“The technique of ordinary poetry”: Coleridgean Notes toward a Genealogy of Technique

Abstract

Standard etymological accounts record that Coleridge introduced the French adjective technique into English as a pejorative noun in Chapter IV of his Biographia Literaria. While use of the word for literary effects likely spread slowly through the nineteenth century, it occurs with some regularity in early twentieth‐century texts important to the establishment of literary criticism as a discipline. Early twentieth‐century Anglo‐American texts tend to follow Coleridge’s formulation in suggesting that while attention to technique characterizes professional criticism, what is crucial in literature is what remains once technique has been subtracted. Early Russian formalists, whose important term приём (preeyom) has been translated both as technique and as device, were more skeptical about the value of literature beyond technique. While the phrases “literary technique,” “narrative technique,” “poetic technique” and the like have become so familiar as to be almost invisible, a recollection of the word’s origin in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria can helpfully defamiliarize this deceptively ubiquitous term and offer an index to the variations among Coleridge’s critical descendents.