Hello and welcome back to this lecture series
on Literary Theory. Today, we are going to
start our discussion on the on a school of
literary criticism that is usually identified
within the field of English studies as Anglo-American
New Criticism, or simply as New Criticism.
It is a way of approaching and understanding
literature that held sway in the field of
English studies both in the universities of
Britain and of America, roughly during the
second and the third quarters of the 20th
century.
So, we are basically moving forward by about
a 100 years or so, from the Romantic literary
theory which we discussed in our previous
two lectures. Now, I think that by now you
have already been able to notice a trend that
is emerging in this series of lectures. So,
whenever we take up any new literary theory
for discussion we see that its emergence is
strongly tied up with some kind of socio-political
change or even turmoil. And, this goes on
to show actually how integrally the politics
and revolutionary social movements are tied
to changes in the cultural world.
So, in my introductory lecture for instance,
I have already discussed how what is today
often labeled as literary theory or even simply
as theory was an intellectual product of the
political turmoil of the 1960s, when students
and workers gathered in the streets of Paris
to protest against authoritarianism. But,
as I have also explained earlier the 1960s
though important, is not a one-off moment,
rather in the history when socio-political
revolution has led to the emergence of new
cultural theories about how to create and
how to read literature.
Indeed, as we have seen in our previous lectures
the very emergence of English literature as
a subject of systematic study and indeed also
as a subject of systematic criticism was connected
with its own history of socio-political upheavals.
This, for instance, was the history of the
decline of the power of monarchy and aristocracy
in England and the emergence of a new bourgeois
public sphere during the 18th century.
Similarly, while discussing the emergence
of Romantic literary theory, we have seen
how the ideals of French revolution have shaped
it. In today’s discussion of New Criticism,
we will see how a political epicenter of this
new intellectual movement might be located
in the outbreak of the First World War. And
as you all know that this war started in 1914,
and continued till 1918, and it resulted in
a manslaughter that was unprecedented in human
history, and this was really a world that
was at war.
So, even though the immediate incident that
triggered the war was a rather localized issue
of European politics which was the killing
of the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire named Franz Ferdinand. It soon grew
to involve not only the whole of Europe, but
also America for instance, Russia, it triggered
Bolshevik revolution there, and also a large
part of Asia and Africa, primarily because
these places were European colonies.
So, just to give you a perspective a war that
began with the murder of an Austrian prince
ended up killing more than 1 crore or 10 million
soldiers worldwide, out of whom 70000 were
Indian soldiers. So, amidst this widespread
killing and destruction there was a pervasive
sense of losing one’s grip on the world
as it was known till then, and of course,
this sense of alienation and this sense of
loss was the sharpest in Europe which was
at the epicenter of the whole political turmoil.
So, the German intellectual Walter Benjamin
writes very eloquently about this feeling
in his essay titled “The Storyteller”,
where Benjamin observes that it was noticeable
how after the First World War and I quote
from Benjamin:
“Men returned from the battlefield grown
silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable
experiences?” Benjamin argues that this
was because of all their past experiences
that allowed these people to communicate with
the world around them and to understand how
things functioned within that world was destroyed
by the First World War
And, I quote from Benjamin again: “For never
has experienced being contradicted more thoroughly
than strategic experience by tactical warfare,
(again something that was employed during
the First World War), economic experience
by inflation, (so, there was runaway inflation
during the First World War), bodily experience
by mechanical warfare, morale experience by
those in power. A generation that had gone
to school in horse-drawn streetcar now stood
under the open sky in a countryside in which
nothing remained unchanged, but the clouds,
and beneath these clouds, in a field of force
of destructive torrents and explosions, was
the tiny, fragile human body.”
New Criticism in many ways is the literary
product, is a sort of literary theoretical
product, of this fragile human being who has
been shorn of all certainties of the world
that he knew of by the destructive torrents
and explosions of the First World War. Hence,
it is a literary theory that sways between
two desires, between the desire to rediscover
for oneself the lost sense of tradition through
literature and literary appreciation, this
is one of the poles of that desire and the
other pole is the effort to read literature
without the help of any context, without the
help of any socio-cultural tradition.
Because, all of these have been made meaningless
by the experiences of the First World War
and I think the first pole is best represented
by the theoretical works of T. S. Eliot. And,
the other pool is best represented by the
school of practical criticism initiated by
I. A. Richards and during the course of today’s
lecture we will explore both these poles,
but we will start with T. S. Eliot.
