A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. VII German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950 by René Wellek (review)

114Rocky Mountain Review criticism, I would place Waid alongside Elizabeth Ammons and Cynthia Griffin Wolff. RADHIKA MOHANRAM University of Waikato, New Zealand RENÉ WELLEK. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. VII German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 458 p. The seventh volume ofA History ofModern Criticism: 1750-1950 reaffirms René Wellek's rank in the Western world as the principal critical historian of our time. In 1955 appeared The Later Eighteenth Century and The Romantic Age; in 1965 The Age of Transition and The Later Nineteenth Century; and in 1986 English Criticism, 1900-1950 and American Criticism, 1900-1950. Volume eight, to be subtitled French, Italian, and Spanish Criticism, 1900-1950, will conclude Wellek's magisterial elucidation of how for two hundred years leading Continental, English, and American critics voiced their responses to the phenomenon of literature. Even with the publication of the early volumes reviewers hailed the work of this Czech émigré and Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale as a "monument" to humane scholarship. The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet suggested that were there a Nobel Prize in literary history, it should go to the esteemed American scholar. The notion pleases exponents of René Wellek's many indispensable books, not the least of which is his (and Austin Warren's) brilliant Theory ofLiterature (1949). Literature, insists this critic of critics, is charged with value. Understanding requires a theory. Adequate theory requires a history. And history requires an international perspective. At the start of his ambitious enterprise, Wellek had conceived a five-volume history, with a jumbo last volume to be subtitled simply Twentieth Century Criticism. Now volume seven, shaped in part out of more than a dozen articles published over three decades, picks up, nationally speaking, where volume four leaves off. While sensibly grouping affiliated critics, texts, and ideas, Wellek points up the concurrency of such rival doctrines as Symbolism, Expressionism, Psychologism, Futurism, Marxism, Historicism, and Formalism. More important, he adopts A. O. Lovejoy's method of "unit ideas" in terms of critical personalities rather than in isolation. To Thomas Mann, D. S. Mirsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, and Roman Ingarden the historian devotes separate chapters. Scores of others— critics, scholars, poets, or influential thinkers like Gundolf, Kommerell, Hofmannsthal, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Vossler, Curtius, Auerbach, Spitzer, Kayser, Staiger, Edschmid, Leontiev, Blok, Ivanov, Lenin, Gorky, Trotsky, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Salda, and Mukafovsky—Wellek discusses in compact but telling detail. Like the earlier volumes, this one also contains useful bibliographies and notes as well as handy name and subject indices. Book Reviews115 While displaying notable diversity and detachment, German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism obviously reflects the historian's valid sympathies and unambiguous direction. The focus on the literary object, the unity of form and content, the alteration of ideas in aesthetic contexts, the relation of literature to reality, the poem's historicity, the obligation to judge—these convictions and many others René Wellek has long propounded . Because he analyzes a critic's views not in isolation but in the context of the history of ideas, he is alert to confusions, contradictions, and commonplaces. He is adept at translating jargon into English. With the rise of the academy, Wellek observes, much twentieth-century criticism "seems to have lost touch with the wider reading public" (xvi). Still, as a historian who takes pains to walk the fine rational line, Wellek does not exalt critical irrationalism, the recent efforts to revive literary criticism as a form of free creation at odds with the life of the conscious mind. For example, he finds Jung rather than Freud of greater interest to the student of literature, but he distrusts beliefin a collective mythology, in critical surrealism, in automatic writing. He is much more sympathetic to organic aesthetics derived from Plato and Neo-Platonism, mediated by eighteenthand nineteenth-century German Idealism, and refined in our day by Edmund Husserl and Roman Ingarden. Particularly interesting to students of Wellek, who neither ostentatiously displays nor aggressively denies his judgmatic "I," is Part III (Poland and Czechoslovakia) treating the relationship between Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art (1931) and Wellek's Theory ofLiterature as well as Wellek's connection...