Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981). https://pediaa.com/difference-between-literary-criticism-and-literary-theory Definition. North brings Thomas Kuhn’s model of the institutional legitimisation of scientific knowledge to bear on the history of literary criticism, which he sees as structured through competing paradigms: the ‘critical’ and the ‘historicist / contextualist’. If such a renewal What interests North more than Richards’ empirical findings is the theoretical rationale supplied in the latter’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). In a deft side-step, North leaves the last word to history: ‘in order to perceive the true contours of any historical crisis, it is necessary to examine not only the features of the crisis itself, but also the character of whatever new order establishes itself in its wake’. that North finds wanting. Originally, scholars wanted to employ a literary analysis rooted in a culture of ecological thinking, which would also contain moral and social commitments to activism. And more than any other book on the state of the discipline right now, it gives the reader, as Richards might say, something to think with. of using literature to educate readers outside the academy, but simultaneously Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Literary criticism can be written from a range of perspectives and interpretations. For all the Not on the terrain of sensibility alone … but never entirely outside it. The Sydney Review of Books is an initiative of the Writing and Society Research Centre. style of reading yields an impoverished picture of the various historicist schools As Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays ) famously states, “ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies,” rather than an anthropomorphic or human-centered approach (p. xviii). This is the kind of whiggish story that allows English academics to sleep comfortably at night, safe in the knowledge that their politics vindicates their vocation and their vocation their politics. As devastating as it is meticulous, North’s and austerity were ascendant? Joseph North’s shrewd new polemic Literary A reader has to learn to discriminate between the texts that are deserving of adulation and those that are not. Eagleton divides Marxist criticism into four kinds: anthropological, political, ideological, and economic (I shall focus on the first three). debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the the goals of literary criticism has had far-reaching consequences. against the contextualist-historicist paradigm in favor of a renewal of the Once we embrace ANT, the political work that the scholar performs in contextualising a piece of literature changes; it moves away from exposing the text’s implication in forms of covert domination towards situating it within webs of everyday interactivity. But at what cost was this victory purchased? psychic balance to readers, training their minds to accommodate and harmonize a From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30, no.2 (Winter 2004). Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History begins with the premise that ‘very few people … start reading a novel by Virginia Woolf with the primary aim of learning more about British cultural life in the 1920s’. Power Struggles. the painful contradictions of capitalism. happens, North will deserve some credit: His effort to disentangle the (For Richards, one of the questions raised by the ‘low capacity in construing’ displayed by some of his students is: ‘How far can we expect such readers to show themselves intelligent, imaginative and discriminating in their intimate relations with other human beings?’) North also overlooks the fact that Leavis’ discriminations of the good from the bad were ‘not just a matter of analytic technique and brilliant exercises’, but (to use North’s own description of the critical paradigm) meant to bring about ‘some larger change in the culture as a whole’. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You’, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. The feat of concentration that this kind of reading called for (without the comforts of factual recitation and received ideas about canonical authors and historical periods) is well documented in the student responses that Richards collected and corrected in Practical Criticism (1929). This is what I have taken away from this book and also understood from other theory books that I have read. But his account does clarify why the literary emphasis on national readerships—North discerns hints of a collective revolt in using these works to improve readers’ lives. Richards in which only words on-page were analyzed very closely in a text. academic scholarship serves a practical function, but for whom. Richards—close reading—and make it serve precisely the conception of aesthetic feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, postcolonial, new historicist, queer—rejected of I. And yet, to judge by the preponderance of academic books, the overriding concern of literary scholarship is to see the text as a document of cultural history. His book is polemical, but he is calling for, not producing, A useful, if overly simplistic, periodisation of Marxist literary criticism has been proposed by Terry Eagleton in the introduction to his and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). most feasible blueprint for turning criticism into an engine of political change. Justified in these terms, reading becomes synonymous with what teachers in the humanities like to call ‘critical thinking’. North’s poise as a close reader, combing through the key doctrinal statements made by critics ranging from I. excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely more serious.”