Is there an implication for the discipline of Comparative Literature in these readings, especially in Ransom’s, and Buurma and Heffernan’s that largely mention English Departments? I’m wondering how New Criticism applies to a discipline that inherently implies more than one national literary tradition (perhaps as in Eliot’s European/Eurocentric perspective?) and also a historically implied conception and context.
What Wimsatt and Beardsley call “the public science of evaluating poems” is barely public, hardly a science, and not really a question of evaluation. However, literary criticism must be said to have these qualities—must, in fact, strive towards these qualities—if its continued performance is to be justified, and paid for. Why isn’t critical theory or philosophy writ large expected to meet these standards?
Eliot emphasizes how “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” This made me think about contemporary writers working in specific past/dead literary traditions: Michael Clune’s Pan/Knut Hamsun’s Pan, Kate Briggs’ The Long Form/Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joyce’s Ulysses/The Odyssey, etc. I guess this is more of an observation than a question, but I’m wondering about how we can apply Eliot’s essay to today’s writers and poets who are building off of past forms. Is it with the purpose to modernize them, to use them as a scaffolding, or something else?
I found Buurma’s and Heffernan’s intervention to be very crucial in reframing what had also been my prevailing apprehension about the primary conflict in methodological approaches to the study of literature. Coming into the field in the wake of postmodernism (e.g. Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”), I had always felt as though the notion of an aesthetic criticism completely divested from any relation to its author or social/historical/political context was mythical. However, in another class I’m taking, we discussed the limited nature of aesthetic criticism which frames all art as a response/critique to a socio-historical event, refusing to engage with the object of study on its own terms. With all this in mind, should future literary criticism depart from its practice in the classroom, incorporating the inherent sociality of literary value?
I found the last few sentences of Eliot’s piece very interesting: “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” (42). I wonder if there are any ways this logic can map onto, or is at least similar to, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s paradox of “what is (1) internal is also public […]; while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic…” (477). Might there be a way to do this? (I have some ideas…) At the moment, the most immediate upshot of this, to my mind, is simply to see if a comparison between these two texts would draw out more of what’s going on in each of them on their own basis, in comparison to one another, and, furthermore, to see how New Criticism on a broader scale views the relation(s) (or lack thereof) between the artist/author/poet and their respective work of art.
I think we might perhaps extend Buurma’s and Heffernan’s intervention by considering spaces where classrooms/ educational institutions are particularly embedded in their surrounding area. CUNY is located in NYC, so some of the most interesting intellectual events are happening outside any academy – rather through institutes and museums and theaters. The bright side to the hustle culture that drives un-tenured academics to churn out public facing writing and work at alternative educational spaces like BISR is that their educational work can in no way be cloistered from the larger intellectual hum of the city. In my lifetime I have seen how major protests movements like George Floyd Uprising and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment are spaces of shared intellectual labor. The feedback between the environment and more concentrated educational spaces is certainly hard to track, but something I would like to clue into.
In the Wimsatt and Beardsley piece, they address an argument made by a critic of theirs. According to the critic, there are “two kinds of enquiry about a work of art (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the work of art ‘ought ever to have been undertaken at all.'” This got me thinking about a film student friend of mine who said he absolutely hated a Wes Anderson film – I can’t remember which one. His vehemence made me ask him if he thought that the world would be a better place without that film, to which he replied yes. What is the purpose of such a stance? What is the point of criticizing something under such an absolute decree? Wimsatt and Beardsley go on to say that (2) need not be a moral judgment. In the wake of our readings from Nietzsche the other week, isn’t it a little naive to suggest the possibility of an amoral judgement of a work of art in 1946?
In “Free Indirect,” Timothy Bewes sets out to reconfigure our fundamental understanding of the novel: Instead of the space in which certain technical devices, effects, and schemes are enacted (or “instantiated,” as he says)—or where we find characteristic elements of plot, character, narrative arc, history, and even culture—he argues that the novel constitues a “decentered and deauthorized” capacity for and of thought (11). The novel thinks, as if with a mind of its own, rather than merely stages, enacts, or reflects its surroundings. How is Bewes, albeit specifically focusing on the novel and writing many decades later, in 2022, converging in his aspirations for literary studies and criticism with those of the New Critics?
