Literary Criticism

Encyclopædia Britannica Article

Introduction
the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any
argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato's cautions
against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often
taken as the earliest important example of literary criticism.

More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called ―practical criticism,‖ the
interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Criticism in this narrow sense can be
distinguished not only from aesthetics (the philosophy of artistic value) but also from other
matters that may concern the student of literature: biographical questions, bibliography,
historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method. Thus, especially in
academic studies, ―criticism‖ is often considered to be separate from ―scholarship.‖ In
practice, however, this distinction often proves artificial, and even the most single-minded
concentration on a text may be informed by outside knowledge, while many notable works of
criticism combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature and
the principles of assessing it.

Criticism will here be taken to cover all phases of literary understanding, though the
emphasis will be on the evaluation of literary works and of their authors' places in literary
history. For another particular aspect of literary criticism, see textual criticism.

Functions
The functions of literary criticism vary widely, ranging from the reviewing of books as they
are published to systematic theoretical discussion. Though reviews may sometimes determine
whether a given book will be widely sold, many works succeed commercially despite
negative reviews, and many classic works, including Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851),
have acquired appreciative publics long after being unfavourably reviewed and at first
neglected. One of criticism's principal functions is to express the shifts in sensibility that
make such revaluations possible. The minimal condition for such a new appraisal is, of
course, that the original text survive. The literary critic is sometimes cast in the role of
scholarly detective, unearthing, authenticating, and editing unknown manuscripts. Thus, even
rarefied scholarly skills may be put to criticism's most elementary use, the bringing of literary
works to a public's attention.

The variety of criticism's functions is reflected in the range of publications in which it

appears. Criticism in the daily press rarely displays sustained acts of analysis and may
sometimes do little more than summarize a publisher's claims for a book's interest. Weekly
and biweekly magazines serve to introduce new books but are often more discriminating in
their judgments, and some of these magazines, such as The (London) Times Literary
Supplement and The New York Review of Books, are far from indulgent toward popular
works. Sustained criticism can also be found in monthlies and quarterlies with a broad

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circulation, in ―little magazines‖ for specialized audiences, and in scholarly journals and
books.

Because critics often try to be lawgivers, declaring which works deserve respect and
presuming to say what they are ―really‖ about, criticism is a perennial target of resentment.
Misguided or malicious critics can discourage an author who has been feeling his way toward
a new mode that offends received taste. Pedantic critics can obstruct a serious engagement
with literature by deflecting attention toward inessential matters. As the French philosopher-
critic Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the critic may announce that French thought is a perpetual
colloquy between Pascal and Montaigne not in order to make those thinkers more alive but to
make thinkers of his own time more dead. Criticism can antagonize authors even when it
performs its function well. Authors who regard literature as needing no advocates or
investigators are less than grateful when told that their works possess unintended meaning or
are imitative or incomplete.

What such authors may tend to forget is that their works, once published, belong to them only
in a legal sense. The true owner of their works is the public, which will appropriate them for
its own concerns regardless of the critic. The critic's responsibility is not to the author's self-
esteem but to the public and to his own standards of judgment, which are usually more
exacting than the public's. Justification for his role rests on the premise that literary works are
not in fact self-explanatory. A critic is socially useful to the extent that society wants, and
receives, a fuller understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him. In
filling this appetite, the critic whets it further, helping to create a public that cares about
artistic quality. Without sensing the presence of such a public, an author may either prostitute
his talent or squander it in sterile acts of defiance. In this sense, the critic is not a parasite but,
potentially, someone who is responsible in part for the existence of good writing in his own
time and afterward.

Although some critics believe that literature should be discussed in isolation from other
matters, criticism usually seems to be openly or covertly involved with social and political
debate. Since literature itself is often partisan, is always rooted to some degree in local
circumstances, and has a way of calling forth affirmations of ultimate values, it is not
surprising that the finest critics have never paid much attention to the alleged boundaries
between criticism and other types of discourse. Especially in modern Europe, literary
criticism has occupied a central place in debate about cultural and political issues. Sartre's
own What Is Literature? (1947) is typical in its wide-ranging attempt to prescribe the literary
intellectual's ideal relation to the development of his society and to literature as a
manifestation of human freedom. Similarly, some prominent American critics, including
Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth Burke, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe, began as
political radicals in the 1930s and sharpened their concern for literature on the dilemmas and
disillusionments of that era. Trilling's influential The Liberal Imagination (1950) is
simultaneously a collection of literary essays and an attempt to reconcile the claims of
politics and art.