Now, T. S. Eliot is too famous a figure within
the field of English literary studies to need
any introduction and in any case we will have
to return to the works of T. S. Eliot as a
poet when we engage theories of Modernism
in one of our future lectures. So, for now
I will just mention his dates which are 1888
to 1965 and I will also like to mention the
fact that Eliot was born in America, but spent
the most part of his adult life in England,
which was in contrast to the other major theorist
of a New Criticism I. A. Richards who was
born in England, but then went on to teach
at the Harvard university in America.
So, this explains why New Criticism is also
regarded as an Anglo-American critical tradition
because this theory really spans the two sides
of the Atlantic in more than one ways.
And, since we are talking about nomenclatures,
let me also note here that the term New Criticism
was derived from the 1941 book titled The
New Criticism written by the American scholar
John Crowe Ransom who used this name to bring
under a common umbrella the critical thoughts
of intellectuals like Eliot, Richards, and
others.
So, the name New Criticism actually came much
later and only after the critical positions
of a people like Eliot and Richards had become
mainstream within the Anglo-American academia.
So, coming back to Eliot again, the piece
of theoretical work that I want to focus in
this lecture today is an essay titled “Tradition
and Individual Talent”. It was published
in 1919 which means it was almost immediately
published after the end of the First World
War and it contains basically two interrelated
sections followed by a very brief conclusion.
The first of these sections revolves around
the idea of tradition and at the heart of
how Eliot defines tradition is the notion
of what he calls historic sense and I quote
from the essay:
Eliot says, “The historical sense involves
a perception, not only of the pastness of
the past, but of its presence”. In other
words, tradition which is posited on the historical
sense is a constant folding in of the present
into a temporal continuum and thereby a fitting
in of the present within the template of the
past.
And it is important to note here that this
constant fitting in of the present within
the past is a dynamic process. So, the present
and the new become meaningful only when inscribed
onto the template of the past, but in being
so, inscribed it also simultaneously changes
what the past is, thereby also modifying the
sense of tradition. Now, all of this might
sound rather complex and vague. So, let me
try and produce a concrete example of how
tradition connects the present with the past.
So, let us say I write a poem of fourteen
lines today praising the beauty and intelligence
of my pet cat. Now, this poem written in the
present will not make much sense from the
view of literary criticism and literary appreciation
until and unless we have what Eliot calls
the historical sense and until and unless
we connect the poem on my cat with the poetic
tradition of sonnet writing which uses the
fourteen line form.
And it is only when the present poem is enfolded
within the sonnet tradition that we will be
able to see how the cat in my poem plays the
same role as a beloved named Beatrice in the
sonnets written by the medieval Italian poet
Dante. Indeed this comparison is important
for my cat poem work at all as a piece of
literary creation.
Therefore, Eliot argues and I quote, “No
poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation
is the appreciation of his relation to the
dead poets and artists. You cannot value him
alone; you must set him, for contrast and
comparison, among the dead.”
Now, it is also important to note here that
the influence of the past tradition on the
present poetry or work of art is not unidirectional,
but rather it works both ways. So, in other
words my cat poem does gain in meaning by
being folded within the sonnet tradition,
but it also simultaneously changes the sonnet
tradition. That is to say if any of you try
your hand at writing a sonnet tomorrow you
will now have to engage with a tradition that
is constituted not only of the sonnets written
on the beloved by Dante, but also my cat sonnet.
So, my poem of fourteen lines written in the
present is subsumed within the existing tradition
even while altering the contours of that tradition
for the future generation of poets like you.
But, having established the fact that a historical
sense of the tradition is significant for
any poet or any creative artist in general,
to produce a work of art, we are confronted
with a very important question and the question
is: how does the individual artist relate
to tradition?
Now, Eliot makes two very important points
here. The first point that he makes is that,
an individual artist can only engage with
tradition at the expenditure of tremendous
amount of labor. It cannot be simply inherited;
tradition cannot be simply inherited by someone
by just being born within a particular socio-cultural
milieu. The second point that Eliot makes
is that an artist can only properly engage
with tradition through a process of and I
quote, “continual self-sacrifice, a continual
extinction of personality”.
Now, the first of these two points is easily
understood if an order to write a sonnet you
would need to know not only about sonnets
written by the medieval Italian poet Dante
or the 16th century English poet William Shakespeare,
but also an obscure cat sonnet written by
me, then this would require tremendous amount
of labor and as Eliot rightly points out “a
ridiculous amount of erudition”. So, that
is something that you require in order to
engage with tradition.
And, that this sense of tradition cannot just
be passively inherited is also easily understandable,
especially if we put this statement within
the context of the years immediately following
the First World War. Since, the experience
of the war had so radically severed the connection
of an individual with the familiar past. A
sense of tradition could only be gained through
a painstaking reconstruction of this past
in order to make it usable again.
