Anglo-American Criticism Research Articles

So Much Depends... Russian Critics in Search of "Reality"

Belinsky and Pushkin from the Twentieth Century My concern in this essay is to examine, from the vantage point of the modem critical mind (by which I mean primarily the critical viewpoint of Russian formalism and structuralism) certain nineteenth-century Russian writings-texts, if you like-about literature and culture that have definitely not stood the test of time. The critical writings of Belinsky and Chemyshevsky, for the most part, have become almost unreadable to students who were weaned on Anglo-American New Criticism and received nourishment as they matured from formalists and structuralists of various hues, only to have all certitudes deconstructed as they reached adulthood. This is certainly true of students in the West, where Belinsky and Chernyshevsky are assigned in large amounts only as a punishment for something, like trying to get a Ph.D. in Slavic. Regarding the reception of these writers by the present generation in the Soviet Union the evidence is not clear, but I do not see how their experience could be very different from our own. Though Soviet students have been sheltered from Wimsatt, Frye, Barthes, and Derrida, and even to a large extent from

The Blank Mirror of Death: Protest as Self-Creation in Contemporary Fantasy

The Blank Mirror of Death:Protest as Self-Creation in Contemporary Fantasy Nancy Huse (bio) Attention to language usually shapes any discussion of fantasy as a literary genre. The parallel worlds and impossible creatures always carry new names; the animals talk in order to signal a transformation of reality; labels combine to produce new categories: a Cucumber King, a Moominmamma somehow bizarre and yet familiar. Recent understandings of language are reflected in contemporary fantasy, particularly in fantasy written in post-war Europe, where the study and writing of children's books have often reflected self-consciously a philosophical and pedagogical climate in which issues of freedom and control are debated. In Sweden, for instance, prominent critics of children's literature such as Sonja Svensson, director of the Swedish Institute for Children's Books, and Vivi Edström, professor of children's literature at the University of Stockholm, commonly incorporate social criteria into their evaluation of children's books,1 while in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Institute for Children's Literature Research at the University of Frankfurt encourages political analyses of children's literature (Fetz 41). The idea of language as a potentially freeing power that can be stifled in a society that does not allow real human community provides a thematic and structural focus for describing four disparate yet contemporaneous writers—Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren, Christine Nöstlinger, and Michael Ende. While all four writers clearly reflect twentieth-century concerns, their visions derive from the ancient fantasy tradition involving the dream of an ordered world and meaningful life. All four exploit fantasy both as escapism and as a vehicle for social messages by developing individualistic word play that is rooted in a social identity. Escapism becomes the means to erase false distinctions between the self and others; the retreat into private worlds by means of unique language actually ends in placing emphasis on the world of human relatedness and the desirability and possibility of its transformation. These four writers are linked by their achievements as authors of contemporary fantasy for children who recognize that language can be tautological and that that is ultimately unacceptable to socially conscious human beings. Together they span the past-war years, Jansson and Lindgren as relatively acclaimed Swedish-language writers and Nöstlinger and Ende as more recent popular authors who do not always satisfy literary [End Page 28] critics' aesthetic or political criteria in Germany. While in some ways they comprise a group partly because they are available in English translation, their very diversity illustrates the point that contemporary fantasy is participating in a quest for meaning occasioned by postmodern tolerance of ambiguity and contradiction. As Kathryn Hume remarks about such writers, "They work with full awareness of the void, and do not fall back on old answers or faith" (49). In so doing, these writers offer children the multiple perspectives needed for development. Each writer's canon centers on issues of freedom: Lindgren wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, for example, in a pedagogical context advocating children's liberation, Jansson examines the threat to both freedom and stability posed by forces out of our control, Nöstlinger responds to memories of the Hitler era, and Ende's stories involve the need for creative play as a basis for human community. Thus, it is clear that they deal with philosophical themes and historical events which define personhood in our century. Such writers pose interesting problems for Anglo-American critics, since our critical discourse (e.g., the work of Northrop Frye often applied to children's books) helps to support the notion that the world is orderly and unthreatening to the thinking individual. "That the structure of the psyche is historical . . . is as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs but rather the results of a long process of differentiation within human history" (Jameson 62). Literary theory, including Marxism, feminism, and structuralism, drives home the point that the self is a social construct. As much as we might struggle to separate "the self" from others, and to emphasize its uniqueness, we must confront the fact that our very perceptions of reality are affected by our history, our...

Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett by Peter Gidal (review)

132 Book Reviews century Russia with a cool, lucid guide who shows all but avoids commentary" (pp. 300-01). Much like Chekhov in his stories, Troyat has attempted the difficult task of portraying a primarily intemallife by means ofexternal description. While the result is of limited value for one seeking insight into the work of that life, taken in its entirety , the book succeeds nicely in characterizing the life itself. If this helps us return to Chekhov's literature with a new attitude, ready for new discoveries, then the book may be considered a success. JOHN FREEDMAN, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PETER GIDAL. Understandi"8 Beckett: A Study ofMonologue and Gesture in the Works ofSamuel Beckett. New York: St. Martin's Press 1986. pp. 278, illustrated. $27.50. Anglo-American criticism has traditionally constructed Samuel Beckett's plays as avenues to metaphysical enlightenment about "the human condition." Such criticism constructs Beckett as the link to enlightenment, his texts as manifest potential, and the critic as necessary mediation between audience and enlightenment. Critics such as Martin Esslin and Ruby Cohn have exemplified this metaphysical construclion of Beckettfor the past twenty-five years and, ifrecent publications within Beckett criticism are any indication. there seems to be a fair amount ofevidence that this construction is gripping desperately to maintain its metaphysical hegemony. Understanding Beckett: A Study ofMonologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett written by mm-maker and theorist Peter Gidal proposes a "materialist feminist" analysis to challenge metaphysical criticism. As such it is an extremely important work not only for Beckett scholars but for Anglo-American literary criticism in general. It succeeds in its self-conscious engagement in a polemic against dominant AngloAmerican criticism; it fails, however, to save itself from reproducing the very "patriarchal bourgeois" discourse it purports to disallow. Gidal draws heavily on Marx's and Engels's notion of commodification as a process which conceals, and thus naturalizes, the historical relations that produce a product and invest it with value. According to Gidal, if we are to understand - and intervene - in relations of power. we must read the use and exchange of speech as a set of relations comparable to the use and exchange ofcommodities. The gesture pivotal to "bourgeois" processes of (re)production, be it in economic or cuJturai production, is the one of concealment - commodification. For the "feminist" prong of his analysis. Gidal draws from such French feminists as Monique Wittig. Christine Delphy. and Monique Plaza. whose models read the construction of gender as economic, political, psychological, cultural. and racial. These critical perspectives allow Gidal to posit that "patriarchy" conceals the tenns of power relations by naturalizing "woman" as commodity for male consumption and "man" as phallocentric broker ofdesire. Within textual production. it is the narrative fonn which, according to Gidal, reproduces commodification within the cultural realm. Narrativeerases its own material (historical) reproduction by articulating Book Reviews 133 itself within a discourse of universal truths and the necessary coherence of meaning. This narrative closes in on itself, denying access to anything but itself. It thus reproduces the dominant discourse and conceals the productions of meaning and distributions of power the discourse authorizes. As such, Gidal claims, narrative is "bourgeois" as a system of conunodification which is necessarily "patriarchal," for in reproducing the dominant discourse, the narrative also reproduces the engendered discourse of "patriarchy" by which male-identified desire constructs the female subject/object. A disruption of narrative will necessarily disrupt "bourgeois" commodification of meaning and "patriarchal" commodification of the female subject/object. It is here that Gidal discloses Beckett's texts as acts of "materialist feminist" disruption. Conventional fonns of monologue, described by Gidal as "patriarchal bourgeois," assume an unproblematic point of reference which functions as the inviolable source of meaning, identification, and authority. In contrast, Beckett's texts disallow the essentially "bourgeois" and "patriarchal" system of commodification by constantly revealing speech and gesture in process, constantly "un-understanding" themselves through the radical dis-location of coherent meaning. This fonn, named by Gidal the "materialist" monologue, reveals its very own production, and thus disallows commodified subjectivity. This "monologue" is presentation, not representation; it is quotation, not naturalized meaning. As such, Beckett's "monologue" de-authorizes itself and...

