History Of Literary Criticism Research Articles

Whimsical criticism

ABSTRACT For many decades, Virginia Woolf's reputation in the history of literary criticism has been as a heroic rebel and challenger to the dominant forms and institutions of literary criticism. This legacy has rightfully been celebrated. Yet this view tends to treat Woolf's idiosyncratic and whimsical writings in relation to and in opposition to the prevailing standards of academic criticism rather than as a serious, normatively coherent form of criticism in its own right. Thus, this essay takes up the hypothesis that Woolf's critical writing constitutes a methodologically coherent criticism, even while it understands the values of reading and literature in deeply different terms. Taking up Woolf's whimsical criticism offers an important alternative practice of criticism capable of mediating between professional and everyday forms of reading. Pursuing Woolf's criticism also allows the essay to unfold some of the values that subtend and continue to shape the hidden norms of literary criticism today.

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century, by Charles LaPorte

Reviewed by: The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte Sally Barnden (bio) The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century, by Charles LaPorte; pp. xii + 213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00. There is a marked tendency in contemporary Shakespeare studies to treat the nineteenth century as a period of protracted vandalism which imposed a sentimental, picturesque, and reverential veneer onto William Shakespeare’s texts—a veneer which must be carefully stripped back for the purposes of modern criticism and performance. The efforts of Victorian literary critics, particularly those who read Shakespeare for moral and religious wisdom, have been similarly derided: for example, Hannibal Hamlin, whose The Bible in Shakespeare (2013) is quoted frequently in the present book, complains of the “semi-intellectual soup” of Victorian writing on Shakespeare and the Bible (Hamlin qtd. in LaPorte 73). Charles LaPorte’s valuable new book, The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century, tackles Victorian reverence for Shakespeare head on, takes it seriously, and illustrates its ongoing influence not just on Shakespeare criticism, but on the whole discipline of English studies. Drawing on a substantial set of examples from across the nineteenth century, he reads texts elsewhere dismissed as eccentric and trivial and, without insisting on their critical merit, makes a persuasive case for their significance in the history of literary criticism. The result is a consistently engaging book which has as much to say about nineteenth-century literary criticism as it does about Shakespeare, and which presents itself as a proxy history of the discipline. LaPorte is evidently conscious that his subject matter has often been treated as a punchline and begins his study with George Bernard Shaw’s scornful coining of the term “bardolatry” in 1900 (1). LaPorte’s preferred term, “bardology,” is intended as a nonpejorative way to describe the same phenomenon. Though the history of disapproval poured on religious veneration for Shakespeare remains relevant throughout the book, the term bardology allows a broader view of its impact, including the bardological impulses that endure in contemporary English studies. For instance, LaPorte cites Roland Barthes’s argument that we “cannot study authorship without indulging in theology” and Franco Moretti’s characterization of close reading as “a theological exercise” (144, 145). In a brief preface, LaPorte also defends his book title’s use of the word “cult,” acknowledging the difficulty of writing about religion with appropriate balance and respect. The book’s determination to afford a fair hearing to Victorian devotional criticism is tempered by LaPorte’s generous but sometimes wry prose. He frankly acknowledges the awkwardness of some efforts to draw parallels between Shakespeare and scripture, such as Charles Ellis’s elaborate scriptural paraphrases for Shakespeare’s sonnets (which LaPorte calls “an intriguing display of hermeneutic perverseness” [86–7]). After a lively and wide-ranging introduction, the book begins with a chapter charting the history of Shakespearean sermons, showing how comparatively conservative examples preached to mark the 1864 tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth provided a precedent for more blatantly idolatrous celebrations of Shakespeare’s divine inspiration later in the century. The next two chapters examine genres of publication whose contents as well as their mise-en-page argue for the equivalence of Shakespearean and scriptural wisdom. Chapter 2 focuses on quotation books that organized out-of-context Shakespearean fragments by theme and placed them alongside comparable extracts [End Page 679] from the Bible. Chapter 3 considers similar efforts regarding the sonnets. As LaPorte notes, we might expect the homoeroticism, idolatry, and explorations of jealousy and lust in Shakespeare’s sonnets to have given pause to a devout Victorian editor. Instead, they prompted some elaborate critical gymnastics to justify interpreting the sequence as a narrative of conflicted devotion to Christ. These chapters are a useful contribution to the field of Victorian Shakespeare and provide crucial context for continuing work on Victorian performance, adaptation, and popular appropriation of Shakespeare in various media (following such scholars as Adrian Poole, Richard Schoch, Gail Marshall, and Stuart Sillars). However, the book’s fourth and fifth chapters constitute a more ambitious intervention by addressing the nineteenth-century genesis of the authorship controversy (in that period...