I think I may have been swayed to this connection by Eliot’s and Ransom’s use of scientific concept and language, present also in Bewes, from Eliot’s presentation of the poet as a catalyst (remaining intact, integral, unaltered after the chemical reaction of producing the mental product of literature) and Ransom’s metaphor of the art-work as a “chemical … which can effect a certain cure” even though “that is not its meaning to the chemist,” who, like the New Critic, instead perceives the object through its inherent, atomical constitution (598). Today, Bewes equips the novel with a cognitive apparatus removed from author, context, and history. Can we make such a leap in comparing these theories and theorists?
In “Eccentric Culture” while reflecting on European culture, Rèmy Brague affirms the content of the Roman contribution to be ” the structure of the transmission of a content not properly its own. The Romans have done little more than transmit, but that is far from nothing. They have brought nothing new in relation to those two creator peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews. But they were the bearers of that innovation, They brought innovation itself. What was ancient for them, they brought as something new” (32)
Brague’s secondarity implicitly raises an issue of identity. Brague defines Europe’s tradition through the genealogical analogy of ‘inverse adoption’ (“usually, it is the parents who adopt the child […] In Europe, the process has functioned in the other direction. Those who come later chose their ancestors for themselves. ” This paradox of identity highlighted by Brague’s remains interestingly unmentioned by Eliot, which leaves me to wonder: where do we ( can we?) draw the lines between tradition, individuality and identity?
“Poetry is not 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.” (Tradition and the Individual Talent 42)
While reading this exact passage, it made me think of Plutarch. Plutarch was trying to convey to his older readers the importance of being able to explain the difference between the poet and the characters in his story, which is something they should be able to demonstrate clearly to the younger readers. The young readers should be taught that the poet is not portraying himself through his characters (mostly referring to the bad ones), which to me, seems like this “loss of personality” since the poet was not the one directly experiencing these events or committing any of the actions. However, how can this be applied to poetry, which flourishes out of pure emotions and personal experiences? I understand that if one is writing a poem about the physical appearance of a book, it doesn’t require the same thought process it would if that same person had experienced war and were to write about it. How can one write a poem about something they have gone through and detach themselves and their emotions from it?
I am interested in Eliot’s analogy of the catalyst as an example of the ideal “impersonal” position of the poet. Eliot explains that when two gases are mixed in the presence of “a filament of platinum,” they form sulfurous acid. The platinum must be present, yet the new acid contains no trace of platinum and the platinum appears unaffected. Eliot goes so far as to say the platinum remains “neutral and unchanged.” The poet is here the platinum.
To describe the poet as the platinum in this catalyst is precisely to remove the poet from ecology, from a system in which all things affect/affect and are affected. I’m thinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of “the artisan” in A Thousand Plateaus. In a hylomorphic account of the work of the artisan, the carpenter impresses the form of furniture she wishes to build upon the passive material of the wood. They point out that this account leaves many things, “active and affective” out. They propose instead a model where the artisan works on the wood but the wood also works on itself and on the artisan, affecting the final object. The wood’s properties are what make it receptive to being shaped by the artisan. This account of art and artist is much more dynamic, mutual. I’m thinking about the effects of Eliot’s theory not only for art but also for science, the discourse he wants to borrow from. Is the scientist the poet here? He has the power to affect but not be affected? In what ways could the analogy of the catalyst be useful? In what ways does it pose a problem?
How do you all read Eliot’s defense of tradition in light of his not-subtle fascism? For me, it’s tough to decouple these things, but I also really love Eliot’s work, not least for the ways it broke with tradition… what I really react negatively to is his elitism in this work (the notion that the poet needs to be rigorously educated the history of literature, I mean, cmon). At the same time, having worked in the world of poetry publishing, the field absolutely tends to reward poets who have MFAs or degrees in literature. So…. what do we do with this?
