Contents General Editor’s Preface viii Acknowledgements x Introduction: Moving beyond the Politics of Interpretation 1 Part I Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory: A Critical Introduction 11 1. Twentieth-Century Formalism: Convergence and Divergence 13 • Separate yet human: Humanism and formalist conventions 17 • Moving from theory to practice: The legacy of I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks 22 • Another way of knowing: Formalism as literary discourse 26 • The limits of formalism: Universalism, eclecticism, and morality in the work of F. R. Leavis and Kenneth Burke 28 • The evolution of formalism: The case of Northrop Frye 33 • Formalist concerns in the present 36 2. Russian Formalism, Mikhail Bakhtin, Heteroglossia, and Carnival 39 • Signs, signifiers, and the Prague Linguistic Circle 44 • Bakhtin and the narratological revolution 47 3. Reader-Response Theory, the Theoretical Project, and Identity Politics 51 • Transactional reading in the theories of Louise M. Rosenblatt and Wayne C. Booth 53 • Reader-response theory, narratology, and the structuralist imperative 57 vi Contents • A subjectivist feast: Reader-response theory and psychological criticism 63 • Searching for the gendered self: Reader-response theory and feminist criticism 73 4. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, and the Professionalization of Literary Studies 80 • ‘Meaning as an event’: The evolution of Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory 82 • ‘Reading’ critical theory, professionalization, and the lingering problem of intentionality 86 Part II Readings in Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory 91 A: Formalist Critical Readings 5. Travelling through the Valley of Ashes: Symbolic Unity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 93 • Nick Carraway’s narrative of hope and wonder 96 • The Great Gatsby, the romantic tradition, and narrative transcendence 103 6. Charlotte Brontë and Frye’s Secular Scripture: The Structure of Romance in Jane Eyre 107 • Romance and its contexts: The archetypal play of form and feeling 107 • Romantic expectations: Heroes, heroines, and their quests 112 • Descent and ascent: The structural movements of Jane and Rochester 117 B: Reader-Response Critical Readings 7. ‘Telle us som myrie tale, by youre fey!’: Exploring the Reading Transaction and Narrative Structure in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde 123 • Chaucer, narrative discourse, and the Clerk’s Tale 124 • Chaucer and the transactional possibilities of literary parody 129 Contents vii 8. Addressing Horizons of Readerly Expectation in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, or, How to Put the ‘Reader’ in ‘Reader Response’ 136 • Engendering reader-response through Conrad’s and Ford’s literary impressionism 138 • Marlow’s journey to the ethical void 140 • Dowell’s narrative circumlocution and the ethics of storytelling 145 Conclusion: Beyond Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory 154 Notes 157 Annotated Bibliography 169 Works Cited 177 Index 188 1 Twentieth-Century Formalism: Convergence and Divergence Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons – which means that its proper seat is in the universities. (John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body) The business of the critic is simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn. (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity) Theory, which is expectation, always determines criticism, and never more than when it is unconscious. The reputed condition of no theory in the critic’s mind is illusory. (John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body) Perhaps the most dominant and influential of all forms of criticism during the twentieth century, formalist thought likely remains the most misrepresented. While the far-reaching political and ideological force of Anglo-American formalism’s New Criticism cannot be denied, it is all too often caricatured as a monolithic reading strategy, one somehow devoid of any theoretical acumen. In Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Gerald Graff contends that although contemporary ‘defenders of theory tend to equate the New Criticism itself with unreflective empiricism . in its time the move- ment stood for theoretical reflection against the primitive accumula- tion of data’ (247). Ransom’s decree that literary criticism need become ‘more scientific, or precise and systematic’ points away from a naïve perspective that reading and interpretation are somehow natural activities. Sadly, Ransom’s assertion includes a more elitist 13 14 A Critical Introduction demand that such activity should occur behind the walls of universi- ties and colleges. But we should not assume that Ransom’s desire to shift the power of reading and interpretation to the academy was shared by all New Critics. A group whose margins and membership remains unclear in many ways,1 the New Critics represent only one strain of formalism, and, even within