New Criticism and the Russian Formalists Readings for Lecture VI

Transcription

Literary Theory 1:
Introduction to Literary Theory
BAN 3381
Mondays 1000-1130, room KMTI-1
Dr Richard Major
New Criticism and the
Russian Formalists
Readings for Lecture VI
(November 3)
The movement known as Formal criticism, Formalism
(especially in Russia), ‘New Criticism’ or ‘The New
Criticism’ (especially in the English-speaking world),
arose in the 1920s, and dominated literary theory until
the ‘Eighties.
2. Its essential impulse is to attend to the form of a piece
of art in itself, and to analyse its mechanisms – rather
than to account for these qualities in terms of the artist’s
biography, or of history, or of the piece’s ethical
teaching, or its political programme, or of anything else.
3. It was, in terms of æsthetic vogue, a reaction against
Romanticism. The art and literature of the period
tended to be anti-Romantic: among other things, it
rejected and despised – and perhaps misrepresented –
the ideal of the artist as a man of heroically intense
feeling who reports back on the mysteries of experience.
(At left: a detail from a canvas by de Koonig.)
4. New Criticism disparaged mere literary appreciation (that is, finding and
pointing out the beauties and morally uplifting elements of writing). Such
criticism, said the New Critics, was merely subjective, emotional and Romantic.
Instead they aimed at an objective, systematic method.
ANCIENT LITERARY THEORY:
http://www.richardmajor.com/teaching/Karoli/BAN3381/readings/6.doc
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5. In literature, the dominant method of New Criticism was close reading,
which we will discuss (and practise!) in class.
6. Although New Criticism could, in principle, be applied to any literature, its
precepts did educate literary taste in a certain direction, and thus change the
contents of the canon – which for the first time became a significant question
in literary theory. New Criticism demoted the Romantics (especially Shelley),
the Victorian poets (especially Tennyson), and Milton; it exalted above all the
intellectual and knotty school of John Donne, the ‘Metaphysical Poets’, as the
ideal of what literature should be like.
7. The influence of New Criticism reached beyond literature, because objective,
systematic formalism was a governing impulse, not just in literary theory and
practice, but in much early-twentieth-century art.
Here is a remarkable 1911 painting, The Bathers, by Duncan Grant:
The Times commented: “if you will not demand any illusion, you will find that it
gives you an extraordinarily keen sense of the pleasure of swimming. In fact it
acts on you like poetry or music”, because it seeks to “represent the act of
swimming rather than any individual swimmers.”
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8. New Criticism (especially under the influence of T.S. Eliot) tended to be
respectful of tradition, and to honour the submission of the individual to
authority beyond himself: classicism in artistic theory and practice, and often
Catholicism in religion and monarchism in politics. By no means all New
Critics were royalists or papists, but there was tendency toward right-wing
views and orthodox Christianity. This of course put them quite apart from the
Romantics who came before, and the various literary theorists who came after.
9. The Russian contribution was the vague, ill-defined movement known as
Russian Formalism (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson),
which emphasised the function of literary devices, and advocated ‘scientific’
study of poetic language – excluding traditional concerns with the psychology
of the artist, or his and cultural and historical background. Leon Trotsky, the
intellectual of the Soviet Revolution, conceded that although the “form of art
is, to a … large degree, independent”; but “the artist who creates this form, and
the spectator who is enjoying it, are … living people, with a … psychology
[that] is the result of social conditions”. Art and artistic criticism must therefore
be subjected to the ultimate human concern, which is social change. After 1917
Formalism was persecuted in Russia.
10. It was therefore the Anglo-Saxons who took up the idea of a Formalist
approach to literature. It caught on partly because after the First World War,
English displaced Classics as the most important humanities subject at
universities (partly because of the arrival in tertiary education of women, and
other people who had not been taught Greek and Latin at school). English was
popular, but it lacked intellectual discipline. Textbooks were “full of
biographical facts and impressionistic criticism” which did not help students
analyse literary language.
New Criticism was thus driven by educational concerns: it offered an
empirical approach to literature; the claim was that the study of literature
(even vernacular fiction!) was as scientific and worthwhile as any other subject.
11. New Criticism was thus concerned with language. It is the particular
quality of poetic language defines poetry: the quality variously described as
‘paradox’ (Cleanth Brooks), ‘emotive language’ (I.A. Richards) or ‘ambiguity’
(William Empson). Poetry – which is to say, successful and serious literature –
says what cannot be said in any other way, using any other sort of language.
Literary language is different in kind from the language of an editorial or a
work of non-fiction. It cannot be paraphrased. Indeed Brooks wrote an
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influential essay on ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’: poetry serves no didactic
purpose; producing some kind of statement would be counter to a poem’s
purpose; “through irony, paradox, ambiguity and other rhetorical and poetic
devices of his art, the poet works constantly to resist any reduction of the poem
to a paraphrasable core”.
12. Literature is thus a form of knowledge, and the rigorous study of
literature is a serious intellectual pursuit.
13. Cleanth Brooks, an Oxford-educated American, laid down these principles
in an essay called ‘The Formalist Critics’:
• That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity –
the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the
relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.
• That in a successful work, format and content cannot be separated.
• That form is meaning.
• That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
• That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction,
but got at through the concrete and the particular.
14. From the 1970s onwards, New Criticism passed out of fashion (which of
course makes no difference at all to what we think of it). It was attacked for
being anti-historical, because being “concerned primarily with the work
itself”, “making the closest examination of what the poem says as a poem”. “A