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12 Comments
Joanna Ligon
Is there an implication for the discipline of Comparative Literature in these readings, especially in Ransom’s, and Buurma and Heffernan’s that largely mention English Departments? I’m wondering how New Criticism applies to a discipline that inherently implies more than one national literary tradition (perhaps as in Eliot’s European/Eurocentric perspective?) and also a historically implied conception and context.
Serena
What Wimsatt and Beardsley call “the public science of evaluating poems” is barely public, hardly a science, and not really a question of evaluation. However, literary criticism must be said to have these qualities—must, in fact, strive towards these qualities—if its continued performance is to be justified, and paid for. Why isn’t critical theory or philosophy writ large expected to meet these standards?
Francesca
Eliot emphasizes how “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” This made me think about contemporary writers working in specific past/dead literary traditions: Michael Clune’s Pan/Knut Hamsun’s Pan, Kate Briggs’ The Long Form/Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joyce’s Ulysses/The Odyssey, etc. I guess this is more of an observation than a question, but I’m wondering about how we can apply Eliot’s essay to today’s writers and poets who are building off of past forms. Is it with the purpose to modernize them, to use them as a scaffolding, or something else?
Alex Lleras
I found Buurma’s and Heffernan’s intervention to be very crucial in reframing what had also been my prevailing apprehension about the primary conflict in methodological approaches to the study of literature. Coming into the field in the wake of postmodernism (e.g. Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”), I had always felt as though the notion of an aesthetic criticism completely divested from any relation to its author or social/historical/political context was mythical. However, in another class I’m taking, we discussed the limited nature of aesthetic criticism which frames all art as a response/critique to a socio-historical event, refusing to engage with the object of study on its own terms. With all this in mind, should future literary criticism depart from its practice in the classroom, incorporating the inherent sociality of literary value?
Alex Riedel
I found the last few sentences of Eliot’s piece very interesting: “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” (42). I wonder if there are any ways this logic can map onto, or is at least similar to, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s paradox of “what is (1) internal is also public […]; while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic…” (477). Might there be a way to do this? (I have some ideas…) At the moment, the most immediate upshot of this, to my mind, is simply to see if a comparison between these two texts would draw out more of what’s going on in each of them on their own basis, in comparison to one another, and, furthermore, to see how New Criticism on a broader scale views the relation(s) (or lack thereof) between the artist/author/poet and their respective work of art.
Dana Burns
I think we might perhaps extend Buurma’s and Heffernan’s intervention by considering spaces where classrooms/ educational institutions are particularly embedded in their surrounding area. CUNY is located in NYC, so some of the most interesting intellectual events are happening outside any academy – rather through institutes and museums and theaters. The bright side to the hustle culture that drives un-tenured academics to churn out public facing writing and work at alternative educational spaces like BISR is that their educational work can in no way be cloistered from the larger intellectual hum of the city. In my lifetime I have seen how major protests movements like George Floyd Uprising and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment are spaces of shared intellectual labor. The feedback between the environment and more concentrated educational spaces is certainly hard to track, but something I would like to clue into.
Peter
In the Wimsatt and Beardsley piece, they address an argument made by a critic of theirs. According to the critic, there are “two kinds of enquiry about a work of art (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the work of art ‘ought ever to have been undertaken at all.'” This got me thinking about a film student friend of mine who said he absolutely hated a Wes Anderson film – I can’t remember which one. His vehemence made me ask him if he thought that the world would be a better place without that film, to which he replied yes. What is the purpose of such a stance? What is the point of criticizing something under such an absolute decree? Wimsatt and Beardsley go on to say that (2) need not be a moral judgment. In the wake of our readings from Nietzsche the other week, isn’t it a little naive to suggest the possibility of an amoral judgement of a work of art in 1946?
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
In “Free Indirect,” Timothy Bewes sets out to reconfigure our fundamental understanding of the novel: Instead of the space in which certain technical devices, effects, and schemes are enacted (or “instantiated,” as he says)—or where we find characteristic elements of plot, character, narrative arc, history, and even culture—he argues that the novel constitues a “decentered and deauthorized” capacity for and of thought (11). The novel thinks, as if with a mind of its own, rather than merely stages, enacts, or reflects its surroundings. How is Bewes, albeit specifically focusing on the novel and writing many decades later, in 2022, converging in his aspirations for literary studies and criticism with those of the New Critics?
