American Literary Criticism From the Thirties to the Eighties by Vincent B. Leitch

American Literary Criticism From the Thirties to the Eighties Reviews

• 
  Mark Bowles

  A. Intro: This book examines 13 American critical schools and movements from the 1930s to the 1980s. He argues that the history of criticism is not separable from economic, social, political, cultural, and institutional history. There has been one main conflict during these years in literary criticism
  1. “Formalistic” schools: They are devoted to linguistic, ontological, and epistemological habits of mind. Exemplified by New Criticism, Chicago School, phenomenological criticism, hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction. Discounted the reader and privileged the text. Literature is a semi-autonomous aesthetic artifact. Liberal and conservative politics.
  2. Cultural movements: They are devoted to sociological, psychological, and political modes of thinking. Exemplified by Marxist criticism, New York Intellectuals, myth criticism, existential criticism, reader-response criticism, feminist criticism, and Black Aesthetics movement. Privileges text over reader. Literature is a cultural production. Leftist and Left-Liberal politics.
  B. Marxist Criticism in the 1930s
  1. Four schools emerge in this decade: Marxists, New Critics, Chicago Critics, and New York Intellectuals.
  2. Marxist philosophy: Historical modes of production, base (economics)/superstructure (culture)
  a) Materialism: The priority of matter over mind
  b) Economic determinism: Economics are the basis for all society
  c) Class struggle: The struggle of social groups are the motive force of history
  d) Labor theory of value: Production of social value through work
  e) Reification: Capitalist commodification of relations and resultant alienation
  f) Proletarian revolution: Seizure of power by the working class
  g) Communist utopia: The establishment of a classless society
  3. Marxist aesthetic theory
  a) Art depends on a particular social formation
  b) Art is an instrument of political action
  c) Art is relatively autonomous
  4. V.F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature (1932) was the first full-length Marxist study of American letters. Calverton rooted American literature in the class system. Most post-bellum writers were from the middle class. They became alienated from Bourgeoisie culture and began to criticize individualism. Collectivism would replace individualism.
  5. Frankfurt School in America during the 1930s. This German school was led by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse. This school reexamined the foundations of Marxist thought. They linked Marxism and Freudianism. They had more influence in America in the 1960s than in the 1930s.
  6. “New Criticism” versus Marxism. The New Critics sought to ban politics from literature (just the opposite from what the Marxists tried to do). Marxists argued that the New Criticism was dangerous because it was indifferent to the fate of the community.
  C. The “New Criticism”
  1. The major development after the Depression was the overwhelming success of the New Critics in instituting formalist concepts and methods. T. S. Eliot was a leader here. In the 1950s the New Criticism dies yet became immortalizes as the status quo of the field.
  2. Fundamentals of the New Criticism
  a) Focuses on the text itself as separate from the context of the writer
  b) Explores the structure of the work and not the mind of the author or reader reaction
  c) Organic theory of literature: Each word contributes to the entirety of the text
  d) Pays close attention to the reading of the work to understand its meaning
  3. Close reading of short texts or poems. The intent of reading was to uncover the structure--not the meaning of the poem which NC saw as irrelevant.
  4. What was the pedagogical mission of the New Critics? To move criticism to the university, to make a profession of criticism.
  D. The Chicago School
  1. This was a reaction against the New Criticism and provided an alternative formalism. Outside of the University of Chicago they attained little popularity while the New Criticism swept the nation. The Chicago School emerged as a reemphasis on humanities in the wake of growing interest in the sciences. Like the New Critics they sought to remove literary history (the study of the context of a written work) and center on the text itself. Where they differed was on the role of theory. New Critics: practice over theory. Chicago School: theory over practice.
  2. Chicago theory: All works were divided into 4 parts, plot, character, thought, and language. The New Critics privileged language. Chicago School placed that last. Methodological pluralism was also a key component of the Chicago School. They examined the logical bases of variation among different literary theorists. There were a plurality of valid philosophies, many ways to attain truth.
  E. New York Intellectuals
  1. These were radical and democratic, socialists (opposed to Stalinism and Soviet Totalitarianism). They opposed commercialism, mass culture, academicism, and American boosterism. They began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1970s but with less influence after the 1950s.