NARRATED AND NARRATING I INIL GIARDINO DEI FINZI–CONTINI

AbstractThe importance of distinguishing between the narrated and the narrating I in the autobiographical novel has been brought into sharper focus by Genette in his study on Proust, which has also shown that ‘point of view’ (an approach to narrative dear to Anglo-American criticism) is inadequate for differentiating between a first and third person technique. When a story is focalized through a particular character the viewpoint will be the same whether the character is the narrator speaking in the first person or a centre of consciousness in a third person novel. The difference here, Genette (p. 186) argues, is one of voice not of viewpoint: who speaks not who sees. Study of viewpoint, however, is particularly relevant to the autobiographical novel when subtle oscillation occurs between the perspective of the narrating I distanced from the events recounted, and that of the experiencing I of past consciousness re-enacted. This phenomenon (again in relation to Proust) was noted sixty years ago by Spitzer,...

Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias , and: Exile and the Narrative Imagination , and: The Sixth Continent: A Literary History of Romney Marsh (review)

Reviewed by: Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias, and: Exile and the Narrative Imagination, and: The Sixth Continent: A Literary History of Romney Marsh Daniel R. Schwarz Peter Ruppert . Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986. 207 pp. $19.00. Michael Seidel . Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. 248 pp. $18.50. Iain Finlayson . The Sixth Continent: A Literary History of Romney Marsh. New York: Atheneum, 1986. 240 pp. $15.95. For many of us, educated in English departments between 1950 and 1970, it seems as if we are, in Arnold's words, "Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born." We are caught between two worlds; one is interpretive humanistic criticism, not dead, but called into question by the challenge of recent theory. The other is deconstruction, fully born but unsatisfactory to many of us for three reasons: its failure to understand or account for the entirety of a work; its tendency to read reductively so that all texts seem much the same; and its polemical tone and at times arrogant stance that looks down on other approaches from a steep and icy peak. The three books under review speak to our human need for alternative places, [End Page 386] whether imaginary or real. Exile is a condition when one is involuntarily removed or voluntarily removes oneself from one's roots, whereas utopias speak to our desire for a perfected world. The impulse for voluntary exile and for Utopias is not dissimilar; they each depend on our hope that a better place may exist than the one we inhabit and that we may vacate the pressures and responsibilities of our world and remove ourselves to a better one. What Ruppert says of utopias is relevant to exile: "Implicit in all Utopian dreams is the urge to escape, the desire to get away from the turmoil of history and the anxiety that comes from an awareness of time and change." Seidel and Ruppert show how the mainstream of Anglo-American criticism is trying to come to terms with recent ideologies of reading, including deconstruction and reader-response criticism. Oblivious to recent theory, Finlayson assumes that readers are interested in the way that a group of writers lived at a specific place at a specific time. All three books assume that literature to some degree represents anterior reality and that it negotiates between real and imaginary experience. Seidel's focus is upon what happens within the world of texts, although he certainly is aware of the anterior world in which the author lived; Ruppert's stress is upon what happens to the reader. Ruppert and Seidel understand that readers and authors meet on the boundaries of their own separate spaces and that readers chart an imaginary new space as they decode a text and apply their own sensemaking. Thus, for Seidel and Ruppert, readers are cartographers who construct maps produced by a transaction between text and reader. Michael Seidel has written an important study of how the experience of literary exile shapes imaginative literature. His focus is "on literary representations of exile, especially representations in which exile or expatriation is foregrounded as a narrative action." He concentrates "on exile as an enabling fiction, or at least a fiction enabling me to address the larger strategies of narrative representation." Seidel is often a compelling reader who combines erudition which perspicacity, as when he writes of Ulysses: "The exilic Bloom is generated by the very mythology the narrative establishes for him, 'Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode' whose exodus from one land of bondage to another is part of his defense in the phantasmagoria of 'Circe,' 'my client's native place, the land of the Pharaoh.'" Seidel also writes with great sensitivity about "Strether's American mission" in The Ambassadors. Seidel's book raises questions about the metaphoricity or disfiguration of interpretative language. Interpretations are never purely literal or demonstrative, for do they not distort and reshape literary texts just as texts reshape and distort anterior reality? Or, as Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar" puts it, "Things...