Тұрсынбек Кәкішев публицистикасындағы алаштану мәселелері

The article analyzes and concludes about the study of the problem of Alash studies in the journalism of scientist T.Kakishev, the civil position and personal views of the author in it. The scientist’s writings are dominated by factuality, which considered the circumstances that influenced the development of the opposite view of the idea of Alash in the history and literature of the Soviet period, which has not yet been fully studied. Special attention is paid to research methods in journalistic articles in which the scientist cited statistical data concerning the fate of the slanderous national intelligentsia, which suffered from political ideologies that took place in different periods of national history. Conclusions about the fate of the Kazakh intelligentsia, published in the newspapers «Zhuldyz», «Leninshil Zhas», reveal the scientist in a new light.T.Kakishev pays special attention to the activities of the press when considering the history of literary criticism, a research essay about the journal «Sadak», published by students of the madrasa «Galiya» in Ufa, works from journalistic trips to regional studies, personal study, is a sample of collecting and generalizing, analyzing, forecasting information. The articles of the scientist «Kiyas kisyndar kiyameti», «Kagidaga ainalgan kateler tuzelse», «Ult ziyalylaryn tagdyr-talayy» explain the conclusions concerning the historical event and the political situation of that period, as well as the slanderous statements of the Alash intelligentsia. The article reveals the methods of analysis of works, printed articles on the topic of a scientist who comprehensively investigated the problem of Alash studies.

Contributors

GABRIELLA ALFIERI is professor of history of the Italian language at the University of Catania. Since 2011, she has been an academic of the Crusca and chair of the Scientific Council of the Verga Foundation and the Committee for the National Edition of the Works of Verga. She is the author of 150 publications on the history of language, philology, and stylistics, including Lettera e figura nella scrittura de “I Malavoglia” (1983); L’ “Italiano nuovo”. centralismo e marginalità linguistici nell'Italia unificata (1986); La lingua sconciata. espressionismo ed espressivismo in Vittorio Imbriani (1990); with I. Bonomi, Lingua italiana e televisione (2012); I “vestigi dei nomi”. l'identità di Catania tra storia e mito (2016); Verga (2016); and “I suoi begli anni”. Verga tra Milano e Catania (1872–1891) (2020). [alfieri@unict.it]MARCEL DANESI is professor emeritus of linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. He taught Italian linguistics and Italian language classes at the same university for over thirty years. He has been a visiting professor at various universities, including the University of Rome (La Sapienza), the University of Perugia (per Stranieri), and the University of Lugano. He has authored many works on the Italian language and various textbooks for the teaching of Italian. He has also published in the field of semiotics, including The Semiotics of Emoji (2016), Understanding Nonverbal Communication: A Semiotic Guide (2021), and Warning Signs: The Semiotics of Danger (2022). [marcel.danesi@utoronto.ca]ANTONIO DI SILVESTRO is associate professor of philology of Italian literature in the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania. His interests are mainly directed to nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, investigated in a critical, textual and semantic perspective, and to the poetry of the fourteenth and seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In this field, on the basis of a philological, intertextual, and lexicographic methodology, he developed research and analyses on Petrarca, Franco Sacchetti, Parini, Leopardi, Montale, Caproni, Sinisgalli, Pavese. He published, with G. Savoca, the critical and commented edition of Giovanni Verga's Lettere alla famiglia (1851–1880) (2011) and Lettere ai fratelli (1883–1920) (2016). He has also edited, in the national edition of Parini's works, the critical and commented edition of Ascanio in Alba. He is the scientific director, with Antonio Sichera, of the digital edition of Luigi Pirandello's Opera Omnia (www.pirandellonazionale.it). With Sichera he also edited Pavese's Opera poetica (2021). [silvanto@unict.it]ANNE C. LEONE is assistant professor of Italian studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and directs the Medieval and Renaissance Program at Syracuse University. Her first monograph, Dante's Blood, is forthcoming from Legenda; other research projects explore intersections between theological, metaliterary, and scientific concerns in medieval culture. [aleone@syr.edu]GIUSEPPE ANDREA LIBERTI is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II,” where he earned his PhD in philology. He worked on eighteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature and contemporary Italian poetry. He published a critical and commented edition of Michele Sovente's Cumae (2019) and edited, with Salvatore Iacolare, the volume Letteratura dialettale a Napoli. Testi, problemi, prospettive (2020). [giuseppeandrea.liberti@unina.it]ANDREA MANGANARO is professor of Italian literature at the University of Catania. He is vice president of the scientific council of Fondazione Verga, coeditor of “Annali,” and member of the board of the Association of Italianists (ADI). He has worked on short-story (Boccaccio, sixteenth century), Foscolo, Verga, Croce, history of literary criticism. His publications include: La ferinità umana, la guerra, lo spatriare. Riletture verghiane (2021); Storie e leggende napoletane critical edition (national edition of Benedetto Croce's works, 2019); Tra imitatio e mimesis. Novelle e poetiche del Cinquecento (2014); “Jusque datum sceleri”. Foscolo e la memoria dei vinti (2014); Partenze senza ritorno. Interpretare Verga (2014); Il rappezzo ininterrotto. Benedetto Croce tra scritture e riscritture (2012); Verga (2011); and Significati della letteratura. Scritture e idee da Castelvetro a Timpanaro (2007). [a.manganaro@unict.it]ALESSANDRO MASI, writer and journalist, is Segretario Generale della Società Dante Alighieri since 1999. He teaches history of art at the Università Uninettuno di Roma and collaborates with the Master di Beni Culturali dell'Università IULM di Milano. His interests range within the Italian twentieth century, with prestigious publications such as Giuseppe Bottai. La politica delle arti (1992), Zig Zag. Il romanzo futurista (2009), and Idealismo e opportunismo della cultura italiana: 1943–1948 (2018). His most recent publication is his historical novel L'artista dell'anima. Giotto e il suo mondo (2022).JULIANNE VANWAGENEN is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and managing editor of the Pirandello Society of America's PSA Journal. She has held positions at the University of Southern California, Tsinghua University, and University of Michigan, and her works have been published as book chapters and in articles in the South Central Review, Gradiva, and Forum Italicum. [jvw@g.harvard.edu]The views and opinions expressed in Italica are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, Editorial Board, the American Association of Teachers of Italian, or the Publisher.