Such a reconciliation is bound to be tentative and problematic if the critic believes, as Trilling
does, that literature possesses an independent value and a deeper faithfulness to reality than is
contained in any political formula. In Marxist states, however, literature has usually been
considered a means to social ends and, therefore, criticism has been cast in forthrightly
partisan terms. Dialectical materialism does not necessarily turn the critic into a mere
guardian of party doctrine, but it does forbid him to treat literature as a cause in itself, apart

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from the working class's needs as interpreted by the party. Where this utilitarian view
prevails, the function of criticism is taken to be continuous with that of the state itself,
namely, furtherance of the social revolution. The critic's main obligation is not to his texts but
rather to the masses of people whose consciousness must be advanced in the designated
direction. In periods of severe orthodoxy, the practice of literary criticism has not always
been distinguishable from that of censorship.

Historical development
Antiquity

Although almost all of the criticism ever written dates from the 20th century, questions first
posed by Plato and Aristotle are still of prime concern, and every critic who has attempted to
justify the social value of literature has had to come to terms with the opposing argument
made by Plato in The Republic. The poet as a man and poetry as a form of statement both
seemed untrustworthy to Plato, who depicted the physical world as an imperfect copy of
transcendent ideas and poetry as a mere copy of the copy. Thus, literature could only mislead
the seeker of truth. Plato credited the poet with divine inspiration, but this, too, was cause for
worry; a man possessed by such madness would subvert the interests of a rational polity.
Poets were therefore to be banished from the hypothetical republic.

In his Poetics—still the most respected of all discussions of literature—Aristotle countered

Plato's indictment by stressing what is normal and useful about literary art. The tragic poet is
not so much divinely inspired as he is motivated by a universal human need to imitate, and
what he imitates is not something like a bed (Plato's example) but a noble action. Such
imitation presumably has a civilizing value for those who empathize with it. Tragedy does
arouse emotions of pity and terror in its audience, but these emotions are purged in the
process (katharsis). In this fashion Aristotle succeeded in portraying literature as satisfying
and regulating human passions instead of inflaming them.

Although Plato and Aristotle are regarded as antagonists, the narrowness of their
disagreement is noteworthy. Both maintain that poetry is mimetic, both treat the arousing of
emotion in the perceiver, and both feel that poetry takes its justification, if any, from its
service to the state. It was obvious to both men that poets wielded great power over others.
Unlike many modern critics who have tried to show that poetry is more than a pastime,
Aristotle had to offer reassurance that it was not socially explosive.

Aristotle's practical contribution to criticism, as opposed to his ethical defense of literature,

lies in his inductive treatment of the elements and kinds of poetry. Poetic modes are identified
according to their means of imitation, the actions they imitate, the manner of imitation, and
its effects. These distinctions assist the critic in judging each mode according to its proper
ends instead of regarding beauty as a fixed entity. The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived
them, are best served by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction,
thought, spectacle, and song. Thanks to Aristotle's insight into universal aspects of audience
psychology, many of his dicta have proved to be adaptable to genres developed long after his
time.

Later Greek and Roman criticism offers no parallel to Aristotle's originality. Much ancient
criticism, such as that of Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian in Rome, was absorbed in technical

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rules of exegesis and advice to aspiring rhetoricians. Horace's verse epistle The Art of Poetry
is an urbane amplification of Aristotle's emphasis on the decorum or internal propriety of
each genre, now including lyric, pastoral, satire, elegy, and epigram, as well as Aristotle's
epic, tragedy, and comedy. This work was later to be prized by Neoclassicists of the 17th
century not only for its rules but also for its humour, common sense, and appeal to educated
taste. On the Sublime, by the Roman-Greek known as ―Longinus,‖ was to become influential
in the 18th century but for a contrary reason: when decorum began to lose its sway
encouragement could be found in Longinus for arousing elevated and ecstatic feeling in the
reader. Horace and Longinus developed, respectively, the rhetorical and the affective sides of
Aristotle's thought, but Longinus effectively reversed the Aristotelian concern with regulation
of the passions.