The Stock of Available Reality: R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman

This study links two long and troubled modern American literary careers and explores the politics of reading in Anglo-American criticism and poetry. Examining three decades of poetry and prose by both writers, the author documents their partisan affiliations with and disaffections from acknowledged literary masters and prevailing critical conventions.

The Theory of Reading , and: The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (review)

Reviewed by: The Theory of Reading, and: The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form Jerry A. Varsava Frank Gloversmith , ed. The Theory of Reading. Brighton: Harvester, 1984. 263 pp. $18.95. Distributed in America by Barnes. J. M. Bernstein . The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. 319 pp. $35.00 cloth; pb. $14.95. The Theory of Reading collects essays by seven contemporary British critics. In general, the essays have one or another of three primary focuses: the reception study, the debunking essay, or the promotional reading of a given theory. The two reception studies investigate, respectively, the critical fates suffered by the Angry Young Man fiction of the Fifties and by Lawrence's The Rainbow and [End Page 454] Women In Love. In the former piece, Stuart Laing points out, with some acuity, how literary and social politics operate as invisible determinants in the canonizing process. In his essay Alastair Fowler juxtaposes two divergent readings of Lawrence and the novels cited: the view of Murry and Wyndam Lewis of the author as traitorous and antinational and Leavis' position that sees Lawrence as a misunderstood patriot. As a corrective to these "misreadings," Fowler resuscitates genetic criticism and influence. Of the three lengthy "debunking" essays, two assail deconstruction while the other—Gloversmith's—takes up the shortcomings of the autonomy theory of Ortega, Fry, and Virginia Woolf. Given the current topicality of deconstruction, I shall confine my remarks to the essays by David Morse and Valentine Cunningham. After ploughing through a review of twentieth-century Anglo-American criticism, Morse moves to confirm his thesis that Derrida has provided a philosophical foundation for New Criticism. Although perhaps guilty of the "totalizing generalizations" of which Morse charges him, Derrida's radical skepticism contrasts sharply with the assured professionalism and static epistemology that characterize New Critical interpretation. Morse's attack on Derridean skepticism reveals the former's undifferentiated view of language. Here, phonocentrism, with its intentionalist underpinning, ignores the fact that written discourse, unlike speech, does not have an absolutely circumscribed field of reception. Cunningham, in the collection's best essay, points out that deconstruction is hardly a contingent hermeneutic as it insistently claims. Deconstructors valorize absence over presence (when, in fact, both are textually invested); they invariably deconstruct the traditional canon; and they view language as supraideological. Cunningham puts forward a dualistic view of logocentrism. He asserts that logocentrism is both presence and absence, both word qua signified and word qua signifier. Notwithstanding the ingenuity and incisiveness of his argument, Cunningham implies that absence and presence are purely functions of the text itself. In this, he fashions a text-centered hermeneutic that ignores the historicity of the reader. Finally, essays by Homi Bhabha and Allon White promote the hermeneutic efficacy of, respectively, Althusserian Marxism and Bakhtinian sociolinguistics. White's essay is noteworthy, in particular, for it provides an excellent introduction to Bakhtinian dialogics as well as an articulate critique of deconstruction's "carnevalization of monoglossia," that is, its reduction of language to a universal play of differance. In brief summary, though several essays in The Theory of Reading take deconstruction to task on a number of issues, one cannot avoid the conclusion that deconstruction's radical reevaluation of Western thinking has served both to enliven and fructify current theoretical discussions. J. M. Bernstein's The Philosophy of the Novel is the first book length study of Lukács' The Theory of the Novel (hereafter TN). This "argumentative defense" adopts "the method of philosophical reconstruction," a tack involving the distillation of the text's "truth" and, thereafter, a detailed analysis of the text in view of this truth. The "truth" here is that TN is based on Marxist premises. Bernstein holds, then, that Lukács' 1918 "conversion" to Marxism is less radical, less precipitous than many—he mentions Arato and Breines, Löwy, and Markus—have claimed. (Actually, for his part, in the essay appearing in Lukács [End Page 455] Reappraised [1983], Markus cautions against one-sided readings, that is, the continuity and discontinuity theses, of Lukács' early intellectual development.) What literary theorists will...

