Age of Grit, had given cerned with the social (and power) questions of way to the Age of Theory. race, class, and gender (see CULTURAL CRITI- In the deconstructive practice of Paul de Man CISM) . T h e s e gave particular attention to the pres- (1919-83), texts were seen to have the inherent sures of socio-historical circumstances on the pro- instability of lang. itself, by virtue of the funda- duction of t h e literary text, though most often the mental role of tropes (see FIGURE, SCHEME, line between literary and other texts was deliber- TROPE), which are at once both subversive and ately blurred. Often, too, specifically lit. crit. or seductive. De Man called his critical practice "rhe- literary theory was tacitly rejected in favor of " c r i t i - torical." Since ancient times, the practice of rhet. cal theory" roughly in the sense established by the in the West has involved the analysis of a text so as Frankfurt theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer, et al.) to identify and categorize its tropes (see RHETORIC in the 1930s, when social crit. enclosed literary AND POETRY) . Rhetorical treatises were generally concerns. In these developments the notion of encyclopedias of tropes with instruction on their textuality, as first developed in structuralism, l i n - appropriate use for purposes of persuasion, in- gered on. The notion of "lit." itself was called in struction, and delight—chiefly to persuade. De question sometimes as conceptually elitist, some- Man's revival of the term "rhet.," however, w a s for times as the victim of reductive tendencies in another purpose—revelation of the rule of tropes theories of textuality themselves, where differ- over the intentions of meaning. ences between literary (or fictive) and other uses Deconstruction has been characterized as both of lang., elaborately developed over centuries of revolutionary and reactionary. Generally, decon- theoretical discourse, were explicitly rejected. structionists saw themselves as the former, point- XV. CONCLUSION. Critical practices and theo- ing to their project of criticizing all assumptions ries have developed not only o u t of or parallel with of centers, origins, and transcendental signifieds. philosophical trends. They have also appeared as Certainly deconstruction came about in France in responses to or deliberate defenses of challenging an intellectually radical period, and deconstruc- literary texts. Sidney and Wordsworth both de- tionists had declared their sympathy for leftist fended their own practice. Aristotle responded to positions during the student uprisings in France. both the Platonic theory of imitation and Sopho- - [25 6 ] - CRITICISM
cles; he thereby set in motion, after the recovery ANTHOLOGIES: Comprehensive and General: Lit. of the Poetics in the Ren., a trad, of dramatic crit. Crit. Plato to Dryden, ed. A. H. Gilbert (1940, that has affected Western poetry and fiction even 1962); Lit. Crit. Pope to Croce, ed. G. W. Allen and to this day, the lang. of imitation having been H. H. Clark (1941); Crit.: The Major Texts, ed. W. revived by the Aristotelians of the Chicago School J. Bate, enl. ed. (1970); Lit. Crit. Plato to Dryden, (q.v.) in the mid 20th c. Critical practice in the ed. V. Hall (1970); Crit.: The Major Statements, ed. first half of the 20th c. was heavily influenced not C. Kaplan, 2d ed. (1986); The Theory of Crit.: From only by T. S. Eliot's crit., but also by his poem The Plato to the Present, ed. R. Selden (1988); Lit. Crit. Waste Land (1922). And the challenge of James and Theory: The Greeks to the Present, ed. R. C. Davis Joyce's texts continues to affect critical practice and L. Finke (1989); The Critical Trad., ed. D. H. over half a century after the publication