The quixotic eighteenth century

Abstract“Quixotism” is a term pivotal to the histories critics tell about literature. Despite a scholarly consensus regarding the significance of quixotism to eighteenth‐century transatlantic writing, there remain vast discrepancies in critical formulations of what quixotism actually is, to the point where trying to find common ground in different scholars' definitions of quixotism might appear, at first glance, a quixotic endeavour. Yet scholarship on quixotism persistently returns to dichotomies: romance versus the novel; the exceptional versus the typical; the original versus the copy; reason versus imagination. Quixotism remains both vexing question and floating signifier, caught between character and genre, system and allusion as it traverses and transforms eighteenth‐century literature and culture. In this article I will both reflect on the state of quixotic studies in eighteenth‐century studies and offer an account of Don Quixote's place in the history of literary criticism and theory.

Kormilov, S. (2019). A history of Russian literature in the 20th c. (1920s - 1990s): The main trends. Moscow: Yurayt. (In Russ.)

The book under review is a polemical and somewhat provocative study of the literary process in Russia and among Russian-speaking emigre writers. Despite its genre (a textbook), the book bears a greater resemblance to a monograph which sets out to construct a theoretical history of 20th-c. Russian literature across the major parameters of literary history. This overarching agenda defines the book's unusual structure: it foregoes the traditional division into periods or listings of ‘big names.' At the same time, the classics and stages of the literary process constitute sections in their own right. The author also considers the history of literary criticism and studies in theory and history of literature, as well as the relationship between verse and prose and writing genres vs. main categories of literature. S. Kormilov's approach can be described as non-ideological, i. e., the author tries to steer clear of any social-political engagement.

Исторические факты литературы и личность в исследовании – o составлении книги «История русской и советской литературной критики XX века»

Russian literature is an important part of world literature and is studied all over the world. In comparison with the history of literature, the history of literary criticism is more an interaction between the objectivity of literary facts and the personality of the compiler of this history. This work presents a description of the personality in research using the example of the book “History of Russian and Soviet literary criticism of the XX century” written by Chinese scientist Zhang Jie, the main task of which is to provide a theoretical basis and methods of criticism for analyzing the mechanism of reproducing the meanings of literary texts and images. We analyze the functions of literary criticism and explain the interaction and harmony of objective historical facts of literature and the compiler’s personality in the study. We define three currents of Russian and Soviet literary criticism of the 20th century: religious and cultural criticism, real literary criticism, and aesthetic criticism. We prove that history reflects not only the objectivity of factors, but also its compiler’s personality, which is an indicator. We explain the need to coordinate the objectivity of historical facts and the subjectivity of the compiler, and we present a value-based reflection of a scientific linguistic personality in the Chinese ethnoculture.

