The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.

Robert Lowell, the New Critics, and the “Unforgivable Landscape” of Liberalism

This essay argues that Robert Lowell’s poetry demonstrates a critical engagement with the liberal individual that he is not often given credit for. By examining Lowell’s handling of the pathetic fallacy, whereby the external landscape is made to match the mood of the observer, the essay reveals a critique of the historical formation of American individualism, visible in how Lowell connects the literary historical tropes he is employing to the history of American “imperial” violence. This is first shown through a close reading of “Mouth of the Hudson.” The essay connects Lowell’s view to those of his New Critical mentors, such as John Crowe Ransom, for whom the individual of the liberal political order is entwined with the history of Puritan iconoclasm and Romantic views of the poetic subject. It argues that Ransom’s critique parallels those of later critics, such as Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, and Maria Damon, who see Lowell’s poetic self as both solipsistic and symptomatic of an American liberal ideology. Demonstrating that Lowell’s views were formed by a critique of liberal individualism, it then attempts to show how Lowell moved beyond this in his later work, harnessing a depiction of the poetic subject’s individual experience to a critique of individualism itself as manifested in the American political worldview of the Cold War era. It reads “Beyond the Alps” as a demonstration of the way Lowell is able to wed both critique and depiction of individuality together through a self-aware handling of the poetic landscape.

New Historicism: Kajian Sejarah dalam Karya Imajinatif Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un Saddam Hussein

Penelitian ini membuktikan bahwa kajian kesusastraan dengan menggunakan new historicism mampu mengungkap pelbagai kekuatan budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik yang menyetubuh dan menyelinap dalam setiap sela teks sastra yang merupakan ranah estetik (aesthetic richness). Penelitian ini mengungkapkan bahwa karya sastra tidak dapat dipisahkan dengan pelbagai konteks zaman dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, serta politik yang melingkupinya. Penelitian ini tidak sependapat dengan konsep new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 dan Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) dan William K. Wimsatt dan Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 dan The verbal Icon, 1954) yang mengatakan bahwa karya sastra merupakan autotelic artefact. Sehingga menjadi tidak tepat ketika pemahaman terhadap sastra dikaitkan dengan pengarang, pembaca, maupun konteks di luar karya sastra. Penelitian ini mendukung konsep new historicism Stephen Greenblatt (Practicing New Historicism, 2000) yang menyatakan bahwa dunia imajinatif-estetis tidak pernah terlepas dari relasi kekuasaan dunia realitas yang termanifestasi dalam karya sastra sebagai apresiasi estetis individu dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik. Berdasarkan interpretasi kritis new historicism Greenblatt terhadap novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un diperoleh hasil penelitian berupa pemahaman karya imajinatif yang penuh dengan simbol yang lebih lengkap dan dalam (deeper understanding of value) dengan melibatkan konteks ekstrinsikalitas karya sastra di dalamnya dan novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un hadir sebagai tanggapan reflektif-imajinatif Saddam Hussein sebagai pengarangnya.[This research proves that literary studies using new historicism can reveal the various cultural, social, economic, and political forces that intercourse and sneak in every literary text: aesthetic richness. This research reveals that literary works cannot be separated from the various contexts of the era and the cultural, social, economic, and political praxis that surround them. This study disagrees with the concept of new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 and Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) and William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 and The verbal Icon, 1954) literature is an autotelic artifact. So it is not appropriate when the understanding of literature is associated with authors, readers, and contexts outside of literary works. This research supports Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism concept (Practicing New Historicism, 2000), which states that the imaginative-aesthetic world is never separated from the power relations of the world of reality which are manifested in literature as an individual aesthetic appreciation and cultural, social, economic, and political praxis. Based on the critical interpretation of Greenblatt's new historicism of the Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal'un novel, the research results are in the form of a deeper understanding of imaginative works of symbols (deeper understanding of value) involving the context of the extrinsicality of literary works in it and the novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal. 'un appears as the reflective-imaginative response of Saddam Hussein as the author.]

James Wright

Poet James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia. His father worked at a glass factory and his mother at a laundry. The poverty of Martins Ferry, his parents’ working-class existence, and the Great Depression affected Wright, and at age sixteen he suffered a nervous breakdown. He later enlisted in the army, serving in Japan. Upon his return, he attended Kenyon College on the GI bill. There Wright studied under John Crowe Ransom and received a foundation in New Criticism, a critical approach that heavily influenced Wright’s early poetry....