But, the problem is actually with the second
point that Eliot makes. What does it mean
to sacrifice one’s personality in order
to creatively engage with tradition? This
is the question that Eliot answers in the
second half of his essay “Tradition and
Individual Talent”.
And, to understand his answer we should start
with Eliot’s assertion that and I quote,
“The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to
express, but a particular medium”. Now,
if we go back to our lectures on Aristotle’s
Poetics, we will see that one of the things
that Aristotle keeps stressing is that poetry
is essentially a craft which uses mediums
like rhythm, language, and harmony to express
itself. Even like a carpenter, who uses mediums
like wood, chisel, and lead machine to create
his almirahs, and beds, and things like that.
And the point that Eliot makes in his essay
is similar to this point made by Aristotle.
In Eliot to the understanding of poetry is
that of a craft which uses phrases and images
to construct itself. So, what the poet creates
is a combination of these phrases, images
and even feelings which are not exclusively
his own, but already available to him and
also to others in the form of tradition. So,
for instance in writing my cat sonnet, I will
not only be recycling the poetic form of the
sonnet and some of the phrases available to
me through the sonnet tradition but, also
the feeling of awe and reverence that is to
be directed towards the subject of my poem.
And, in this combination nothing actually
needs to come from my personality, not even
the feelings that I put in my poem, because
it is not necessary to personally feel any
sense of awe or reverence, or even great love
towards my cat or towards my beloved for that
matter in order to poetically use that feeling
of great love of reverence and awe that is
already part of the sonnet tradition and therefore,
already available to me in it is poetic form.
In fact, Eliot argues that it is an error
in poetry, “To seek for new human emotions
to express;” because and as he justifies,
“in this search for novelty in the wrong
place it discovers the perverse”.
This explains why for Eliot, poetry is and
I quote, “not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality”. Now, as
you can see here, this position is radically
different from the Romantic literary theory
that was based on the cult of the poet’s
personality. This is precisely the reason
why we find Eliot attacking again and again
the view of poetry as forwarded by Romantics
like Wordsworth for instance.
Indeed, this disappearance of the poet or
even the author from critical consideration
is to be among the chief identifying traits
of a number of theories that emerged during
the 20th century and we are in fact, going
to look at some of these theories during the
course of our next few lectures. But, right
now let us move on to I. A. Richards and see
how this denial of the personality of the
put shapes his theoretical approach to literature.
I. A. Richards was born in 1893 and died in
1979 and he is today most well known for an
experiment that he conducted while teaching
at the University of Cambridge and the principles
of reading literature that he was able to
build from that experiment, and the experiment
was basically very simple. Richards gave his
class a number of poems and asked them to
submit back to him their readings of those
poems. So, they were supposed to write their
interpretations of those poems and they were
supposed to return back those interpretations
to Richards anonymously.
But, there was something very interesting
that Richards did and that was that the poems
that he offered to his students were devoid
of any references that might allow them to
connect these poems either to any particular
author or to any particular historical social
or cultural context. In fact, the poems that
Richards provided his students did not even
have their titles. And, Richards analyzed
the interpretations and the readings that
he received from his students in his seminal
study titled Practical Criticism which was
published in 1929.
And, in this study he observes how irrespective
of whether the poem was actually produced
by a great poet, “great poet”, or by an
obscure one, what the students mostly produced,
in the form of interpretation, were stock
responses which had little to do with the
texts that the students actually encountered.
And this, Richards argued was a widespread
problem with literary criticism itself.
So, in Richards own words and I quote, “We
should be better advised to acknowledge frankly
that, when people put poems in our hands […] what
we say, in nine cases out of ten, has nothing
to do with the point, but arises from politeness
or spleen or some other social motive. […] It
would be an excellent thing if all the critical
chitchat which we produced on these occasions
were universally recognized to be what it
is, a social gesture […]”. In this experiment
with the nameless and context-less poems,
we again come across a critique of the Romantic
theory, but this time it is a critique that
is even more radical than the one provided
by Eliot because, whereas, Eliot stressed
on the irrelevance of the personality of the
poet in creating and reading poetry, Richards
talks about the irrelevance both of the poet
as well as the historical context of the poem.
Any commentary about these issues results
in what Richards would, in fact, consider
to be banal chitchat and not literary criticism
because what matters for Richards are just
the words on the page and this intense concentration
on the text forms the hallmark of the new
kind of literary criticism that Richards initiated
and which is known as Practical Criticism.