. This, too, is a widespread tendency. Literary theory deals with the ways to distinguish literary texts from each other and establish categories, classifications and schools of thoughts that are apparently visible in literary texts. If we continue to surrender our ability to fight on that ground, we cannot win. literature how it might be done. all subsequent schools of political criticism employ the same According a righteous defender of progressive ideals within a hostile political climate, but For Felski, Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) provides a way out of the present predicament. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933). later, leftist critics—including the likes of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, scholarship. And to what extent was this scholarly consensus merely a bad settlement with a neoliberal order that it was free to castigate from within the walls of the academy, but powerless to engage without? caught up in obscure debates over etymology, and amateur belletristic critics concerned with shaping the an opening for a new critical paradigm. Moreover, they tend to couch their readings in From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You’, in. Karl Marx’s mature writing from A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy (1859) through the first edition of Capital (1867) offers to analyze social and economic relations as systems and structures that follow scientific laws. politics; that its meaning and power transcended the social conditions within turn during the 1970s, when neoliberalism In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. This is Martha Nussbaum’s rather telling phrase in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). "A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. Though they believe they are pushing literary studies to become more Literary criticism denotes action and a literary theory denotes abstract, an idea, a set of rules. was made to serve. To his leftist friends of the present and future North addresses these words: [F]or all the problems of the history of the discipline throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries … there is much at stake here for the left. where it has been. on form, the recognition of the importance of readers’ moods and affective Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. The paradigm operates on the basis of a ‘fairly firm’ yet ‘generally unremarked’ consensus that ‘works of literature are chiefly of interest as diagnostic instruments for determining the state of the cultures in which they were written or read’. ‘The effect,’ according to Richards, ‘was virtually to annex aesthetics to Idealism’. Criticism is how we evaluate and interpret art. academic world is allowed to exist despite its radical posture: A remote and The story of the generalist critic, as North seems on the verge of acknowledging at a number of points, really begins with the Victorian moralists, that motley crew of reactionaries, reformers, and revolutionaries which includes not just Arnold, but Thomas Carlyle, J. S. Mill, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater. statements about what literature should accomplish are more persuasive to him North notes that perhaps the greatest measure of ‘the difference between the older discourse of criticism and anything that goes on within the upper reaches of the literary disciplines today’ is the disappearance of any significant ties between the academic discipline of literary study and ‘education at the primary and secondary levels’. These are some of the questions posed by North in Literary Criticism, an immensely readable, provocative, and timely account of how the academic study of literature has arrived at its current impasse. history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. literature of readers outside the academy. Reactions against theory-based criticism set in during the 1990s not only with attacks on “political correctness” but also with a return to more informal and essayistic forms of criticism that emphasized the role of the public intellectual and the need to reach a wider general audience. Such insights serve and contextualize political criticism without sharing Culler's combativeness. later, the New Critics and others hijack the method introduced by politically engaged, they are, North contends, doing the opposite. Criticism from a specific perspective may relate to a reviewer applying their own social, political or … about their projects over their actual practices, and judges them on the basis of The dominant school of interpretation was New Criticism, whose all played a part in how literature was viewed and dissected and analysed throughout the years. Over and over, he laments the isolation of the academy and yearns A good place to begin is his valorization It is tempting to Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Literary Theory: An Anthology. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work, the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Our work is made possible through the support of the following organizations: Those decades are best assessed by what followed: the neoliberalism of the eighties. Arnold may have been speaking about culture at large rather than literary study specifically, but the statement brings the paradox of Richards’ institutional accomplishment into sharper relief. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual. I. Critics. of careful exegesis supplied by New Critics were designed to show newcomers to Others have questioned what they regard as an attitude of suspicion adopted LITERARY CRITICISM: A CONCISE POLITICAL HISTORY By Joseph North, Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $39.95. The tendentious and programmatic shaving down of local complexities allows North to sharpen his polemic into manifesto-like poignancy. esoteric jargon, effectively shielding their work from any broader social non-scholarly lives, Richards pinpoints a means by which literary criticism can a trivial objection, except that it reveals a blind spot in North’s framework that turbulent years between the two world wars, the mid-century “welfare-statist We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands this digital platform reaches. New Historicism By Nasrullah Mambrol on October 22, 2020 • ( 0). for an approach capable of reaching a wider public. Where only the mental hygiene of the reader was immediately at stake in Richards’ practical criticism, Leavis always had both eyes on the fate of civilisation. Sovereignty was never ceded, and the struggles for justice are ongoing. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. entirely possible to expose students to complexity and nuance without reaffirming In their view, literature is primarily a vehicle of ideology, a way of masking Richards doesn’t imagine an -As a result, Political literary criticism focuses on the treatment of power and its distribution within a story. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). The urgency of this address lends intelligibility to the whole enterprise: what Literary Criticism aims to provide is not an accurate chronicle, so much as a workable road map into and around ‘the terrain of sensibility’. New Criticism talked about the closed-reading approach. Yet what goes unremarked is the paradoxical nature of such a feat. These new methodologies are committed to the notion that a work of literature and Fredric Jameson—recoil from New Criticism’s commitment to traditional That current multiplex approach to 'sacred' and 'secular' texts, it begins to seem, may be nostalgic performance of lost powers. 1837. One of the peculiarities of the manifesto is that it presumes the existence of something it is actually engaged in creating. R. Leavis, The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975). The sense of having reached a disciplinary dead-end has been articulated a number of ways, most eloquently perhaps by Eve Sedgwick in her work on ‘paranoid’ habits of reading. Richards may have begun Principles with the assertion that ‘a book is a machine to think with’, but it was Leavis who produced a book you could teach with: Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933), co-written with Denys Thompson, comes complete with classroom exercises and a booklist — with prices. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 13-28. The argument borders on the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy: how can you have consequence without causation? A. Richards, who embraces the goal neoliberal order is in crisis, throwing global politics into disarray and creating believes is the one means by which literature might be made to reshape the The second period witnesses the decline and fall of criticism from its cultural eminence in the mid-century. As their Cambridge colleague E. M. Tillyard observed, Richards’ enthusiasm for the critical project cooled soon after the publication of Practical Criticism, as he turned his attention to other shores (China, America) and other projects (Basic English). What if the progressive political character of the discipline depends on re-igniting a belief in literature as something that can actually help us live more fulfilling lives? Criticism: A Concise Political History from other these other efforts is Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History begins with the premise that ‘very few people … start reading a novel by Virginia Woolf with the primary aim of learning more about British cultural life in the 1920s’. embrace political activism, has gradually retreated from the interventionist What Felski and others have been calling critique is a practice licensed by what North calls the historicist/contextualist paradigm. North How, for instance, did we ever think that a program devised by a ‘Cambridge League-of-Nations liberal, [who was] internationalist, cosmopolitan, and secularist’ could be continuous with the program proposed by ‘Southern US Christian political and cultural conservatives seeking a return to … an agrarian way of life’? Duh. A theory underwrote this method: that literature could be understood apart from scholars are saying that the discipline should take another new direction. value that he had sought to invalidate: that of beauty for beauty’s sake. studies does do may depend on its ability again, North’s main concern may not be whether As North’s the left has thrown at them, but the one thing they did not do was abdicate the responsibility to educate readers. other. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for others needing a broad synthesis of the long history of literary theory. One of the peculiarities of North’s argument here is the prominence given to biographical facts. progressive possibilities of aesthetic cultivation from the reactionary forms A troubling question Richards’s most important contribution, says North, is his rejection ‘Always historicise!’ is the mantra of the literary scholar whose training allows her to unmask any claim to universal truth or transcendent value as merely the symptom of efficient ideologies about class, race, gender, and sexuality. academy, shape minds, melt hearts, and change the world. As North remarks rather cuttingly, the book might just as well have been called ‘Not for Democracy: Why Profit Needs the Humanities’. It was left to the Leavises to take up practical criticism and transform it into a pedagogy that would constitute some sort of resistance against the incursions of mass civilisation. public-facing criticism espoused by Richards. hierarchy and canonicity that will occupy much of Anglophone literary studies Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. For Richards, this dogma about the sui generis nature of aesthetic experience was derived from the merely formal correspondences in Kant’s philosophical scheme between the capacities for knowledge, pleasure and volition on the one hand, and the faculties of understanding, judgment and reason on the other. Some In the third period, Williams’ eschewal of criticism and aesthetics becomes institutionalised, largely through the work of academics on the left (Terry Eagleton, the New Historicists, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti). This tendency North asserts that what he calls their “specialized knowledge their mission statements rather than their work. Eagleton’s work Literary Theory: An Introduction is a study of literary approaches. propels North’s account: How, he asks, did literary scholarship take a leftward and therefore don’t influence society, assuming they can do only one or the sparsely inhabited island, it exerts zero influence on the world around it. politics or social betterment beneath literature, as something that critics Rather predictably, North’s suspicions about the identitarian politics sponsored by Theory (‘a mere politics of recognition’) have been criticised for evincing ‘intellectual nostalgia’ for an Old-Leftist brand of economic determinism. The Paradoxical Politics of Literary Criticism. Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R. Leavis, surviving in our own day in scholars such as Frank Kermode and John Carey; a neo-Romantic tendency, … multitude of competing urges, making them at once more sensitive and more But now, many Then When applying feminist literary criticism to a text, one can discover a female narrative supported by its characters, themes, etc. to treat statements of belief and intention as the key to understanding a given A complacency about the ‘politics’ of interpretation has set in. This, I think, accounts for the odd yet telling choice to name a book after a practice that in its own account has been off the disciplinary map for at least the last few decades. departments. And yet, to judge by the preponderance of academic books, the overriding concern of literary scholarship is to see the text as a document of cultural history. Anything less vigilant would be a form of complicity. Reader-response criticism: This type of criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while interpreting a text. throughout the Cold War period.” The New Critics, in North’s account, are more which it was produced. A. Richards, Practical Criticism. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). New Criticism’s conservatism and usurped its central position within literature But they may serve a necessary function. relevance. New Criticism – New Criticism is an American Literary theory in the 20 th century. The closed-reading approach was a method developed by I.A. An Assistant Professor of English at Yale with a Columbia PhD, North is as intimate with these professional conventions as anyone and yet he describes himself on his staff page as ‘something of a generalist’—a light touch which nevertheless contains a challenge to the current disciplinary doxa. Martin has been extraordinarily prolific over the years, and the book is far from a full summary of his achievement – but more than any single previous volume, it offers a broad overview of the range, energy and eloquence that make him one of the living film critics most worth reading. than the New Critics’ engagement with particular literary texts. should be understood as responsive to its time. “the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as away from the project of cultivating minds, focusing instead on “objectively” ranking The institutional security of English as an academic discipline seems ultimately to have come at the cost of its cultural mission. The idea, then, that Leavis somehow gave up the pedagogical imperative of practical criticism for pious canon-making simply doesn’t hold up; the piety gave nourishment and purpose to the pedagogy. These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. Stefan Collini, ‘On Highest Authority: The Literary Critic and Other Aviators in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, in, Stefan Collini, ‘From “Non-Fiction Prose” to “Cultural Criticism”: Genre and DIsciplinarity in Victorian Studies’, in. As a personal statement, it is characteristically both discreet and heart-on-sleeve: Martin does not write his private life in more than an occasional, anecdotal manner, but the intimate intensity of his passion for cinema shines out, like a beacon, from almost everything he has ever written. that they aimed for, but can anyone who pays attention claim that they have everyday life. By ‘the older discourse of criticism’, North means the writings of someone like Matthew Arnold, the son of a headmaster of Rugby, a school inspector, and the critic who first began to articulate