this particular group, much diversity and tension existed. Because of New Criticism’s reign in the academy from roughly 1940 to 1960 – and, perhaps more significantly, the programmatic institutionalization of its standards as the normal or natural practice of reading for several generations of students and teachers in secondary schools in America – the New Criticism became the target or scapegoat of competing forms of criticism – even while many of its specific strategies or skills remain the basis for other more overtly ideological forms of reading. New Criticism claims such diverse and noted practitioners as William Empson, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, Kenneth Burke, F. R. Leavis, and Yvor Winters, among a host of others. The sheer number and diversity of names in this list implic- itly points toward the marked differences that existed within the named boundaries of this group. Yes, all of these critics undertook a shift away from the various forms of biographical, moral, and socio- logical criticism practiced by a previous generation in order to focus upon the formal aspects of the art object, but such a shift inevitably led each critic down different roads, offering markedly different perspectives of the same artistic scenery. The story of the New Criticism begins in the 1920s, when seeds for an explicit turn to formalism were planted and began to take root in America and England. In America, such groups as the Fugitives and the Agrarians articulated a shift away from historical or biographical criticism toward an emphasis upon close reading. In such journals as The Fugitive, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Sewanee Review, critics waged a battle for the work of art itself, stri- dently proclaiming that we must honor art for art’s sake, not for the sake of the artist’s life or for some political cause. Under the editor- ship of such noted critics and poets as Ransom, Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, these journals not only established a forum for such critical discussions but also published many of the poems that would later come to embody the very critical standards championed by the New Criticism. In England, a similar movement was underway. Under Formalist Criticism 15 the tutelage of Eliot, some of the same concerns were mirrored in the pages of The Criterion, as well as in the work of Empson and Richards. Although most literary historians agree that Eliot moved beyond the New Criticism during the 1930s and 1940s – shifting his role from literary critic to that of social critic – his influence upon British and American formalism continues to manifest itself most dramatically in the idea of the text as sacred. In his authoritative treatise The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot advances the idea that the decadent devolution of the contemporary world represents a marked turning from the ordered, unified world whose very creation implies a sacrosanct, higher order – a complexity and wholeness that can only be found in a turn away from skepticism and science. The alienation of modernity, Eliot suggests, results from our turn to secularism and industrializa- tion, a condition that may only be overcome in a return to myth and religion. Not surprisingly, then, Eliot champions texts and forms of criticism that value what he calls a ‘unified sensibility’ – a complexity of thought and wholeness birthed from some religious or mythical order. For this reason, Eliot champions a poet like Dante and dismisses a poet like Blake: the former works toward unity and claims a traditional mythological framework, philosophy, and theology, while the latter does not subscribe to any set of accepted or tradi- tional ideas. For Eliot, the sacred unity found in the poetry of the highest order is born out of a homogenous (in his case, a Christian) cultural inheritance. While Eliot’s work marks a significant turn toward a formalist study of literature, the breadth of his career cannot be characterized in the same terms as those who more passionately championed the New Criticism. Rather, Eliot saw his own work in less exclusive terms, explaining in To Criticize the Critic (1965) that ‘it is impossible to fence off literary criticism from criticism on other grounds, and that moral, religious, and social judgments cannot be wholly excluded’ (25). While not all formalists aligned themselves with Eliot’s religious views, their actual practice of literary criticism mirrored the idea of the text as sacred. Much of the world beyond the text – and even more to the point, beyond the security of the walls of academe that guarded the most influential formalists – crumbled beneath the weight of wars and economic depression, beneath the onslaught of radical shifts in social and intellectual thought. Not surprisingly, in a climate of cataclysmic upheaval, the role and meaning of a given text altered radically, taking on the increasingly important but harrowingly illusive role of stabi- 16 A Critical Introduction lizer.