Medieval period

In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical
texts and from an antipagan distrust of the literary imagination. Such Church Fathers as
Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the Platonic argument against
poetry. But both the ancient gods and the surviving classics reasserted their fascination,
entering medieval culture in theologically allegorized form. Encyclopaedists and textual
commentators explained the supposed Christian content of pre-Christian works and the Old
Testament. Although there was no lack of rhetoricians to dictate the correct use of literary
figures, no attempt was made to derive critical principles from emergent genres such as the
fabliau and the chivalric romance. Criticism was in fact inhibited by the very coherence of the
theologically explained universe. When nature is conceived as endlessly and purposefully
symbolic of revealed truth, specifically literary problems of form and meaning are bound to
be neglected. Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to
have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scriptural
exegesis.

The Renaissance

Renaissance criticism grew directly from the recovery of classic texts and notably from
Giorgio Valla's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Latin in 1498. By 1549 the Poetics had
been rendered into Italian as well. From this period until the later part of the 18th century
Aristotle was once again the most imposing presence behind literary theory. Critics looked to
ancient poems and plays for insight into the permanent laws of art. The most influential of
Renaissance critics was probably Lodovico Castelvetro, whose 1570 commentary on
Aristotle's Poetics encouraged the writing of tightly structured plays by extending and
codifying Aristotle's idea of the dramatic unities. It is difficult today to appreciate that this
obeisance to antique models had a liberating effect; one must recall that imitation of the
ancients entailed rejecting scriptural allegory and asserting the individual author's ambition to
create works that would be unashamedly great and beautiful. Classicism, individualism, and
national pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French
writers known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were
simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

The ideas of the Italian and French Renaissance were transmitted to England by Roger
Ascham, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, and others. Gascoigne's ―Certayne notes of
Instruction‖ (1575), the first English manual of versification, had a considerable effect on
poetic practice in the Elizabethan Age. Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595) vigorously argued

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the poet's superiority to the philosopher and the historian on the grounds that his imagination
is chained neither to lifeless abstractions nor to dull actualities. The poet ―doth not only show
the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it.‖
While still honouring the traditional conception of poetry's role as bestowing pleasure and
instruction, Sidney's essay presages the Romantic claim that the poetic mind is a law unto
itself.

Neoclassicism and its decline

The Renaissance in general could be regarded as a neoclassical period, in that ancient works
were considered the surest models for modern greatness. Neoclassicism, however, usually
connotes narrower attitudes that are at once literary and social: a worldly-wise tempering of
enthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of propriety and balance.
Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by these
Horatian norms. French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strict
orthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre, as if to
disregard them were to lapse into barbarity. The poet was not to imagine that his genius
exempted him from the established laws of craftsmanship.

Neoclassicism had a lesser impact in England, partly because English Puritanism had kept
alive some of the original Christian hostility to secular art, partly because English authors
were on the whole closer to plebeian taste than were the court-oriented French, and partly
because of the difficult example of Shakespeare, who magnificently broke all of the rules.
Not even the relatively severe classicist Ben Jonson could bring himself to deny
Shakespeare's greatness, and the theme of Shakespearean genius triumphing over formal
imperfections is echoed by major British critics from John Dryden and Alexander Pope
through Samuel Johnson. The science of Newton and the psychology of Locke also worked
subtle changes on neoclassical themes. Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) is a Horatian
compendium of maxims, but Pope feels obliged to defend the poetic rules as ―Nature
methodiz'd‖—a portent of quite different literary inferences from Nature. Dr. Johnson, too,
though he respected precedent, was above all a champion of moral sentiment and
―mediocrity,‖ the appeal to generally shared traits. His preference for forthright sincerity left
him impatient with such intricate conventions as those of the pastoral elegy.

The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly surprising; literary theory had developed very little
during two centuries of artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century's important
new genre, the novel, drew most of its readers from a bourgeoisie that had little use for
aristocratic dicta. A Longinian cult of ―feeling‖ gradually made headway, in various
European countries, against Neoclassical canons of proportion and moderation. Emphasis
shifted from concern for meeting fixed criteria to the subjective state of the reader and then of
the author himself. The spirit of nationalism entered criticism as a concern for the origins and
growth of one's own native literature and as an esteem for such non-Aristotelian factors as
―the spirit of the age.‖ Historical consciousness produced by turns theories of literary
progress and primitivistic theories affirming, as one critic put it, that ―barbarous‖ times are
the most favourable to the poetic spirit. The new recognition of strangeness and strong
feeling as literary virtues yielded various fashions of taste for misty sublimity, graveyard
sentiments, medievalism, Norse epics (and forgeries), Oriental tales, and the verse of
plowboys. Perhaps the most eminent foes of Neoclassicism before the 19th century were
Denis Diderot in France and, in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, Johann von Herder, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.

