Criticism In Crisis Research Articles

Professing Poetry Anew

The three books under review, all of which focus on poetry and attend in some way to American poetries of the twentieth century, enact in common a challenge to critical approaches that fail to take into account poetry’s participation in its social world: poetry’s meanings are inseparable from the circumstances of its production and circulation, its readers and reception history, its biographical encodings, and its political engagements. Their announced assumptions of reading as social act and poetry as social text could easily resonate as old news; after all, cultural studies has had considerable impact even on the relatively conservative field of poetry studies, despite its being in some ways still caught in New Criticism’s wake. Yet in these skillful studies, which offer very different reading experiences and divergent perspectives on literary value, the social and cultural emphasis is news that stays news, taking fresh forms and yielding significant readings and reconceptualizations of literary history that challenge entrenched critical binaries. The three books share, too, a sense of urgency—a sense of poetry, poetry reading, and poetry criticism in crisis. To some extent each implicitly or explicitly blames traditional modernist studies or the high modernism on which it focused for the crisis; the history of modernism and modernism’s legacies, then, are part of the terrain these works provocatively remap. In Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), Joan Shelley Rubin, a cultural historian, presents a social history of reading, not literary interpretation, though in passing she quarrels with literary critics who have made what she considers inadequate or biased arguments. As her title’s allusion to Whitman suggests, one of Rubin’s principal aims is to provide a “more democratic portrayal of American culture than we have previously possessed” through a “more inclusive account of American

Letters to Workmen? Fors Clavigera, Whistler vs. Ruskin and Sage Criticism in Crisis

Questioning recent critics' rehabilitation of Fors Clavigera, this article argues that because its defining features were extreme violence and self-contradiction, Ruskin's epistolary periodical was doomed to the disaster that befell it when Whistler sued him for libel. For whilst targeting artisan readers, Fors betrayed their trust with its prohibitive pricing and sales methods, incoherence, cryptic and coercive confessionalism, and Carlylean misanthropy towards subjects and correspondents alike. Thus, echoing Blackwood's notorious persecution of Keats, Fors branded Whistler and the evolutionist Huxley "Cockneys," and Ruskin fatally regressed to the level of the scurrilous periodical reviewers against whom his identity as "sage" had always been defined.

The British critical tradition: a re-evaluation

Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Criticism in Crisis G.Day - Carlyle's Metaphorical Dynamic of History: or How to Trace A Grand Narrative in the French Revolution N.Parker - Matthew Arnold: The Discourse of Criticism G.Holderness - Samuel Butler: The First Post- Structuralist? R.Stewart - Oscar Wilde and Reader Response Criticism B.Moore-Gilbert - Is There a Method in His Theory? A.C.Bradley and Contemporary Criticism A.Page - E.M.Forster: The Isolation of The Reader A.Smith - The Moth and the Moth Hunter: The Literary Criticism of Virginia Woolf L.Kranzler - D.H.Lawrence: Cliques and Consciousness J.Reilly - I.A.Richards and the Problem of Method B.Cullen - George Orwell: The Practical Critic A.Crabbe - Reason, Rhetoric, Theory: Empson and de Man C.Norris - About Being a Necessity: The Work of Christopher Cauldwell M.Hayes - W.H.Auden as Critic H.Blakemore - 'I thought I had provided Something better' F.R.Leavis: Literary Criticism and Anti Philosophy B.Cullen - Raymond Williams and Post Modernism T.Pinkney - Frank Kermode: History and Synchronicity B.Helm - Vanishing Point: On The Edge of Critical Breakdown C.Bloom - Index

Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (review)

Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (review)

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies. By Mark G. Brett. Cambridge University Press, 1991. 237 pages. N.P. Stephen Breck Reid Stephen Breck Reid Austin Presbytenan Theological Seminary Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LXI, Issue 2, Summer 1993, Pages 350–352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LXI.2.350 Published: 01 July 1993

Book Review: Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies

Book Review: Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies

Book Review: Biblical Criticism in Crisis?

Book Review: Biblical Criticism in Crisis?

Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: setting the scene 1. Distinguishing interpretative interests 2. The development of canonical exegesis 3. 'Introduction' and Old Testament theology 4. Has Childs fallen into Gabler's ditch? 5. Textual intentions and histories of reception 6. The future of the canonical approach Notes Bibliography Bibliographical key to the works of Brevard S. Childs Index of Old Testament references Index of subjects Index of authors.

Criticism in Crisis

??E SERAIT encore une gloire, dans cette grande confusion de la societe qui commence, d'avoir ete les derniers des delicats. -Soyons les derniers de notre ordre, de notre ordre d'esprits." The confusion has been even greater than Saint-Beuve foresaw when he set down this reflection a hundred years ago, and those of us who are still occupied with the problems of criticism have abandoned any pretensions to his kind of elegant connoisseurship. He and the kindred spirits that he invokes enjoyed the privilege of living more at ease with their time and in closer touch with the past; the influx and reflux of subject matter from both of those continual sources were rich indeed, yet not too overwhelmingly large to be breasted by a nicely discriminating eclecticism. Something like a synthesis could be effected between classical judgment and romantic appreciation, but it was too precarious and personal to outlast the middle years of the nineteenth century. Walter Pater, addressing himself to the next generation, exceeded SainteBeuve in his epicurean sense of the heightened moment and the coming deluge. The flood-by which I mean the uncontrollable flow of undifferentiated reading matter-was destined to sweep away the surviving landmarks, so that, when we take our bearings in this postdiluvian world, it is by means of such dead reckonings as I have been rash enough to venture here. Not only have tastes changed, and changed utterly, but the concept of good taste has lost its validity, since that depended upon its appeal to universal standards. Buen gusto, the faculty of Renaissance man for judging aright, has gradually yielded to the sort of uncritical enthusiasm connoted by "gusto," or to the degustation of literary vintages that has its cellar book in Saintsbury's History of Criticism. Critics, falling back on impressionism, sought their own criteria in the range and perceptiveness of their individual impressions. Some of these were based upon a rounded cultivation which might well have passed for professional erudition among their successors; other instances have been so capricious that today the term "impressionist" has gone the way of "amateur" and "dilettante." Such terms, as long as they had a positive meaning, embodied the natural impulse of every man to be his own critic rather than delegate another job to another expert. Their passing marks a final stage in the dissolution of that ideal which Nietzsche so poignantly and vainly evoked, the whole man. The century had its exemplary