poem by Donne or Marvell does not depend for its success on outside
knowledge that we bring to it; it is richly ambiguous yet harmoniously
orchestrated, coherent in its own special aesthetic terms”. Is this a plausible
approach?
15. New Criticism was moreover attacked by the Poststructuralists, who
argued that, far from creating unity and harmony, the various ‘paradoxical’
impulses in a work of literature actually warp and deform it; every literary text is
pressured from within by its contradictions. Subjectivity and relativism are
inevitable in literature, and thus in literary criticism and literary theory – an
approach, said Brooks, which meant “each critic played with the text’s language
unmindful of aesthetic relevance and formal design”.
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T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)
I have taken these extracts from what is easily the most influential single essay in the literary
theory of the twentieth century.
What is to be insisted upon is that the
poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past and that he
should continue to develop this
consciousness throughout his career….
What happens is a continual surrender of
himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The
progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality.
There remains to define this
process of depersonalization and its
relation to the sense of tradition. It is in
this depersonalization that art may be
said to approach the condition of
science.
Honest criticism and sensitive
appreciation is directed not upon the
poet but upon the poetry ….
The poet’s mind is in fact a
receptacle for seizing and storing up
numberless feelings, phrases, images,
which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new
compound are present together.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with
fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
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For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?…
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination
of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty
and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it
and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic
situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is
inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the
drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a
number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means
superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion….
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular
events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His
particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry
will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of
people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact,
of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in
this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The
business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones
and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all….
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it
is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to
want to escape from these things….
There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere
emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate
technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant
emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the
poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And
he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely
the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of
what is dead, but of what is already living.
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Click on cover to get the text of the whole book
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CLOSE READING
The practical application of New Criticism is the technique known as close
reading, in which a short passage is studied, as if through a microscope, line-byline and word-by-word, so as to understand exactly how language is working.
1. I.A. Richards (Practical Criticism) on close reading:
2. William Empson
on Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’:
Gray’s Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
What this means, as the context makes clear, is that eighteenth century England
had no scholarship system…. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put
into a mood in which one would not try to alter it. ... By comparing the social
arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives
it a dignity which was undeserved. ... The tone of melancholy claims that the
poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges
against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality
and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we
ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death….
Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the
complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because
they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the ‘bourgeois’ themselves do
not like literature to have too much ‘bourgeois ideology.’…
And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree
that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the
waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy,
cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of
value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be
prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is
certainly non-political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the
great poetic statements of it are in a way ‘bourgeois’, like this one; they suggest
to readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be
improved even in degree.
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EXERCISE
1. Now work through this online
close-reading of Gerard Manley
Hopkins’ poem ‘Margaret’.
2. Have a look at how Cleanth
Brooks conducts a close-reading of
the same poem: pp. 80-90 of
Practical Criticism . You needn’t study
Brooks’ work too closely; just make
sure you grasp the attention, the
sustained intelligence, and the
concern with the unity of the poem
as a complete work of art.
3. Familiarise yourself with William
Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ (here it is as
first published, in Blake’s own handcultured woodcut), and the two
other short poems.
We will perform close readings on them in class.
W. S. Merwin
Separation (1962)
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Robert Herrick
Upon Julia’s Clothes (1648)
Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
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New Criticism and the Russian Formalists Readings for Lecture VI

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