Criteria for and Forms of Assessing Talent: From the History of Literary Criticism

Criteria for and Forms of Assessing Talent: From the History of Literary Criticism

The Queer Confessional: Foregrounding the Discordant Poetics of Henri Cole Through the Troubling of Genre

This paper is a research study on a nascent American Poet, Henri Cole, whose scholarly archiveremains minimal, positioning itself as a fundamental starting point to which to begin a discussionaround a new, but critical voice within the field of American Poetics. The discordant poetics of HenriCole are informed by two distinct traditions within the canon of 20th and 21st century Americanpoetics, namely that of a queer and confessional mode to which he stands at the intersection ofboth movements. However, Cole’s scholarly archive is woefully small due to his recent publicationpresence in the literary field. Thus, research was focused on analyzing Cole’s chief poetic inspirations(Hart Crane and Elizabeth Bishop) as well as recursive forays into queerness and confessionalpoetics. In identifying that intersection, I argue that Cole is at the forefront of troubling poetic genrethrough the proposal of a ‘queer confessional’ mode of poetics. Cole troubles the notion of truththrough utilizing a queer perspective on the confessional genre that has historically fell to criticismsof histrionics and overt inwardness. Instead, this paper aims to subvert a long history of literarycriticism through instead focusing on how a queer confessional form ‘retrieves’ the confessional asa radical, poetic gesture that relishes in the instability of truth-making through a simultaneous reaffirmationof poetic genre. Cole thus disrupts and revises the notion of literary tradition through hisqueer perspective; in which his ‘queer confessional’ proposes a poetics of liberation.

Становление и развитие чувашской фольклористики и литературоведения XIX в.

History of literary criticism of various nations of Russia in the 19th century is many-sided and is important both for further development of literature and for the process of mutual enrichment, addition of literatures and literary studies. A special place in this context belongs to the Kazan province which has always been characterized by ethnic diversity an multinational structure and to the University of Kazan which is the acknowledged center for studying traditional ways of life, folklore and literature of the Volga region. In the formation of literary criticism and the development of literature of the Volga region in general and Chuvash literature in particular, the activities of the Chuvash writers, actors, artists, composers (I. Yurkin, G. Timofeev, M. Akimov, K. Ivanov, N. Shubossinni, M. Trubina, F. Pavlov, P. Pazukhin, etc.) and researchers (A.A. Fuchs, V.A. Sboev, S.M. Mikhailov, P. Malkhov, I.Ya. Yakovlev, N.M. Ashmarin, etc.) are of special importance.

The “Poetry” and “Art” of the psalms in Ivan Franko’s prose (on the material of novel “A thorn in foot”)

In the first part of the article Poetry and art of psalms in Ivan Franko's prose, contextual and ekstraxtual analysis of I. Franko's Teren in the Leg presented. For the first time in the history of literary criticism, Psalm 31 is considered as the intertext and chronotope of Ivan Franko's novel Teren in the Leg. The relevance of the exegetical tradition is shown as a key to explication of the content of sacral images and biblical materials in the prose writings of the writer.

Claude Rawson in conversation with Marjorie Perloff

PREFACEClaude Rawson has been called 'perhaps the best living scholar in eighteenth-century satire, and perhaps of British satire itself', and there is frequent reference in the literature to 'Rawson’s unassailable pre-eminence as Swift’s most challenging, exciting, and erudite modern critic'. In the words of Robert Alter, 'What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity'. Before his retirement in 2014, Rawson was the first Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale, where he had taught since 1986. Before that, he was for many years (1971–1986) professor at the University of Warwick: while at Warwick, he served as Department Chairman and was the co-editor of Modern Language Review. Rawson has held many distinguished visiting professorships around the world, most recently in China, where he was born and grew up. He is the author of numerous now-classic scholarly studies, among them God, Gulliver, and Genocide, and has edited dozens of scholarly editions, individual volumes of essays, and series like the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. He is currently the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, now in process. In the 1980s, he was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, writing on a great variety of literary and cultural topics, and he continues to contribute to the TLS and other periodicals. Since retirement, Rawson spends much of his time in Cambridge.Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She contributed an essay 'Beckett in the Country of the Houyhnhnms' to the 2008 Cambridge University Press Festschrift for Rawson called Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy.The interview took place via email between Cambridge and Los Angeles, which is Perloff’s home, in August-October 2016.

