Cleanth Brooks and Modern Irony: A Kierkegaardian Critique

Abstract

Irony is, of course, the most pervasive category of Cleanth Brooks's criticism, and it shares along with Burke's paradox and Empson's ambiguity a position so dominant in modern literary study that to question it is to question the best practical criticism and much of the best critical theorizing of this century. Nonetheless, the time for re-evaluating Modernism's ironic stance is overdue. During the nineteen-sixties, critics such as Nathan A. Scott, Jr., J. Hillis Miller, Frank Kermode, and, later in the decade, William V. Spanos called for a critical discourse which would be open to the thematic nightmare of Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, and Beckett in a way which the highly disinterested language of ambiguity, paradox, and irony is not.1 Most importantly, these critics searched for a concept of form to replace the verbal icon, just as the non-traditional, open nature of what is now called destructive or deconstructive anti-art had replaced the classical closed forms the concrete universals of such modern poems as In a Station of the Metro, Musee des beaux arts, Lord Weary's Castle, and Empson's Arachne. At the same time that this critical dissatisfaction was beginning to