  2. The NYI linked literature to culture. As such a literary work should be examined from many perspectives. Since literature was linked to culture all approaches to study culture could be used to study literature (psychoanalytical, sociological, biography, etc.).
  3. How did they differ from Chicago School and the New Critics? The NYI wanted to understand the writers social existence. This was completely opposed by the other 2 schools.
  4. Psychoanalysis was very important to these cultural critics. This technique was not used in isolation but in conjunction with other methods. It was subordinated.
  5. The NYI focused on modern literature.
  6. Because they hated academe and did not seek out is posts the New Critics were able to become the established critical method.
  F. Myth Criticism
  1. Myth Criticism is a literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions of recurring myth patterns or timeless archetypes. . Their heyday was from the late 1940s to the 1960s. What united these critics was a way of thinking about literature and criticism based on European philosophy, anthropology, or sociology. They reacted against formalism and technology and yearned for a spiritual significance to the world. Science destroyed myth and left man godless and homeless.
  2. They were inspired by Carl Jung who proposed that there was a collective unconscious below the personal unconscious. This collective unconscious (the source of myth) was where all superior literature came from. When we read these mythological archetypes we are swept away and become members of the race.
  3. This emerged in the 1950s as the strongest rival to the New Criticism. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) was the great work of this genre. Frye argues that where the New Critics failed was to separate a text from its communal or archetypal context.
  G. Phenomenological and existential criticism
  1. Context of the 1950s and 60s as one of conformity and big business (The Organization Man). Young intellectuals turned to Continental philosophy as an alternative.
  2. Phenonenology: The most important and founder of the movement at the turn of the 20th was Husserl. This was an attempt to establish scientific truth by going beyond objective Lockean empiricism and subjective Kantean idealism. Instead he examined objects as experienced by subjects. Intentionality of consciousness: phenomena does not exist independent of subjects, the subjects themselves intentionally constituted meaning on phenomena.
  3. Existentialism. The most influential were Heidegger and Sartre (Being and Nothingness). While phenomenology was an epistemology, existentialism was an ontology. This existetialist state of being was one in which God did not exist, humans had no essence, ethics were subjected and had to be reinvented for every context, and man is alone in an uncaring universe.
  4. Both phenomenology and existentialism strove to affirm human subjectivity, deny scientific objectivity, and celebrate the individual.
  5. Geneva style phenomenological criticism contrasts sharply with all previous forms of criticism. The object of this criticism was to share the experience of an author as they constituted the world. The criticism itself was literature. The manifesto of this school was Consciousness of consciousness, literature about literature.
  6. Christian existential criticism. Sartre argued that there are two types of existentialists Christian and atheistic. American theologians and literary critics represented the Christian existentialists.
  H. Hermeneutics
  1. Developed from the 1960s to 1980s and reflected some of the key preoccupation’s with the Vietnam era. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation which is concerned with understanding the meanings of texts. The goal of interpretation was meaning. Interpretation is based on the hermeneutic circle and involves problems such as the text’s meaning, the author’s intention, historical meanings, and reader’s contribution to the meaning. Heidegger’s hermeneutical “revolution.” He wanted a phenomenological ontology as the grounds of understanding--a way to interpret being.
  2. What this position argued was wrong with the New Criticism and myth criticism was that they separated subject and object (reader and text). Hermeneutics argued that the literary work should not be separate from historical context or the reader. Richard Palmer’s Hermeneutics was one of the founding documents.
  3. The second phase of the hermeneutical movement was in the mid-1970s and its attempt to come to terms with deconstruction.
  
• 
  Arthur George

  Very solid coverage of the range of criticisms of the era. It was dense reading and slow going, but worth it. It was highly theoretical and philosophical in perspective, with no real examples of how the various kinds of criticism work in texts, which would have been useful, which is why I gave it 4 rather than 5.
• 
  Luiz

  It Beats Eagleton´s and Compagnon´s Books by Far.