BBL 3228

ISSUES AND APPROACHES

IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

DR. IDA BAIZURA BAHAR

SEMESTER 1, 2012/2013

WEEK 3

THE HUMANISTIC APPROACH

Overview

Traditional literary criticism takes the Humanist view

looks for both technical skills and significant content, for a re-representation of themes that
belong to the great commonplaces of human existence.

The humanistic tradition in interpreting literature upholds the notion that one should study
literature for its own sake.

The idea that there cannot be an ideology in literature is in itself an ideology called liberal
humanism.

Liberal humanism was based on the idea that one should study literature for its own sake
because it was enriching.

The humanists Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold both wrote about literature at a time when
the suffrage movement was yet to happen.

THE HUMANISTIC TRADITION

Walter Pater The Renaissance

Walter Pater extolled the concept of art for arts sake in his book The Renaissance.

He wrote that the love of art for arts sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to
give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those
moments sake.

THE HUMANISTIC APPROACH

Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy

Matthew Arnold was a nineteenth-century poet and a literary and cultural critic, who sought to
defend art on the basis of what art can do to society and culture.

He was the first cultural critic who claimed that to speak about literature one has to speak about
culture.

Matthew Arnold proposed that philosophy and religion would be "replaced by poetry" in
modern society.

He held that culture representing the best that has been thought and said in the world was
available through literature and enhances man.

Matthew Arnold saw culture as the moral attributes to literature, which could mount a
humanist defence against the destructive anarchy: the moral chaos brought about in the
industrial age.

Arnold stresses that only the best poetry will have the power of the criticism of life.

According to Arnold, poetry has the unique power of making sense of life, and culture allows us
"to grow", become more complete and better human beings

Arnold had a very narrow-minded view about what a work of art should be.

His view was that a classic should form public taste rather than be formed by public taste.

However, Arnold does not consider the possibility that what is "the best" for one age might not
be "the best" for another, or that what within a given period is "the best" for one party e.g.
aristocracy is not necessarily the best for another e.g. peasants.
F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition

F. R. Leavis was profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold and he established the canon of
English Literature to identify the great works of literature.

According to Leavis, the canon of English Literature assists in promoting humanistic values
against the forces of industrialization.

However, his unsure critical judgment on what constitutes the great works of literature, along
with the moral aspect of literature was called into question.

OLD CRITICISM

Criticism predating the New Criticism and bringing extrinsic criteria to bear on the analysis of
literature.

Refusing to recognize the autonomy of art, such criticism sees literature as authorial selfexpression (Romanticism) or critical self-expression (impressionism) or as parasitic upon moral
or ethical absolutes (new humanism).

Such criticism blithely commits the affective and intentional fallacies.

Romanticism

A movement of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century that exalts
individualism over collectivism, revolutionism over conservatism, innovation over tradition,
imagination over reason, and spontaneity over constraint.

According to romanticism, art is essentially self-expression, a spontaneous overflow of

powerful emotions.

A work of art should exemplify organic form so that the parts and the whole are vitally
interdependent.

Romanticism strives to heal the cleavage between subject and object, "to make the external
internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature" (Samuel Taylor
Coleridge).

As a political idea, Romanticism stresses the innate goodness of human beings and the evil of
the institutions that trammel and stultify human creativity.

Intentional fallacy

A term used by William K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley to describe the error of interpreting a
work in terms of its author's professed intention in creating it.

Unless intentions are realized and implied by the autonomous verbal structure itself, they are
irrelevant and immaterial.

From this point of view, biographical facts, authorial testimonies, and other data extrinsic to
the text itself have no bearing on interpretation unless they pertain to concretely dramatized
elements

NEW CRITICISM

A term applied to the criticism written by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate. R. P. Blackmur,
Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and others as well as to the seminal ideas of T. S. Eliot, I. A.
Richards, and William Empson.

A reaction against the old criticism which saw art as self-expression (Romanticism) or exalted
the subjectivity of the reader (impressionism) or applied extrinsic criteria of morality and value
to literature (new humanism) or gave credence to the professed intentions of the author
(intentional fallacy) or confused what a poem is with what a poem does (affective fallacy), the
New Criticism regards the work of art as an autonomous object, a self-contained universe of
discourse.

Whereas scientific language corresponds with an external referent, literary language is internally
coherent, self-referential, and rich in irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity.

New Criticism maintains that a close reading of literary texts will reveal the multiple meanings
and nuanced complexities of their verbal texture as well as the oppositions and tensions which
are balanced in the organic unity of the text.

A literary movement that started in the late 1920s and 1930s and originated in reaction to
traditional criticism that new critics saw as largely concerned with matters extraneous to the
text, e.g., with the biography or psychology of the author or the work's relationship to literary
history.

New Criticism proposed that a work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous, and so
should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself.

A poem consists less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about the 'real' world
beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex
experiences in a verbal form (Hawkes, pp. 150-151).

Major figures of New Criticism include I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches,
William Empson, Murray Krieger, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Robert Penn
Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur, Rene Wellek, Ausin Warren, and Ivor Winters.
Key Terms

Intentional Fallacy - equating the meaning of a poem with the author's intentions.

Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a text with how it makes the reader feel. A reader's
emotional response to a text generally does not produce a reliable interpretation.

Heresy of Paraphrase - assuming that an interpretation of a literary work could consist of a

detailed summary or paraphrase.

Close reading (from Bressler - see General Resources below) - "a close and detailed analysis of
the text itself to arrive at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural
concerns" (263).

Irony

Recognition of the difference between real and apparent meaning. Verbal irony is a rhetorical
trope wherein "x" is uttered and "not x" is meant, as when Mark Anthony says that Brutus is
an honorable man.

Dramatic irony occurs when characters say something and the auditors know more than they
do.

In the New Criticism, irony, the poet's recognition of incongruities, was thought to be the
master trope in that it was essential to the production of paradox, complexity, richness, and
ambiguity.

Paradox

A statement that initially seems to be illogical or self-contradictory yet eventually proves to

embody a complex truth.

In the New Criticism, the term is extended to embrace any complexity of language that
sustains multiple meanings and deviates from the norms of ordinary language use.

Hence Cleanth Brooks's claim that "the language of poetry is the language of paradox."

Ambiguity

A no negative term for the capacity of language to sustain multiple meanings.

Also called plurisignation or polysemy, ambiguity arises from what William Empson calls "any
verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of
language."

In literary parlance, ambiguity is not a mistake in denotation to be avoided, but a resource of

connotation to be exploited.

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Empson argues that the richness, complexity, and
concentration of literary language derives from the seven types of ambiguity he discusses.

The notion that ambiguity is the root condition of all literary discourse, a notion that arises
from I. A. Richards's distinction between the scientific (referential or denotative) and the
poetic (emotive or connotative) uses of language, is an integral aspect of the New Critical view
that irony, paradox, and tension are definitive aspects of the work of art.