I think I may have been swayed to this connection by Eliot’s and Ransom’s use of scientific concept and language, present also in Bewes, from Eliot’s presentation of the poet as a catalyst (remaining intact, integral, unaltered after the chemical reaction of producing the mental product of literature) and Ransom’s metaphor of the art-work as a “chemical … which can effect a certain cure” even though “that is not its meaning to the chemist,” who, like the New Critic, instead perceives the object through its inherent, atomical constitution (598). Today, Bewes equips the novel with a cognitive apparatus removed from author, context, and history. Can we make such a leap in comparing these theories and theorists?
Irene
In “Eccentric Culture” while reflecting on European culture, Rèmy Brague affirms the content of the Roman contribution to be ” the structure of the transmission of a content not properly its own. The Romans have done little more than transmit, but that is far from nothing. They have brought nothing new in relation to those two creator peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews. But they were the bearers of that innovation, They brought innovation itself. What was ancient for them, they brought as something new” (32)
Brague’s secondarity implicitly raises an issue of identity. Brague defines Europe’s tradition through the genealogical analogy of ‘inverse adoption’ (“usually, it is the parents who adopt the child […] In Europe, the process has functioned in the other direction. Those who come later chose their ancestors for themselves. ” This paradox of identity highlighted by Brague’s remains interestingly unmentioned by Eliot, which leaves me to wonder: where do we ( can we?) draw the lines between tradition, individuality and identity?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
“Poetry is not 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.” (Tradition and the Individual Talent 42)
While reading this exact passage, it made me think of Plutarch. Plutarch was trying to convey to his older readers the importance of being able to explain the difference between the poet and the characters in his story, which is something they should be able to demonstrate clearly to the younger readers. The young readers should be taught that the poet is not portraying himself through his characters (mostly referring to the bad ones), which to me, seems like this “loss of personality” since the poet was not the one directly experiencing these events or committing any of the actions. However, how can this be applied to poetry, which flourishes out of pure emotions and personal experiences? I understand that if one is writing a poem about the physical appearance of a book, it doesn’t require the same thought process it would if that same person had experienced war and were to write about it. How can one write a poem about something they have gone through and detach themselves and their emotions from it?
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
I am interested in Eliot’s analogy of the catalyst as an example of the ideal “impersonal” position of the poet. Eliot explains that when two gases are mixed in the presence of “a filament of platinum,” they form sulfurous acid. The platinum must be present, yet the new acid contains no trace of platinum and the platinum appears unaffected. Eliot goes so far as to say the platinum remains “neutral and unchanged.” The poet is here the platinum.
To describe the poet as the platinum in this catalyst is precisely to remove the poet from ecology, from a system in which all things affect/affect and are affected. I’m thinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of “the artisan” in A Thousand Plateaus. In a hylomorphic account of the work of the artisan, the carpenter impresses the form of furniture she wishes to build upon the passive material of the wood. They point out that this account leaves many things, “active and affective” out. They propose instead a model where the artisan works on the wood but the wood also works on itself and on the artisan, affecting the final object. The wood’s properties are what make it receptive to being shaped by the artisan. This account of art and artist is much more dynamic, mutual. I’m thinking about the effects of Eliot’s theory not only for art but also for science, the discourse he wants to borrow from. Is the scientist the poet here? He has the power to affect but not be affected? In what ways could the analogy of the catalyst be useful? In what ways does it pose a problem?
Coco Fitterman
How do you all read Eliot’s defense of tradition in light of his not-subtle fascism? For me, it’s tough to decouple these things, but I also really love Eliot’s work, not least for the ways it broke with tradition… what I really react negatively to is his elitism in this work (the notion that the poet needs to be rigorously educated the history of literature, I mean, cmon). At the same time, having worked in the world of poetry publishing, the field absolutely tends to reward poets who have MFAs or degrees in literature. So…. what do we do with this?