The Ideology of the Individual in Anglo-American Criticism: The Example of Coleridge and Eliot

In the wake of the post-structuralist attack on interpretation by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, the function of criticism has been increasingly questioned, so that whatever its claims to contribute to the understanding of texts, it no longer enjoys its former privileged status. Far from being objective and innocent, criticism can now be seen as a transformative activity mediated by theoretical assumptions that make possible, but also limit, its thinking about the

Götterzeichen, Liebeszauber, Satanskult. Neue Einblicke in alte Goethetexte (review)

Robert M. Browning 233 "reflex" in Götz von Berlichingen, which he takes occasion to quote. We are told just when the Ugner troupe performed in Strasbourg, and that their repertoire included a Faust drama "(zurückgehend auf Christopher Marlowes 'The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,' 1589): vielleicht besucht Goethe eine Aufführung." Numerous other such conjectural events and possible influences lard the volume, all in accord with the bestknown topoi (Herder and Shakespeare being perhaps the most frequently mentioned in these years before 1775). They will make Steiger a gladly used handbook. Makeup facilitates easy reference. Goethe's works stand out from the page in caps, all proper names (including God and the angels), in italics. Detailed parenthetical annotation supplies biographical, topographical, historical, cultural, even meteorological data. There are abundant cross-references. The remark in Dichtung und Wahrheit, "ich hatte zwar sehr schöne Haare" (with respect to a visit to a Strasbourg barber), invites comparison with Marie Körner's (nee Stock) reminiscence on the Breitkopf house in Leipzig; this, in turn, with Goethe's recollection in a letter to Förster of how the Stock children had loved to play in his tresses. One can while away many an hour pursuing such a labyrinthine wealth of allusions. Even as Goethe was writing his letter to Förster, that handsome growth of hair was vanishing. Today, his entire existence is totally dependent on the living, and their ability to respond to the written word, on our powers of imagination. Works like Zischka and Steiger constitute magnificent enabling agents, the one facilitating our access to the original documentation, the other focusing the labors of many scholarly generations. University of Illinois, Urbana Harry G. Haile Schöne, Albrecht, Götterzeichen, Liebeszauber, Satanskult. Neue Einblicke in alte Goethetexte. München: Beck, 1982. 230 pp. It is probably safe to assume that by the time this review appears many members of the GSNA will have already perused the book, which has been hailed (by Franz Josef Görtz in the FAZ) as "der brillanteste und gewiß auch anregendste Beitrag zum Goethe-Jahr 1982." Three well known and frequently discussed texts are the subject of Schöne's reinvestigation: "Harzreise im Winter" (Des. 1777), "Alexis und Dora" (June 1796), and the "Walpurgisnacht" scene in Faust I (1808). Each is shown in a new and revealing light, a light derived not only from the texts themselves (though always trained on them) but also from Goethe's other works, letters, and sources that may have been or demonstrably were used by him, as well as sources paralleling these. Schöne's stance is fundamentally positivistic, but it is a profounder, a transformed, positivism that sees connections to which the older positivists were blind. Positivism plus immanent interpretation. Schöne's bête noire is Rezeptionsgeschichte, the "Aberwitz einer Rezeptionsästhetik" (p. 67), which would find "Sinn und Form des literarischen Werks in der geschichtlichen Entfaltung seines Verständnisses" (H. R. Jauß), an approach that never really caught on in Anglo-American criticism, but which perhaps still needs (or needed) castigation in Germany. In any event, I believe the Anglo-American reader will feel an instinctive 234 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA sympathy with Schöne's empiricism. His rejection of Rezeptionsgeschichte as a critical method does not of course mean that he takes no account of his predecessors; on the contrary, he goes into their views very thoroughly and, it would seem, fairly. Anyone who has attempted to take "Harzreise im Winter" at its word will agree with Schöne that it is one of Goethe's most difficult texts. A highly autobiographical document, it is by no means fully explicated by Goethe's own commentary of 1821 in Kampagne in Frankreich, which is itself more in the nature of a commentary on Kannegießer's explication of the year before. AU his poems, Goethe insisted, were written "im unmittelbaren Anschauen irgend eines Gegenstandes" and "Harzreise" was "hard to fathom (entwickeln) because it refers to the most particular circumstances" and is "mysterious in tone and meaning," like the whole undertaking that gave rise to it. This being the case, Schöne concludes that we can...