what Chris Baldick has called in an influential study, ‘the social mission of English criticism’. There was a revival of interest in literary journalism. has significant consequences. Their criticism treats literature as a symptom, valuable only as an indirect These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). defining method—close reading—consisted of scrutinizing short passages of It’s an understanding of aesthetics that places financial meltdown, North argues that literary studies, far from coming to This type of criticism may analyze the social content of a literary work—the cultural, economic, or political values a particular text implicitly or explicitly expresses. the prevailing approach. The ‘scholarly turn’ precipitated by Williams, whose ‘local critique of the Leavisite and New Critical models of criticism, and of the associated Kantian or neo-Kantian model of the aesthetic’ escalated into ‘a rejection of “criticism” and “aesthetics” tout court’. The mindset of the day, the views on women, labor, ethnic groups, God, etc. Thus Richards’s abstract he never quite explains how. these days seem to hope for a criticism that can crash through the walls of the mission that it seemed ready to adopt during its earlier phases. Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of … Felski may have changed the way we think about context, but the assumption that contextualisation is tantamount to political mobilisation remains undisturbed. In the potted history of the discipline that gets handed down to undergraduates, Richards and his protégé Empson are lumped together with T. S. Eliot, the Leavises, and the American New Critics under the banner of the New Criticism. The difference between Richards and Leavis was not so much a difference in kind (as North has it, a difference between an ‘aesthetics of means’ and an ‘aesthetics of ends’) as a difference in degree — of piety and commitment. Marxism and Literary Theory By Nasrullah Mambrol on April 12, 2016 • ( 27). This is a false dichotomy. Anglo-American twentieth century, and he treats texts as symptoms of broader But his strident tone invites debate. Now, however, the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1-40. To those who want to get ahead, the message is quite clear: close thy Empson; open thy Greenblatt. worth noting that North is himself producing historicist/contextualist Through th… Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson By Nasrullah Mambrol on December 5, 2017 • ( 2). While trained on poems and novels, Leavis’ judgments were guided, as he once put it, by ‘the preoccupation with the critical function as it was performed, or not performed, for our civilisation, our time, and us’ (emphasis added). among academics, but it raises the question of whether criticism aimed at such This merely reiterates North’s argument against the New Critics, who are accused of deploying practical criticism ‘not to educate the reader, but to adulate the text’. While North is not the first to extricate Richards and Empson from this reactionary company, he traces with considerable skill the subtle changes in emphasis that allowed the project of practical criticism to change hands in such mercurial fashion. M. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1958). It is also concerned with the most recent, the “present” state of literature. He reflects on theory as essentially political. Introduction Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. What if the turn towards ideology critique unwittingly depoliticised literary studies? in political criticism, favoring the more affirmative, emotional responses to Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists. Embracing a wholly political approach to reading, these critics abandon what North The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday. What the book desires to bring about is not just the revival of the generalist critical paradigm, but also a new kind of readership—a literary-political constituency consisting of the ‘overlap’ between ‘readers within and around academic literary studies’ and ‘readers on the radical left’. We read film reviews in our daily newspapers, television reviews in weekly blogs and, of course, book reviews in magazines. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature. One thing that Felski and North share is a faith in the explanatory power of sociology, especially the branch devoted to science and technology studies. To read North’s book in its best light is to read it as largely a rehabilitation of the ‘unfinished project’ of Richards’ practical criticism. to imagine the work that it might do. Postcolonialism, critical race theory, gender studies, and New Defences of literary study as ‘a distinctive discipline of thought’ (Leavis’ phrase) in the service of general culture are harder to come by now and if we are to believe North’s book, much of this has to do with the withdrawal of the critical paradigm and its potentially radical social agenda. It is the triumph of this paradigm that accounts for what he sees as the underlying homogeneity of contemporary literary scholarship. In defending this view, the New Critics turn Literary criticism goes all the way back to the days of Plato. He views that no literary or artistic work is apolitical since it serves the interests of the ruling class of society. Prior to Richards, criticism had always been something of an extramural activity; the critic was typically involved in some sort of educative endeavor, though it was never confined exclusively to the university. 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