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Romanticism

Romanticism, an amorphous movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of the
19th century, and somewhat later in France, Italy, and the United States, found spokesmen as
diverse as Goethe and August and Friedrich von Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Staël and Victor Hugo in France,
Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the United
States. Romantics tended to regard the writing of poetry as a transcendentally important
activity, closely related to the creative perception of meaning in the world. The poet was
credited with the godlike power that Plato had feared in him; Transcendental philosophy was,
indeed, a derivative of Plato's metaphysical Idealism. In the typical view of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, poetry ―strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and
sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.‖

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its definition of poetry as the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regarded
as the opening statement of English Romanticism. In England, however, only Coleridge in his
Biographia Literaria (1817) embraced the whole complex of Romantic doctrines emanating
from Germany; the British empiricist tradition was too firmly rooted to be totally washed
aside by the new metaphysics. Most of those who were later called Romantics did share an
emphasis on individual passion and inspiration, a taste for symbolism and historical
awareness, and a conception of art works as internally whole structures in which feelings are
dialectically merged with their contraries. Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence
of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical
demands upon literature. The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition that
artistic creations are justified, not by their promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence
and intensity.

The late 19th century

The Romantic movement had been spurred not only by German philosophy but also by the
universalistic and utopian hopes that accompanied the French Revolution. Some of those
hopes were thwarted by political reaction, while others were blunted by industrial capitalism
and the accession to power of the class that had demanded general liberty. Advocates of the
literary imagination now began to think of themselves as enemies or gadflies of the newly
entrenched bourgeoisie. In some hands the idea of creative freedom dwindled to a
bohemianism pitting ―art for its own sake‖ against commerce and respectability. Aestheticism
characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-
conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England. At
an opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of social
truth were developed by Vissarion Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in
France, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola's program, however, was no
less anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he wanted novels to document conditions so
as to expose their injustice. Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in the
criticism of Matthew Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and for
the unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class.

Toward the end of the 19th century, especially in Germany, England, and the United States,
literary study became an academic discipline ―at the doctoral level.‖ Philology, linguistics,
folklore study, and the textual principles that had been devised for biblical criticism provided

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curricular guidelines, while academic taste mirrored the prevailing impressionistic concern
for the quality of the author's spirit. Several intellectual currents joined to make possible the
writing of systematic and ambitious literary histories. Primitivism and Medievalism had
awakened interest in neglected early texts; scientific Positivism encouraged a scrupulous
regard for facts; and the German idea that each country's literature had sprung from a unique
national consciousness provided a conceptual framework. The French critic Hippolyte Taine's
History of English Literature (published in French, 1863–69) reflected the prevailing
determinism of scientific thought; for him a work could be explained in terms of the race,
milieu, and moment that produced it. For other critics of comparable stature, such as Charles
Sainte-Beuve in France, Benedetto Croce in Italy, and George Saintsbury in England,
historical learning only threw into relief the expressive uniqueness of each artistic
temperament.

The 20th century

The ideal of objective research has continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarship
and criticism and has prompted work of unprecedented accuracy. Bibliographic procedures
have been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory have
placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important contributions to literary
understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and
psychoanalysis. Impressionistic method has given way to systematic inquiry from which
gratuitous assumptions are, if possible, excluded. Yet demands for a more ethically
committed criticism have repeatedly been made, from the New Humanism of Paul Elmer
More and Irving Babbitt in the United States in the 1920s, through the moralizing criticism of
the Cambridge don F.R. Leavis and of the American poet Yvor Winters, to the most recent
demands for ―relevance.‖

No sharp line can be drawn between academic criticism and criticism produced by authors
and men of letters. Many of the latter are now associated with universities, and the main shift
of academic emphasis, from impressionism to formalism, originated outside the academy in
the writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Hulme, largely in London around 1910. Only
subsequently did such academics as I.A. Richards and William Empson in England and John
Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks in the United States adapt the New Criticism to reform of
the literary curriculum—in the 1940s. New Criticism has been the methodological
counterpart to the strain of modernist literature characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox,
and indifference or outright hostility to the democratic ethos. In certain respects the
hegemony of New Criticism has been political as well as literary; and anti-Romantic
insistence on irony, convention, and aesthetic distance has been accompanied by scorn for all
revolutionary hopes. In Hulme conservatism and classicism were explicitly linked.
Romanticism struck him as ―spilt religion,‖ a dangerous exaggeration of human freedom. In
reality, however, New Criticism owed much to Romantic theory, especially to Coleridge's
idea of organic form, and some of its notable practitioners have been left of centre in their
social thought.