of Fin- Richter (1989); Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. H. negan's Wake (1939). Adams, 2d ed. (1992). In the latter half of the 20th c., lit. crit., apart Classical and Medieval:]. D. Denniston, Gr. Lit. from reviewing in the newspapers and certain Crit. (1924); Ancient Lit. Crit.: The Principal Texts magazines, was practiced in America almost en- in New Trs., ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbotto m tirely by the academic professoriate. This fact had (1972), redacted as Cl. Lit. Crit. (1990); Cl. and interesting causes and consequences. One conse- Med. Lit. Crit.: Trs. and Interps., ed. A. Preminger quence may have been the tendency for critical et al. (1974; also pub. separately). theory (see THEORY) to replace practical crit. as a Renaissance. Elizabethan Critical Ess ays, ed. G. G. principal activity. Enormous attention was paid to Smith, 2 v. (1904); Critical Essays of the 17th C., ed. methodologies, arguments about their relative J. E. Spingarn, 3 v. (1908-9); Critical Prefaces of the merits, and unveiling of their often hidden as- Fr. Ren., and Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinque- sumptions. Virtually absent from this discourse cento, both ed. B. Weinberg (1950, 1970); E. W. was any discussion by an artist defending or pro- Tayler, Lit. Crit. of 17th-C. England (1967); B. moting a practice, or by a critic concerned with Fabian, Poetiken de Cinquecento, 25 v. (1967-69); the special nature of lit., with specifically literary The Continental Model: Selected Fr. Critical Essays of value, or with the particular excellences of a given the 17th C. inEng. Tr., ed. S. Elledge and D. Schier, literary work. H.A. rev. ed. (1970). For fuller discussion of specific types of crit., see Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: 18th-C. Criti- the entries AUTONOMY; IMITATION; REPRESENTA- cal Essays, ed. S. Elledge, 2 v. (1961); Ger. Aesthetic TION AND MIMESIS; AESTHETICISM; HISTORICISM; and Lit. Crit., ed. D. Simpson, K. M. Wheeler, and EXPRESSION; RUSSIAN FORMALISM; STRUC- H. B. Nisbet, 3v. (1984-85)—Kant, Hegel and the TURALISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM; NEW romantics. CRITICISM; CHICAGO SCHOOL; ORGANICISM; CON- Twentieth Century: Contemp. Crit., ed. M. Brad- TEXTUALISM; MYTH CRITICISM; LINGUISTICS AND bury and D. Palmer (1970); Critical Theory Since POETICS; GENEVA SCHOOL; INFLUENCE; MARXIST 1965, ed. H. Adams and L. Searle (1986)—54 CRITICISM; CULTURAL CRITICISM; READER-RE- selections; Mod. Crit. and Theory: A Reader, ed. D. SPONSE CRITICISM; DECONSTRUCTION; FEMINIST Lodge (1988)—30 selections in 7 categories; 20th- POETICS; ETHICS AND CRITICISM; PLURALISM; and C. Literary Theory, ed. K. M. Newton (1988)—50 THEORY. See also ANALYSIS; EVALUATION; EXPLI- excerpts; Contemp. Lit. Crit., ed. R. C. Davis and R. CATION; HERMENEUTICS; INDETERMINACY; INTEN- Schleifer, 2d ed. (1989)—36 selections in 8 cate- TION; INTERPRETATION; INTERTEXTUALITY; SIM- gories; Contemp. Critical Theory, ed. D. Latimer PLICITY AND COMPLEXITY; SUBJECTIVITY AND (1989)—40 selections in 6 categories. OBJECTIVITY; TEXTUAL CRITICISM; TEXTUALITY. HISTORIES AND S U R V E Y S : Comprehensive and Gen- For a survey of crit. within the larger context of eral: G. Saintsbury, Hist, of Crit. and Literary Taste Western poetics, see POETRY, THEORIES OF. The in Europe, 3 v., (1900-4), the Eng. sect. rev. as Hist. major periods of Western poetics are discussed in ofEng. Crit. (1911); Abrams (below); R. Wellek, A greater detail in CLASSICAL POETICS; MEDIEVAL Hist, of Mod. Crit., 1750-1950, 6 v. (1955-86), POETICS; RENAISSANCE POETICS; BAROQUE POET- Concepts of Crit. (1963)—esp. chs. 1, 2, and 11-13, ICS; NEOCLASSICAL POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POST- Discriminations (1970), "Crit., Literary," inDHI, v. ROMANTIC POETICS; AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY 3, Four Critics (1981), and "Lit. Crit.," Encyc. of POETICS. Non-Western traditions in poetics are World Lit. in the 20th C., rev. ed., ed. L. S. Klein surveyed in ARABIC POETICS; CHINESE POETICS; (1983); W. K. W i m s a t t , J r . , and C. Brooks, Lit. Crit.: HEBREW PROSODY AND POETICS; INDIAN POETICS; A Short Hist. (1957); W. Krauss, Grundprobleme der and JAPANESE POETICS. For overview of the West- Literaturwiss. (1968); R. H. Stacy, Rus. Lit. Crit.: A ern and Eastern trads. in poetics, see POETICS. Short Hist. (1974), "Lit. Crit." in Terras; K. K. BIBLIOGRAPHIES: Garland Bibls. of Mod. Critics Ruthven, Critical Assumptions (1979); D. Daiches, & Critical Schools series, gen. ed. W. E. Cain; N e w Critical Approaches to Lit., 2d ed. (1982); A Hist, of Literary History International Bibl. of Literary Theory Ger. Lit. Crit., ed. P. U. Hohendahl (tr. 1988); K. and Crit., ed. R. Cohen, 1-(1988 for 1984-85); Weimar, Gesch. der deutschen Literaturwiss. bis zum Research in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. L. Orr Endedes 19.Jh. (1989). (1989). Classical: C. S. Baldwin, Ancient Rhet. and Poetic - [ 257 ] - CRITICISM
(1924); J. F. D'Alton, Roman Lit. Theory and Crit. Richards, Principles of Lit. Crit. (1925), Practical (1931); J. W. H. Atkins, Lit. Crit. in Antiquity: A Crit. (1929);V. Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929); Sketch ofltsDevel, 2 v. (1934); G. M. A. Grube, The R. Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (1931, tr. Gr. and Roman Critics (1965), A Gr. Critic: Demetrius 1973); T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932, on Style (1961); R. Harriott, Poetry and Crit. Before rev. 1950); W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral Plato (1969); D. A. Russell, Crit. in Antiquity (1935); J. C. Ransom, The New Crit. (1941); K. (1981); W.J. Verdenius, "The Principles of Gr. Lit. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, rev Crit.," Mnemosyne 4 (1983); Cambridge Hist, of Lit. 1957), Lang, as Symbolic Action (1966); E. Cassirer, Crit., v. 1, Cl. Crit., ed. G. A. Kennedy (1989). An Essay on Man (1944); Brooks; L. Spitzer, Lin- Medieval: C. S. Baldwin, Med. Rhet. and Poetic guistics and Lit. Hist. (1948); A. Tate, On the Limits (1928);J. W. H. Atkins,Eng. Lit, Crit.: TheMedieval of Poetry (1948); J.-P. Sartre, What Is Lit. ? (1948); Phase (1943)—one-sided; W. F. Patterson, Three S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949); R. P. Black- Centuries of Fr. Poetic Theory, 3 v. (1935); O. B. mur, Lang, as Gesture (1952); Crane; Empson; Hzrdison,]r.,Med.Lit. Crit.: Trs. andlnterps. (1974); Auerbach; Abrams; R. S. Crane, The Langs, of Crit. Med. Lit. Theory and Crit., ca. 1100-ca. 1376: The and the Structure of Poetry (1953); W. K. Wimsatt, Commentary Trad., ed. A.J. Minnis et al. (1988). Jr., The Verbal Icon (1954); G. Poulet, Studies in Renaissance: F. E. Schelling, Poetic and Verse Crit. Human Time (1956); Wellek and Warren; Frye; R. of the Reign of Elizabeth (1891);J. E. Spingarn, Hist, Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1850 (1958), of Lit. Crit. in the Ren., 2d ed. (1908); C. S. Baldwin, Marxism and Lit. (1977); H.-G. Gadamer, Truth Ren. Lit. Theory and Practice, ed. D. L. Clark and Method (1960, tr. 1975, rev. 1988); R. Barthes, (1939); M. T. Herrick, The Fusion ofHoratian and On Racine (1963), S/Z (1970); E. Vivas, The Artistic Aristotelian Lit. Crit., 1531-1555 (1946); J. W. H. Transaction (1963); W. Benjamin, The Origins of Atkins, Eng. Lit. Crit.: The Renascence (1947); V. Ger. Tragic Drama (1963, tr. 1977); G. Bachelard, H