Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
Norman Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Minority Report

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful

Philosophy ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 36 (136) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Anthony Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Academic Philosophy

Burke's Enquiry is one of those books that hovers, importantly but ineffectively, at the fringes of the attention of most modern readers of philosophy. It is something that they have always meant to read some time but yet which they all too seldom get around to actually reading. Its neglect, no doubt, is mainly to be accounted for as part of the generally rather forlorn position of aesthetics in our intellectual landscape. Students of literature disregard aesthetics as at once too schematic and abstract for their purposes and as too often the work of people inadequately equipped for and experienced in the direct criticism of literature and the arts. Although the dominant style of modern criticism had as one of its principal sources a fairly consciously philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature, namely Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism, in its prevailing form, as manifested in the writings of Dr. Leavis and his fol-lowers, it is hostile to any pretensions to critical relevance on the part of academic philosophy. If it rejects impressionism for determinedly intellectual analysis of the detail of literature, it still relies on philosophy only in the loosest and most colloquial sense of the word in so far as it embodies a definitely articulated point of view on questions of morality. (This is not true, it should be added, of the corresponding American New Criticism.) On the other hand, aesthetics has only figured in the most fitful and peripheral manner on the agenda of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Wood Pulp ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pulp Paper ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 138-183
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Racial History

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

ANNE BRONTË'S SHAMEFUL AGNES GREY

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hallemeier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agnes Grey ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

Historical Poetics and the Dream of Interpretation: A Response to Paul Fry

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-318
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
White Male ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third

Abstract As a response to Paul Fry’s essay “The New Metacriticisms and the Fate of Interpretation,” this essay asks a few questions: (1) Isn’t “metacriticism” what the twentieth century meant by literary criticism? (2) Why is modern literary criticism so defensive when it comes to lyric poetry? (3) What happens when the historical situation of a lyric literalizes apostrophic address? The answer to the first of these questions is yes. The answer to the second question depends on the critic, but this essay points out that defenses of lyric began in the early nineteenth century, so modern lyric theory continues a long tradition. The white male supremacist foundation of those defenses informs definitions of lyric poetry as utterance overheard, as solitary self-address. Fry is right that historical poetics attempts to rock that two-hundred-year-old foundation. The answer to the third question is that many poets have also rocked that foundation over those two centuries. The essay ends by interpreting an apostrophic ode written and published by George Moses Horton in 1828. Horton’s enslavement in North Carolina literalized the figurative situation of address that has come to define lyric reading.

Emerson and Whitehead

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Harry Modean Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
Logical Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.

scholarly journals Loss of Innocence: Albert Moll, Sigmund Freud and the Invention of Childhood Sexuality Around 1900

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lutz D.H. Sauerteig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Normal Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Experiences ◽  
Childhood Sexuality ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The One

AbstractThis paper analyses how, prior to the work of Sigmund Freud, an understanding of infant and childhood sexuality emerged during the nineteenth century. Key contributors to the debate were Albert Moll, Max Dessoir and others, as fin-de-siècle artists and writers celebrated a sexualised image of the child. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most paediatricians, sexologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and pedagogues agreed that sexuality formed part of a child’s ‘normal’ development. This paper argues that the main disagreements in discourses about childhood sexuality related to different interpretations of children’s sexual experiences. On the one hand stood an explanation that argued for a homology between children’s and adults’ sexual experiences, on the other hand was an understanding that suggested that adults and children had distinct and different experiences. Whereas the homological interpretation was favoured by the majority of commentators, including Moll, Freud, and to some extent also by C.G. Jung, the heterological interpretation was supported by a minority, including childhood psychologist Charlotte Bühler.

The Creole of Mon Louis Island, Alabama, and the Louisiana Connection

1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Louisiana French ◽  
Language Data ◽  
New Evidence

Louisiana French Creole (LFC) has clearly been undergoing decreoli-zation in the twentieth century; its exact nature is difficult to determine, since the only evidence from the previous century available up to now has come from literary texts of that time. Language data was elicited from elderly informants whose parents were the last monolingual creole speakers living in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. Since communication between the speakers of New Orleans Creole and Mobile Creole was quite commonplace, Mon Louis Island Creole (MLIC) represents new evidence relating to nineteenth century LFC. This study presents an analysis of the MLIC and LFC noun phrase and verb phrase. Mon Louis Island (MLI) speakers use two-stem verbs which are not attested in nineteenth century LFC texts. On the other hand, there are developments in LFC, such as preposed definite articles, that were not documented in MLIC. Thus, the MLIC data might help distinguish the features already present in the nineteenth century from those which represent more recent changes in LFC.

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