Decolonize Practical Criticism?

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (270) ◽  
pp. 227-236
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington ◽  
Jarad Zimbler
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Practical Criticism

Abstract This article reflects on what it might mean to decolonize practical criticism in the current moment by considering previous responses to the same imperative. It discusses critical and institutional interventions by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Mervyn Morris, Chidi Amuta, and, more recently, Harry Garuba and Benge Okot. In this way, the article demonstrates that the antidote to colonial paradigms of literary criticism has not been a pedagogy that prioritizes context over text but a critical practice oriented to a work’s formal and technical context of intelligibility. Such a practice demands that readers inhabit the literary constraints and possibilities encountered by postcolonial or otherwise peripheral writers.

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

scholarly journals The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kucich
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Potential Integration

Historicism remains relatively robust in Victorian Studies, but it has developed rather quietly in two contrary directions – synchronic and diachronic – that have long constituted an important theoretical fault line. The first half of this essay surveys these two ongoing types of Victorian historicism and urges the importance of integrating them; the second defends historicism from a recent theoretical movement that deflects attention from that potential integration: the critique of ‘suspicious reading’. The essay focuses on general methodological issues that affect how we defend humanistic scholarship, since historicism's continued development remains vital not only to Victorianists but to the discipline as a whole. While historicism has been both enormously reinvigorating and much contested, by friend and foe alike, the tectonic shift in our critical practice that it represents has never crystallized a simple, coherent set of principles that might define the mission of literary studies within the humanities. Although there are many ways to justify literary criticism, historicism will always be centrally entwined with them. Affirming the role suspicious reading plays in historical contextualization and clarifying the methodologies and objectives of historicism are thus tasks that still lie urgently before us.

Beweren of bewijzen

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-228
Author(s):  
Mathijs Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
And Function

Abstract Claiming or Proving. Models in Dutch Literary Criticism around 1917The first two decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid expansion of literary criticism in the Dutch literary field. Models played an important role in contemporary debates about the nature and function of criticism. In search for new modes of critical writing after the Movement of 1880, critics (consciously or not) made use of discursive conventions, textual genres and exemplary predecessors in order to determine their own critical practice. This article develops a model for studying the specific features and functions of models in literary criticism by analyzing a questionnaire in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer in 1917.

I. A. Richards

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Paul Russo
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Second Career ◽  
Pocket Book ◽  
Four Books ◽  
University Professor ◽  
Practical Criticism ◽  
Basic English

Ivor Armstrong Richards (b. 26 February 1893; d. 7 September 1979) is among the most and influential theorists and critics of literature in the 20th century. A student of Moral Science at Cambridge University (1911–1915), he was the intellectual offspring of the Age of Principia. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead, among others, were completing a philosophical revolution by rejecting varieties of 19th-century idealism, seeking to ground philosophy in first principles, and reasserting a native empiricism with an emphasis on language, logic, and analysis. The Newtonian term is apropos because there had been nothing so sweeping in British philosophy since the 17th century. Richards taught in the new English School at Cambridge from 1919 to 1939, where he developed his ideas and conducted his famous experiments in reading, resulting in Practical Criticism, thereby becoming one of the founders of New Criticism. The interdisciplinary play of his writings has led to his being labeled a linguist, a psychologist, or a philosopher. Yet the deepest vein of his interest lay in the theory and practice of criticism. He best belongs in an anthology together with Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot; not in one with De Saussure, Jakobson, or Chomsky; nor in one with Skinner, Piaget, and Allport; nor in one with Dewey, Ayer, and Quine. The peaks of his achievement in the 1920s are The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden) (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929). His ideas were widely disseminated in his compendium Science and Poetry (1926). Richards’s involvement with Basic English, which was the creation of C. K. Ogden, grew throughout the 1930s, becoming almost a second career. Basic English is a technique of learning the language based on 850 key words, the ones that could do the most work with the least effort (there are only sixteen verbs). He wrote four books on Basic in the 1930s alone, spending three years in China in the hope of creating a national experiment. Meanwhile, these studies in language learning (and second-language learning) alternated with theory of criticism: Coleridge on Imagination; The Philosophy of Rhetoric, with its revolutionary theory of metaphor; and Interpretation in Teaching, which attempted to perform for prose what he had done with poetry in Practical Criticism. Thus, there were the two careers, like parallel corridors, at times crossing each other’s path, or at the least with windows open between them. From 1939 to 1974 he taught at Harvard University, becoming University Professor in 1944. Basic English and Its Uses (1943) remains his most useful introduction to the subject. The Pocket Book of Basic English: A Self-Teaching Way into English (1945), coauthored by Christine M. Gibson, led to his Language through Pictures series, eventually including eight languages, some of which went into film-strip and other media as the technology became available. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1964 and was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal in 1971. His testamentary Beyond (1974) explores the Book of Job, Plato, Dante, and Shelley.

