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  • The New Critics And The Text-Object
  • Douglas Mao

It is presently a commonplace among scholars and teachers of literature that the New Criticism is, and has been for decades now, both dead and alive. As a set of techniques for reading developed from the 1920s through the early 1950s by I. A. Richards, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and others, and principally disseminated by Brooks and Warren, it continues to exercise an enormous influence on teachers of literature in the United States and to hold an important place in the practice of literary pedagogy. As a set of principles pertaining to the ontology, structure, and function of the literary text and of the critical act developed mainly by Brooks, Ransom, and W. K. Wimsatt, however, the New Criticism is undoubtedly long dead, its ruins the foundation upon which every major movement in literary theory since the late fifties has fortified its own position. 1 When in his 1975 John Crowe Ransom Lecture, Hugh Kenner said of the school of criticism that Ransom himself had named, “the curious thing is how a classroom strategy could come to mistake itself for a critical discipline,” he was not so much indicating a flaw in the New Critics’ understanding of their project as evoking the history of literary study in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. 2

Both the resiliency of the New Criticism’s pedagogical method and the vulnerability of its theoretical premises seem to owe a good deal to its tendency to treat the text in certain respects as though it were a self-contained object. Clearly, this approach facilitates classroom discussion because it seems to demand little more than a working competence in the English language, thus addressing the fact that college students in the post-Second World War United States could not and cannot, in Gerald Graff’s words, “be depended on to bring to the university a common cultural background.” 3 On the other hand, the most popular form of attack upon the New Criticism has proven to be the assertion that in treating the literary text as an autonomous aesthetic object it severs it irretrievably from both psychology and history. Perhaps the most extreme formulation of this dismissal is offered by Terry Eagleton, who writes in Literary Theory: An Introduction that “if the poem was really to become an object in itself, New Criticism had to sever it from [End Page 227] both author and reader,” that “rescuing the text from author and reader went hand in hand with disentangling it from any social or historical context” and that “what New Criticism did, in fact, was to convert the poem into a fetish.” 4

Among these charges, the one that would seem most serious at the moment is that of attempting to pry the text from its social and historical contexts, just as in the late seventies and early eighties the most dreaded accusation might have been the nearly opposite one of taking for granted a simple referential relation between text and world; what Jerome McGann called the “scandal of referentiality” in 1981 has since undergone a characteristically twentieth-century American transformation from scandal to cause célèbre to norm. If the historicist shift is predicated significantly upon a change in the status of reference, a reconceptualizing of the relation between world and text that has undone the possibility of thinking of meaning as enclosed “inside” a text’s language, it would seem that New Critical poetics is particularly unsuited to the present scholarly climate. The New Critics’ propensity to regard the text as an enduring thing and to compare it to the work of plastic art (and particularly the object with hieratic associations: the well wrought urn, the verbal icon), after all, would tend to block historical inquiry to the degree that objectification implies a hardening of the boundaries that separate text from world.

But to what extent does this implication hold? As several critics have noted, to insist that history does not permeate objects, that it is rightly understood as an...

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