-
Seeing the New Criticism Again
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
129 Seeing the New Criticism Again Once upon a time there was a small group of men who cared about poems, but not much else. They wanted to discuss poems in terms of their form, and such was their love for poetry they wanted these poems to be perfect, for every detail to balance out every other, and for the poems to come together in wonderfully ironic wholes. They worked hard reading those poems, searching for unities and ironies and balances , and they called this hard work “close reading.” This was all a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it, because Derrida had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of deconstruction . And the men so loved poems that they didn’t want the messiness of the world to enter into the poems, so they read the poems they loved without reference to context. They worked hard to avoid looking at history and ethics and politics, and they called this hard work “formalism .” This too was a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it because Greenblatt had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of the New Historicism. But these men, misguided as they were, came to dominate our English departments, because something called the G.I. Bill came along, leading behind it a long line of eager and ambitious people, a new generation of students who hadn’t been prepared for college at fancy prep schools. Someone had to find a new way to teach them, a way that didn’t depend on the students having prepped for college at Groton or Choate or some provincial equivalent. And the New Critics came forward and said they didn’t need for their students to do anything but closely read a few short poems and all would be well. But all was not well until the New Critics were driven from the land by Derrida and Greenblatt—may their swords never rust, may their books remain in print forever. 130 The Poet Resigns this, more or less, was the story I was told about the New Critics when I was a graduate student in the 1990s. The people telling me this story considered themselves enemies of the New Critics, but in the years since leaving their seminar rooms, I’ve discovered that, where partisans of the New Criticism still exist, they tell a remarkably similar story. And I’m not sure who’s done more damage to the New Critics: their detractors or their defenders. Detractors condemn the New Criticism as ahistorical and unconcerned with ethics or politics, and defenders generally don’t disagree with this depiction. They just value it differently, hoisting it high like a tattered flag under which to rally the scattered remnants of the pre-identity-politics, pre-continental -theory literary intelligentsia. As in so many fiercely fought debates, though, beneath the clamor the two sides really agree more than they differ: both, after all, see the New Critics as formalists, and set them up against a set of politicized, post–1960s approaches to literature. But does the consensus lying beneath the squabble offer an accurate view of things? My contention is that is does not, and that both detractors and defenders insist on unity where there is none to be found. Like the cartoonishly simplified New Critics in the story above, they take a contradictory and dissonant thing and hammer it into something coherent, with all the parts are subordinated to an interpretive whole. The challenge in reading the New Critics again is to try to see them without any of the preconceptions that underlie the debate between their detractors and their defenders. When we meet this challenge, we see in the New Critics a more diverse, less strictly formalist movement than we find in the distorted version so often invoked by both sides of debate. It may be of some service to us, as we attempt to wipe several decades’ worth of preconceptions off our critical lenses, to remember that none of the New Critics actually saw themselves as locked in battle with the nascent forces of deconstruction, cultural studies, and identity politics. One of the things that becomes clear when we reread the New Critics is that they weren’t a rearguard action, but an advance force, launching raids against a host of other critical movements. Although the New Critics are often taught at the beginning of the literary theory seminar, as a kind...