Imposed Identity through Foucauldian Panopticism and Released Identity through Deleuzian Ressentiment in Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

The despotic society of classical era, run by a despot, who had “the right to decide life and death” of the dominated subjects (Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I 135), had indeed the system of observance and surveillance of Foucauldian panoptical system. The present paper scrutinizes the Happy Valley of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, as the symbolic representation of a panoptic structure in which dominant discourses are institutionalized in the captives and inmates of the Happy Valley. In essence, the central theme of Foucault’s theories of power is “the methods with which modern civilization creates and controls human subjects, through institutions” (Habib, A History of Literary Criticism 766) as well as discourses. The present paper contends that such institutions and discourses also existed in classical era and in the despotic society run by the despot, seemed to be the focal point or the center of power, but who indeed remained ineffective without discourses and institutions which dispersed his power.

О ПРОТИВОРЕЧИЯХ ТЕРМИНА «МЕТОД ДИАЛЕКТИЧЕСКОГО МАТЕРИАЛИЗМА» В ИСТОРИИ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ КРИТИКИ

О ПРОТИВОРЕЧИЯХ ТЕРМИНА «МЕТОД ДИАЛЕКТИЧЕСКОГО МАТЕРИАЛИЗМА» В ИСТОРИИ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ КРИТИКИ

Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and a Poetics for 1688

Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and a Poetics for 1688 David Alvarez Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711) marks a contentious point where the history of literary criticism and the politics of 1688 meet. Critics are divided about whether the poem dictates the laws of criticism and monarchical sovereignty or promotes the formation of rational-critical debate in a public sphere. A line of thinking from Maynard Mack to Lee Morrisey argues for the poem’s “pervasive concern for corporateness” and invocation of rigorous “Rules” of criticism designed to contain “democratized reading” by disavowing the irrational, passionate, and figurative elements of language (Mack 171; Morrissey 117). Emphasizing the poem’s concern with unity, such interpretations align it with Ronald Paulson’s claim that Pope rejects the “Whig idea” of aesthetics by returning to a Jacobite “poetics, focusing on the poet,” a move analogous to a “a return from an oligarchy to a monarchy” (130).1 On the other hand, celebrations of An Essay on Criticism for its commitment to polite sociability and the formation of a public sphere resist claims about the poem’s totalizing aesthetics and absolutist politics. Offering the most sophisticated version of this Habermasian approach, Sarah Eron argues that the poem is structured by “didactic and dialogic exchange” because its modern muse is not a divine addressee or the imagination but always a “social other” (25-6, 3).2 Insofar as such readings insist on the poem’s commitment to the intersubjective determination of aesthetic judgment, they sit easily with analyses that situate it within the framework of Ernst Cassirer’s influential account of aesthetic thinking in the Enlightenment as “a striving for totality” that also allows for the “finite to assert its own character” (352-3). David Morris, for example, argues that the poem’s conception of criticism espouses “universal, certain, permanent, theoretical values” while also taking into account “the particular, variable, practical aspects of critical activity” (55). Yet if both Eron and Morris find in the poem versions of Enlightenment reason that [End Page 101] preserve the particular from subsumption by the universal, they anchor it differently in either communicative or probabilistic reasoning, respectively. Neither form of rationality, however, fully captures the poem’s own efforts to theorize the relationship between the the production of art and the practice of criticism. Although it insists on an openness to the social other, Habermasian communicative rationality cuts reason off from the rhetorical and poetic resources that Pope’s poem and understanding of criticism rely upon: it is closed to the other of language.3 Likewise, Pope argues that because writing poetry is intimately bound up in the fecundity of the poem’s material elements and irrational poetic devices—because it requires a “Happiness as well as Care”—the “Rules” that govern criticial judgment must be subject to critical reflection and ongoing transformation (142). This openness to the irrational limits the light that Lockean probabilistic reasoning can shed on the poem’s conceptions of rationality, selfhood, and community. The poem’s understanding of the rules of criticism, genius, and political sovereignty are more heteronomous than the opposing accounts of Pope as monarch manqué or Habermasian avatar suggest.4 It is more open to both the otherness of individuals and of language. This openness takes at least two forms. First, if the poem extols the “whole,” it also rejects bad forms of unity. It resists the subsumption of the individual into an unthinking mass. Like The Dunciad, it is concerned with how meaningful language can collapse into meaningless noise, how a whole can undifferentiate and assimilate: “All glares alike, without Distinction gay” (314). An Essay on Criticism understands authentic individuality and community in terms of the linguistic interplay of sameness and difference, a mutual dependency that Fredric Bogel identifies in The Dunciad as a “double relation, in which…energies of unification and division, coexist, a relation that immediately dissolves when either element is lost” (“Dulness Unbound” 845). Similarly, efforts in An Essay on Criticism to write or criticize based on communal repetition or individualistic singularity fail—as does the selfhood and community of such would-be writers and critics. By figuring individuality and community through...