The totality of Western criticism in the 20th century defies summary except in terms of its
restless multiplicity and factionalism. Schools of literary practice, such as Imagism, Futurism,
Dadaism, and Surrealism, have found no want of defenders and explicators. Ideological
groupings, psychological dogmas, and philosophical trends have generated polemics and
analysis, and literary materials have been taken as primary data by sociologists and
historians. Literary creators themselves have continued to write illuminating commentary on

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their own principles and aims. In poetry, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens; in the
theatre, George Bernard Shaw, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht; and in fiction, Marcel Proust,
D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann have contributed to criticism in the act of justifying their
art.

Most of the issues debated in 20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, even
technical, in nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of a
literary work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or only the
words themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author's avowed intention be trusted,
or merely taken into account, or disregarded as irrelevant? How is conscious irony to be
distinguished from mere ambivalence, or allusiveness from allegory? Which among many
approaches—linguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forth—is best
adapted to making full sense of a text? Would a synthesis of all these methods yield a total
theory of literature? Such questions presuppose that literature is valuable and that objective
knowledge of its workings is a desirable end. These assumptions are, indeed, so deeply
buried in most critical discourse that they customarily remain hidden from critics themselves,
who imagine that they are merely solving problems of intrinsic interest.

The influence of science

What separates modern criticism from earlier work is its catholicity of scope and method, its
borrowing of procedures from the social scienes, and its unprecedented attention to detail. As
literature's place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as humanistic
education has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of professionals serving as one
another's judges, criticism has evolved into a complex discipline, increasingly refined in its
procedures but often lacking a sense of contact with the general social will. Major modern
critics, to be sure, have not allowed their ―close reading‖ to distract them from certain
perennial questions about poetic truth, the nature of literary satisfaction, and literature's social
utility, but even these matters have sometimes been cast in ―value-free‖ empirical terms.

Recourse to scientific authority and method, then, is the outstanding trait of 20th-century
criticism. The sociology of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythological
investigations of Sir James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl's
phenomenology, Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, and the psychological
models proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung have all found their way into criticism.
The result has been not simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespread
belief that literature's governing principles can be located outside literature. Jungian
―archetypal‖ criticism, for example, regularly identifies literary power with the presence of
certain themes that are alleged to inhabit the myths and beliefs of all cultures, while
psychoanalytic exegetes interpret poems in exactly the manner that Freud interpreted dreams.
Such procedures may encourage the critic, wisely or unwisely, to discount traditional
boundaries between genres, national literatures, and levels of culture; the critical enterprise
begins to seem continuous with a general study of man. The impetus toward universalism can
be discerned even in those critics who are most skeptical of it, the so-called historical
relativists who attempt to reconstruct each epoch's outlook and to understand works as they
appeared to their first readers. Historical relativism does undermine cross-cultural notions of
beauty, but it reduces the record of any given period to data from which inferences can be
systematically drawn. Here, too, in other words, uniform methodology tends to replace the
intuitive connoisseurship that formerly typified the critic's sense of his role.

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Criticism and knowledge

The debate over poetic truth may illustrate how modern discussion is beholden to
extraliterary knowledge. Critics have never ceased disputing whether literature depicts the
world correctly, incorrectly, or not at all, and the dispute has often had more to do with the
support or condemnation of specific authors than with ascertainable facts about mimesis.
Today it may be almost impossible to take a stand regarding poetic truth without also coming
to terms with positivism as a total epistemology. The spectacular achievements of physical
science have (with logic questioned by some) downgraded intuition and placed a premium on
concrete, testable statements very different from those found in poems. Some of the most
influential modern critics, notably I.A. Richards in his early works, have accepted this value
order and have confined themselves to behavioristic study of how literature stimulates the
reader's feelings. A work of literature, for them, is no longer something that captures an
external or internal reality, but is merely a locus for psychological operations; it can only be
judged as eliciting or failing to elicit a desired response.

