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