The Status of Shin Heum in the Literary Criticism History, and the Meaning of Adventing of Seoin party in the Middle of Chosun Dynasty

The Status of Shin Heum in the Literary Criticism History, and the Meaning of Adventing of Seoin party in the Middle of Chosun Dynasty

Patrick Buckridge — A Tribute

Patrick Buckridge is that rare person — even in the academic world: a true scholar with a deep, sometimes eccentric, passion for ideas. He belongs contentedly to Brisbane while engaging intellectually with the vast world of scholarship in history, language and literature. He has retained his interest in his first love, Renaissance literature, but understands that literature is also here and now, in the society around him. So his studies have extended to Australian writers, Queensland literary history, the history of the book, the history of literary criticism and the nature of readership for literary work. As his May 2013 public lecture demonstrated, he believes in the continued importance of attentive reading as a source of intellectual understanding.

Plato's Poetics

This paper presents an introductory overview of Plato's poetics, aesthetics, and literary theory, with particular reference to his notion of mimesis, and grounding the discussion on his Theory of Ideas. It is part of a lecture series on the history of literary criticism, partly available online as HYPERCRITICA: A HYPERTEXTUAL HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM.

In Defense of Paraphrase

This essay notes initially an assumption underlying much of the criticism addressing ethics and literaturethe belief that if there is something especially ethically significant about literature, it results from the peculiar nature of the relationship between the aesthetic text and its reader. Readings relying on this assumption often seek to outperform each other in emphasizing their attention to the ineffable features of literary texts, while criticizing rivals as inappropriately reading for a paraphrasable “message” commendable on philosophical grounds. I suggest that an alternative approach, one that sees the paraphrasable ideas such texts express as part of what makes them worthwhile, would be promising. The essay goes on to defend this account from two objections: an aesthetic objection, which suggests that it is mistaken to see literary texts as making theoretical assertions at all; and an objection from the history of literary criticism, which points out that it is debatable whether this approach is really new. I respond to the first by arguing that in fact moral-philosophical ideas are a necessary element of the artistic form of narratives, especially that of realist novels. Insofar as narratives necessarily involve the depiction of persons who make decisions and subsequently act, they cannot help but present at least an implicit view of the nature of human agency. Moreover, when narrators describe and reflect upon the decisions and actions of such characters, their articulations bring the implicit philosophical claims to a level of awareness. I draw out these ideas through a brief reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch . The reply to the second objection depends on a genealogy of interpretative theory, one that draws out how an opposition to critical emphasis on ideas in literature developed within formalist theories of the novel, a process culminating in the New Critical insistence that literary ideas matter only insofar as they create an aesthetic structure. The genealogy shows then how deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion share this fundamental opposition through their insistence that one must go beyond the mere ideas in a text to something more fundamental—either its reliance upon a fundamental instability or its repression of a non-normative political entity. Against this opposition, I propose a “content formalism”: an approach that openly admits its primary attention to the intellectual content of the literary work while accompanying this attitude with a non-reductive recognition of the importance of literary form.

Writing Print Cultures Past: Literary Criticism and Book History

Book historians focus on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a period of transformation in authorship and reading practices in England. Their studies often turn to paratextual matter like prefaces and dedications for evidence about how authors, patrons, publishers, and readers negotiated their roles in the changing literary marketplace. Early literary criticism found expression in the same paratexts. Yet although they share common artifacts, these two lines of inquiry remain largely separate. In this article, I bring these threads of inquiry together to show how the history of literary criticism contributes to the history of the book (and vice versa).