Other critics, however, have renewed the Shelleyan and Coleridgean contention that literary
experience involves a complex and profound form of knowing. In order to do so they have
had to challenge Positivism in general. Such a challenge cannot be convincingly mounted
within the province of criticism itself and must depend rather on the authority of antipositivist
epistemologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, and Michael Polanyi. If it is
now respectable to maintain, with Wallace Stevens and others, that the world is known
through imaginative apprehensions of the sort that poetry celebrates and employs, this is
attributable to developments far outside the normal competence of critics.

The pervasive influence of science is most apparent in modern criticism's passion for total
explanation of the texts it brings under its microscope. Even formalist schools, which take for
granted an author's freedom to shape his work according to the demands of art, treat
individual lines of verse with a dogged minuteness that was previously unknown, hoping
thereby to demonstrate the ―organic‖ coherence of the poem. The spirit of explanation is also
apparent in those schools that argue from the circumstances surrounding a work's origin to
the work itself, leaving an implication that the former have caused the latter. The determinism
is rarely as explicit or relentless as it was in Taine's scheme of race, milieu, and moment, but
this may reflect the fact that causality in general is now handled with more sophistication
than in Taine's day.

Whether criticism will continue to aim at empirical exactitude or will turn in some new
direction cannot be readily predicted, for the empiricist ideal and its sanctuary, the university,
are not themselves secure from attack. The history of criticism is one of oscillation between
periods of relative advance, when the imaginative freedom of great writers prompts critics to
extend their former conceptions, and periods when stringent moral and formal prescriptions
are laid upon literature. In times of social upheaval criticism may more or less deliberately
abandon the ideal of disinterested knowledge and be mobilized for a practical end.
Revolutionary movements provide obvious instances of such redirection, whether or not they
identify their pragmatic goals with the cause of science. It should be evident that the future of
criticism depends on factors that lie outside criticism itself as a rationally evolving discipline.
When a whole society shifts its attitudes toward pleasure, unorthodox behaviour, or the
meaning of existence, criticism must follow along.

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As Matthew Arnold foresaw, the waning of religious certainty has encouraged critics to
invest their faith in literature, taking it as the one remaining source of value and order. This
development has stimulated critical activity, yet, paradoxically, it may also be responsible in
part for a growing impatience with criticism. What Arnold could not have anticipated is that
the faith of some moderns would be apocalyptic and Dionysian rather than a sober and
attenuated derivative of Victorian Christianity. Thought in the 20th century has yielded a
strong undercurrent of anarchism which celebrates libidinous energy and self-expression at
the expense of all social constraint, including that of literary form. In the critical writings of
D.H. Lawrence, for example, fiction is cherished as an instrument of unconscious revelation
and liberation. A widespread insistence upon prophetic and ecstatic power in literature seems
at present to be undermining the complex, irony-minded formalism that has dominated
modern discourse. As literary scholarship has acquired an ever-larger arsenal of weapons for
attacking problems of meaning, it has met with increasing resentment from people who wish
to be nourished by whatever is elemental and mysterious in literary experience.

An awareness of critical history suggests that the development is not altogether new, for
criticism stands now approximately where it did in the later 18th century, when the Longinian
spirit of expressiveness contested the sway of Boileau and Pope. To the extent that modern
textual analysis has become what Hulme predicted, ―a classical revival,‖ it may not be
welcomed by those who want a direct and intense rapport with literature. What is resisted
now is not Neoclassical decorum but impersonal methodology, which is thought to deaden
commitment. Such resistance may prove beneficial if it reminds critics that rationalized
procedures are indeed no substitute for engagement. Excellent work continues to be written,
not because a definitive method or synthesis of methods has been found, but on the contrary
because the best critics still understand that criticism is an exercise of private sympathy,
discrimination, and moral and cultural reflection.