New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays

Presented here are selected critical essays from five volumes of the Poetik und Hermeneutik series published in Germany by the Wilhelm Fink Verlag of Munich. These essays represent some of the newest and most advanced thinking of fifteen leading scholars in the German-American interdisciplinary school of literary criticism. Until now no single volume has provided such an extensive contemporary treatment of literatures, problems, and methodologies representative of European criticism. The book's significance rests in the potential this new interdisciplinary criticism has for increasing the interplay between the two major critical movements of our day, namely, the objective, pragmatic Anglo-American criticism and the more subjective, phenomenological Continental criticism.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) Grand Master of Interpretations

The death of Ivor Armstrong Richards on 7 September 1979 saddens a worldwide community of devoted friends, former students, and attentive readers of his various published works, not to mention so many more, teachers and critics of English, who may know nothing of the man and his writing and yet be in his debt. His passing marks the end of an era in Anglo-American criticism, which may well be judged unique for the range and authority of its hermeneutic advances. Richards's career extended through six decades and touched on so many areas of intellectual endeavour that no commemorative résumé could do it justice. He was one of the founders of the New Criticism; a pioneer in poetics, semantics, and the theory of literature and interpretation; an eloquent spokesman for so many causes in the better use of English, especially in education; in his later years a poet of spectacular formal versatility; and above all, to generations of attentive students at Cambridge, Harvard, or wherever, a teacher and mentor without equal.

Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979

Hartman: I'm not sure that I complain about it. I show that there is a difference of traditions, that in the case of Anglo-American criticism or style of thought as it has developed through the academy, there is a greater emphasis on a certain kind of pedagogical decorum. Whereas in Europe, although that is a large generalization, there seems to be more flexibility in terms of audience or style of thought. Clearly, there is a university style in Europe, too, in German, Swiss, and French universities. A pedagogical style, expository, introductory, and so forth, but there is also another level, which in England and the States would come out as journalistic or free lance. Although it might be tied to academic issues, there is in Europe a greater freedom of style, orders of discourse, let's say.

Saving the Text: Reference and Belief

One of the few problems in literary theory which Anglo-American critics can with some justice claim as our own is the problem of belief. Which is not say that we have recently manifested much inclination enforce that claim. Rather, the debates over the relation between literature and belief which were once the staple of theoretical discourse in this country seem more-or-less have passed from the scene. And, in the wake of phenomenology, structuralism, and now deconstruction, attempt once again raise the question of belief may seem like a singularly gratuitous act of logocentric nostalgia. Nevertheless, I would like in this essay return this perhaps too-familiar question and begin justifying this return by noting that the seemingly obsolete topic of belief was from the very start associated with a topic whose contemporary relevance can hardly be questioned, the supposed nonreferentiality of literary language. The question of belief in poetry and the question of reference in poetry are in fact the same question, and our answer that question, despite the turnover in critical approaches and vocabularies, has also remained pretty much the same. The purpose of this essay is thus examine not only that answer but the fact of its persistence and explore some of the possibilities for and consequences of a different answer. The terms in which the problem of belief was first conceived were more-or-less these-on the one hand, some critics maintained that beliefs have nothing do with literature and that literary language is non-referential. Different critics had, of course, different versions of non-referentiality, but I think we can get at the essence of this position by noting that it was primarily motivated by what one of its adherents, Cleanth Brooks, called the desire to take poetry out of ruinous competition with science and philosophy,'

Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics

Previous articleNext article No AccessSpatial Form: An Answer to CriticsJoseph FrankJoseph Frank Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 4, Number 2Winter, 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447935 Views: 14Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1977 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alejandro Palma Castro, José Sánchez Carbó, Alicia V. Ramírez Olivares, Felipe Ríos Baeza, Samantha Escobar Fuentes, Alejandro Ramírez Lámbarry Topoiesis: Procesos de espacialización en la literatura (crítica y metodología), Romance Quarterly 64, no.11 (Dec 2016): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2017.1254467Siân E. White Spatial Politics/Poetics, Late Modernism, and Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, Genre 49, no.11 (Apr 2016): 27–50.https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3429225Gabriel Matelo Problemas de la teoría estadounidense de la forma espacial en narrativa, TRANS- , no.1717 (Feb 2014).https://doi.org/10.4000/trans.904Jonathan Stainer Localism, signification, imagination: de-stabilizing sectarian identities in two fictionalized accounts of ‘Troubles’ Belfast, Social & Cultural Geography 7, no.11 (Aug 2006): 103–126.https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500453077Luisa Calé A visual interface for the act of reading, Comparative Critical Studies 1, no.1-21-2 (Jun 2004): 97–118.https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2004.1.1-2.97 Notes, (Jan 1995): 279–351.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822379584-005 Bibliography, (Jan 1995): 353–363.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822379584-006Daniel R. Schwarz The Consolation of Form: the Theoretical and Historical Significance of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, (Jan 1986): 170–186.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10885-5_9

The fortunes of Cambridge: Myth and ritual in Anglo-American criticism

The fortunes of Cambridge: Myth and ritual in Anglo-American criticism

Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship

Note from the translator: Most of the contentions that Roman Ingarden (1893-1969) makes in the ensuing article cannot nowadays be easily contested or rejected. After several decades of structuralist, formalist, and phenomenological argumentation about the ontic position of the literary work, we have learned not to seek its locus any longer in psychological space. However, at the time Ingarden wrote his article,1 psychologism, or, it would be better to call it, neo-psychologism, disguised in behaviorist, Gestalt, and psychoanalytical terminology, was still, albeit inadvertently, claiming the primacy of in literary scholarship. Moreover, in Anglo-American criticism, I. A. Richards, in spite of his earnest search for a serviceable psychology of literary art, which would not conflict with the methodologically autonomous literary scholarship, was still confusing this art with appentices and coenesthesia-in brief, was still groping in the psychologistic circulus viciosus. In Germany, Ernst Elster, Ed. Scherrer, Hubert Rdtteken, H. Hamann, Robert Hartke, and a score of other scholars continued to consider the Grundwissenschaft in literary aesthetics almost with the same resoluteness the initiators of psychologism in aesthetics toward the end of the last century. Also psychologistically oriented was the so-called typologische Literaturbehandlung of Eduard Spranger and Richard Miiller-Freinfels. Yet, even though Ingarden's resolute stand against psychologism was spurred by these and other psychologizers, relativists, or subjectivists, it stemmed, however, from the philosophy as a rigorous science or phenomenology of his mentor, Edmund Husserl. As is generally known, this philosophy has posited a thesis of absolute presuppositionlessness a fundamental method through which the philosopher at the beginning secures an absolute foundation for himself. 2 In Ingarden's opinion, empirical applied to aesthetic phenomena presupposes an essential knowledge of the psyche which created them and thus surrounds them a priori with the barrier of naturalistic prejudices. Ergo, it becomes a formidable obstacle to a disinterested reflection and description of the aesthetic object and must be put out of action, must be bracketed.

Poe and Tennyson

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism

Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism

Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism

Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism

Towards a Definition of the Novella

There is still no acceptable definition of the German novella. The literature on the subject is prescriptive and proscriptive; its generalizations will not bear scrutiny; characteristics are ascribed to the novella that are common to all genres; too little attention is paid to theory and practice in non-German literatures. The history of the novella in European literature shows a development from entertainment to high art; a broadening of theme, tone, style; an evolution from a social game to a criticism of life. The present paper emphasizes the emergence of the long story (or short novel) since the eighteenth century and the tendency of Anglo-American criticism to classify fiction according to length. Four subdivisions are proposed: novel, novella (= short novel), short story, anecdote. The length tells us nothing about essence; it is no more than a convenience. All fiction has the same concerns and may use the same techniques, in so far as space will permit. Recent scepticism about the validity of classification by genre supports the position of this study.