Reviewing the South: Competing Canons in South Today and the Kenyon Review

This chapter considers the editorial careers of Lillian Smith and John Crowe Ransom. Lillian Smith co-edited the little magazine South Today from 1936 to 1945 out of Clayton, Georgia, while John Crowe Ransom was the long-time editor of the Kenyon Review, a journal important in the proliferation of the New Criticism. This chapter uses these two figures, their periodicals, and their editorial decisions to show two competing criteria for a literary canon at the moment of World War II. Smith, whose magazine published many of her own essays on southern culture, was an anti-segregationist, and values literary works that established a progressive view on race relations. Smith’s ideal literary canon was a socially and politically engaged one. On the other hand, the optics of being apolitical by emphasizing aesthetics were the guiding principles for Ransom in his leadership of Kenyon Review, evidenced by the kinds of criticism and reviews published.

Kenneth Burke and the New Critics

Most scholars of American theorist Kenneth Burke consider him a founder of the post-war New Rhetoric, a movement to shift rhetorical studies from a historic focus on persuasion to a more expansive understanding of language, dialogue, and communally constructed truths. However, Burke throughout the 1930s and 40s thought of himself primarily as a literary critic, albeit one who turned literary critical techniques to the social scene around him. Without his ongoing, often contentious dialogue with the literary scholars of the New Criticism, Burke’s rhetorical theories on the power of language to answer questions of human motivations may well have never materialized. New Criticism and New Rhetoric, therefore, forged each other in the crucible of the mid-century years of depression and war and the intellectual ferment they generated. It was Burke’s attempts to explain himself to these literary critics and exhort them to turn their critical lens to the world around them that provided the methodology for his action-analysis of the socio-political world. In this article I examine three of these contentious relationships—with Allen Tate prior to World War II, with John Crowe Ransom during the war, and with René Wellek following it. Their debates and congruences led Burke to formulate his purposely ambiguous understanding of hierarchies and norms that constitute what he termed the “wrangle” of parliamentary debate— a constitutive rhetoric that continues to drive international relations today.

Regionalism

In American literature, regionalism refers to works that describe a distinctive local geography and culture, and to movements that value smaller-scaled representations of place over representations of broad territorial range. Regionalism emerges from the perception of modern geographic plurality; writers and readers understand a larger unit of space (commonly the national territory) to be diversified at its periphery according to topographical features, economy, history, dialect, and manners. A region is always one among many within a common container, characterized by uneven development between center and periphery. Regionalism indicates that a writer has chosen to focus on one of the areas outside the centers of power, and to organize the work around that region. In American literature, regionalism has been associated with the sketch or short story, although the category can accommodate poetry and the novel. Regionalism’s detractors have treated it as a minor form portraying outdated folkways, more parochial than literature that features a larger spatial scale and cosmopolitan characters. Its defenders reject that evaluation, often arguing that regionalism provided access to female, nonwhite, and rural writers, who used the form in innovative and empowering ways. As a literary category, regionalism originates in the post-Civil war era, but many critics locate its origins in the antebellum period, when women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe offered sketches of rural New England, while Southwestern humorists promoted the storytelling style and wilderness settings of the nation’s frontier territories. In the late 19th century, the term gets used interchangeably with “local color” to designate stories set in relatively undeveloped areas, such as coastal New England, the South, the Midwest, and California. Regionalist writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, and Charles Chesnutt were perceived to be contributing to American realism, doing so by describing, piecemeal-style, the varied conditions of American life. In the 20th century, regionalist movements such as the “Revolt from the Village” school (Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters) and the “New Regionalism” (Mary Austin and John Crowe Ransom, for example) rejected both modern American standardization and the “local color” writers, accusing those earlier artists of capitulating to East Coast taste. Writers who have been studied as instrumental in the development of 20th-century southern regionalism include William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, while Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gloria Anzaldúa have been especially important in literary regionalism of the West.

Context Rocks!

Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?

‘Influence poetry once more’: Allen Tate and Milton's ‘Lycidas’

The standard narrative of the Milton Controversy in the early twentieth century has frequently regarded the New Criticism as part of the modernist antipathy towards Milton, which was fostered by articles such as F. R. Leavis's ‘Milton's Verse’ (1933) and T. S. Eliot's ‘A Note on the Verse of John Milton’ (1935). This essay challenges such depictions of two prominent New Critics – Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom – as inveterately hostile to Milton, arguing instead that he occupies a significant place in their poetry and criticism. By also considering these American writers’ debts to Milton as a context in which to situate the early work of a British poet deeply influenced by them, Geoffrey Hill, the essay opens up new perspectives on Milton's transatlantic reception in the mid-century and his importance to modernist poetics.