At the heart of this new kind of critical
practice is a reading strategy. It is a reading
strategy that is widely recognized as ‘close
reading’, and in close reading we do not
seek to understand the poet’s personality
through the poem nor do we seek to gain knowledge
about the social political or cultural milieu
which might have produced a poem. Rather a
close reading focuses on things like the poems
structure, its use of rhyme, the way in which
it brings together a particular choice of
words, a particular choice of metaphors, of
images, the way these metaphors images words
interact with each other and create a sense
of tension or create a sense of ambiguity.
Now, ambiguity is an interesting term and
we will come to this later in our discussion
today, but in other words, in a close reading
we basically focus only on those things that
are before our eyes when we see a poem in
the form of black words on a white page or
a screen if you are reading your poem on a
computer. So, according to Richards, the reason
that we can subject, to such an intense scrutiny,
the internal structuring of the language of
a poem a poem in particular and literature
in general is because it employs a special
kind of language which allows this scrutiny
to happen. And, this language which Richards
refers to as “emotive language” is different
from the “referential language” of the
more mundane and non-literary forms of communication.
So, in case of the referential language it
is used solely to refer us truly and reliably
to the world outside language. So, if I say
I need a pencil it is a referential language
because I want you to be directed towards
a pencil in the world outside language and
to pick it up and give it to me on the other
hand the language of poetry or literature
can be studied and indeed should be studied
according to the new critics by focusing not
on it is ability to refer the reader to an
external reality, but by it is ability to
internally structure metaphors and symbols
and figures of speeches to create a complex
pattern of meaning.
This distinction between literary and non-literary
language will also play an enormous role a
very significant role in the literary theory
identified as a Russian Formalism which we
are going to discuss in our next lecture.
But, before we move on to Russian Formalists,
let me briefly mention here at the end of
my lecture today some of the work of the later
new critics who carried forward the legacy
of I. A. Richards and the first name that
I want to mention here is that of William
Empson.
Empson who was student of a Richards presented
in his book titled The Seven Types of Ambiguity
which was published in 1930, the first sustained
attempt to read literature, following Richards
Principles of Practical Criticism, which is
to say by focusing exclusively on the language
of literature and on the production of what
he calls ambiguity through the employment
of poetic devices.
Now, ambiguity is common enough term and it
results from a multiplicity of meanings and
it is usually considered as a negative thing
within the domain of referential language
where clarity is of the utmost value. So,
for instance, if my message to you about the
pencil is ambiguous, you will not know what
to give me or what to do. But, in the literary
language this ambiguity is something which
is celebrated by New Critics like Empson.
And this celebration of ambiguity is also
something that is easily understood
if we consider an example like Shakespeare’s
sonnet number 18, for instance, “Shall I
Compare thee to a Summer’s Day”, where
the phrase and I quote from the poem, “in
eternal lines to Time thou grow’st”, gives
us the kind of pleasure that it does primarily
because of the multiple possible interpretations
of the word lines. Because, that word might
mean the lines of progeny that the poet and
his beloved might have if they unite together
or even the lines of the poem itself as they
grow and develop during the course of our
reading.
And, it is precisely because the pleasure
of poetry rests in such linguistic ambiguity,
in such linguistic indecisiveness that we
must shy away from what another New Critic,
Cleanth Brooks warns us, which is the “heresy
of paraphrase”. Since the way language is
used in poetry and in literature in general
is of utmost importance. It does not make
any sense to create paraphrases of literary
pieces because then the entire pleasure is
lost.
The other critic whom I would like to refer
before I end this lecture is the Yale University
professor W. K. Wimsatt, who along with his
collaborator Monroe C. Beardsley produced
two very influential essays in the 1940s.
And, the first essay was titled “The Intentional
Fallacy” and the second essay was titled
“The Affective Fallacy”. In the first
of these two essays, Wimsatt and Beardsley
argue, that it is an interpretive error to
read a literary work by trying to decipher
the intentions [with] which its authors wrote
that piece; not the least because the author
is usually not available to the reader to
testify what exactly his or her intention
was.
The second essay makes a complimentary argument
by highlighting the fallacy of reading a text
based on the kind of emotional effects that
it might give rise to in the readers. The
claim here is that both in the case of intentional
fallacy as also in the case of affective fallacy
we are moving away from the real basis of
literary criticism which is the literary text
itself and what constitutes that literary
text is neither the putative authorial intention
nor the possible psychological effects that
it may produce among its readers. It is constituted
simply of the medium of language, of words
on the page.
So, as we can see with the New Critics and
during the first half of the 20th century
literary criticism takes a definitive linguistic
turn. In our upcoming lectures we are going
to follow this linguistic turn in the 20th
century literary criticism as it is manifested
in various theoretical forms like Formalism
for instance, or Structuralism, and Post-structuralism,
but in the next lecture we will pick up Formalism
first.
Thank you for listening.