Secondary Metalepsis?

Metalepsis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Talitha Kearey
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Critical Practice

This analysis of metalepsis in the Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae, an allegorical exposition of Virgil’s Aeneid by the sixth-century Christian Fulgentius, enables the formulation of a new critical concept, ‘secondary metalepsis’. In this phenomenon, the diegetic levels of author, narrator, and narrative are blurred not by the same author but by another, who employs the figure of the first author and their text within their own new (‘secondary’) work. The chapter identifies Genette’s ‘Virgil has Dido die’ as an example of secondary metalepsis rather than (as Genette claims) authorial metalepsis, before discussing key hermeneutic dynamics in the Expositio, a work whose most striking feature is its necromantic conceit that the exegesis is not in fact Fulgentius’, but is delivered by the shade of Virgil himself. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how considering the metaleptic dynamics of literary criticism—both ancient and modern, both ‘nonfictional’ and embedded within unequivocally fictional frames—can help refine our understanding of metalepsis itself, its use in classical antiquity, and its far-reaching implications for literary-critical practice in general.

The Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of a Profession

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kopec
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New Critics ◽  
The One ◽  
Data Reading

The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

SEMANTIC COUNTERPOINT AND THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119
Author(s):  
Dennis Sobolev
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Practical Criticism

IT IS WELL KNOWN that both traditional, historically orientated, literary criticism and new-critical studies were inseparable from a belief in the “unity” of meaning – a belief in the existence, below the multicolored surface of the literary text, of a single semantic center, which unifies the text and turns it into an “organic whole.” Similarly, Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, though critical of the notion of the “organic whole” and its use in art criticism by the Neo-Romantics and the Symbolists, never questioned the alleged semantic unity of the literary text. An alternative approach to the problem of meaning was developed in the early books of Michel Foucault and conceptualized in his Archeology of Knowledge; he described meaning as “dispersal” and “dissemination.” A little later, in Dissemination and On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida radicalized Foucault's position by questioning the existence of clear-cut boundaries for Foucault's semantic “dissemination,” and he applied this notion in both philosophy and literary criticism. The resultant polemics between the two major approaches to the problem of the organization of meaning in the literary text caused the extreme polarization of literary studies; moreover, this polemics was often based on the tacit assumption that there exist only these two possibilities of the formal description of such organization: it should be described as either “unity” or “dissemination.” At the same time, from the logical, a priori, point of view, these terms describe only the poles of possible organization of meaning; moreover, practical criticism tends to show that both pure “unity” of meaning and its pure “dissemination” are very rarely found in literary texts. Thus, it seems to me, that those scholars who work in the field of literary criticism and cultural theory should attempt to create more complex and more precise models of the organization of meaning, which will transcend the dichotomy of “unity” and “dissemination.” One of these such models, the model of “semantic counterpoint,” is described and exemplified in this paper.

Morality and the Assessment of Literature

Philosophy ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 37 (141) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Pole
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Small Contribution ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Practical Criticism

At the beginning of The Principles of Literary Criticism I. A. Richards complained of the chaos of critical theories—a complaint that we hear pretty often, generally from theorists about to add to it, each making his small contribution. Richards' own contribution was a plan for reckoning the merit of poetry in terms of the more or less organised psychological state that it serves to induce in its readers: for poetry, he held, organises our ‘attitudes’—a term that may be taken in different ways. The theoretical picture that Richards connects with it, a vivid enough picture in its way, is of a kind of stock exchange of neural impulses; but perhaps in his practical criticism the word reverts to its ordinary sense. And surely the practical criticism, not the neurological speculation, is what has served to keep Richards' work alive. This is the aspect, at least, to which I shall confine my attention here; my concern is with the use of these and similar concepts in the practical business of criticism. For here we have critical approach, a technique and an orientation, that has in point of fact increasingly established itself. And the fact is one, surely, that aesthetics cannot ignore; a general theory should take notice of practice. But if this is only to add still more to the notorious chaos, I cannot see any alternative course short of abandoning the subject altogether; and that alternative, at least for those who are instinctive theorists and generalisers, is an impossible one.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Mia Gaudern
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Artistic Medium

Etymology has been linked to poetry in various ways since the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with theory—from formalist understandings of etymology’s role in ambiguity through the contested place of philology in modern literary criticism to poststructuralist interpretations of etymology as a purely rhetorical category—this chapter surveys the use of etymology in critical practice. It also introduces the ‘etymological poetry’ of Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon through examples of their ‘self-inwoven etymologies’. Finally, a version of Paula Blank’s theory of the ‘quasi-disciplinarity of etymological desire’ is proposed: for poets who suspend its force between critical discovery and poetic invention, etymology can address profound tensions that lie at the heart of the use of language as an artistic medium.

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