Frederick C. Crews

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Additional Reading
A useful compilation of essential texts on literary criticism is Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon
McKenzie (eds.), Criticism, rev. ed. (1958). The best survey of critical history is William K. Wimsatt, Jr.,

and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957); G.M.A. Grube, The Greek and Roman
Critics (1965); Joel E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 5th ed. (1925,
paperback edition 1963); Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1946, reprinted 1961); and Rene
Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, 4 vol. (1955–65), are more specialized

historical studies. Important theoretical statements are M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp
(1953); Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd rev. ed. (1966); Northrop Frye, Anatomy
of Criticism (1957); and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). William Empson, Seven Types
of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1956, reprinted 1963); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946; Eng. trans. 1953);
and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950), are representative examples of modern
criticism, combining theory with analysis of a wide variety of texts. See also Douwe W. Fokkema
and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism,
Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (1978).

Source:
"literary criticism." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2009 Student and
Home Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009.

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Literary Criticism
I INTRODUCTION

Literary Criticism, discussion of literature, including description, analysis, interpretation,

and evaluation of literary works. Like literature, criticism is hard to define. One of the critic’s
tasks is to challenge definitions of literature and criticism that seem too general, too narrow,
or unworkable for any other reason. Whatever it is, literary criticism deals with different
dimensions of literature as a collection of texts through which authors evoke more or less
fictitious worlds for the imagination of readers.

We can look at any work of literature by paying special attention to one of several aspects: its
language and structure; its intended purpose; the information and worldview it conveys; or its
effect on an audience. Most good critics steer clear of exclusive interest in a single element.
In studying a text’s formal characteristics, for example, critics usually recognize the
variability of performances of dramatic works and the variability of readers’ mental
interpretations of texts. In studying an author’s purpose, critics acknowledge that forces
beyond a writer’s conscious intentions can affect what the writer actually communicates. In
studying what a literary work is about, critics often explore the complex relationship between
truth and fiction in various types of storytelling. In studying literature’s impact on its
audience, critics have been increasingly aware of how cultural expectations shape experience.

Because works of literature can be studied long after their first publication, awareness of
historical and theoretical context contributes to our understanding, appreciation, and
enjoyment of them. Historical research relates a work to the life and times of its author.
Attention to the nature, functions, and categories of literature provides a theoretical
framework joining a past text to the experience of present readers. The tradition of literary
criticism surveyed here combines observations by creative writers, philosophers, and, more
recently, trained specialists in literary, historical, and cultural studies.

II CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

The Western tradition’s earliest extended instance of literary criticism occurs in The Frogs
(405 BC), a comedy by Athenian playwright Aristophanes that pokes fun at the contrasting
styles of Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides. In the play the two dead masters of
Greek tragedy compete for supremacy in Hades (the underworld), debating a fundamental
dilemma of all subsequent criticism: Is the writer’s first commitment to uphold and promote
morality or to represent reality? Is the task of drama and other forms of literature primarily to
improve or primarily to inform the audience?

Greek philosopher Plato found virtually all creative writers deficient on both counts in his
dialogue The Republic (about 380 BC). Plato felt that stories about misbehaving gods and
death-fearing heroes were apt to steer immature people toward frivolous and unpatriotic
conduct. Besides, he argued, poetry tended to arouse the emotions rather than promote such
virtues as temperance and endurance. But even at their moral best, Plato viewed writers—like

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painters and sculptors—as mere imitators of actual human beings, who are themselves very
imperfect “copies”or imitations of the eternal idea of Human Being in the divine mind.

Greek philosopher Aristotle produced a strong philosophical defense against such criticism.
His Poetics (about 330 BC) presents artistic representation (mimesis) not as mere copying but
as creative re-presentation with universal significance. For example, the epic poet and the
playwright evoke human beings in action without having to report actual events. Because the
poetic approach to human action is more philosophical in nature than a purely historical
approach, literature can show the most probable action of a person of a specific type, rather
than what an actual person said or did on a particular occasion. Even the portrayal of great
suffering and death may thus give pleasure to an audience—the pleasure of learning
something essential about reality.

Aristotle justified the poetic arousal of passions by borrowing the concept of catharsis
(purification through purging) from contemporary medicine. He suggested that tragedy cures
us of the harmful effects of excessive pity, fear, and similar emotions by first inducing such
emotions in us, and then pleasurably purging them in the controlled therapeutic setting of
theatrical experience. The precise meaning of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis has been
debated for many centuries, but most critics of literature and of other arts, such as opera and
cinema, find useful his isolation and analysis of six interacting aspects of performed drama:
plot, character, thought or theme, diction, music, and spectacle.

Roman poet Horace offered practical advice in Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, about 20 BC),
a witty letter written in verse to two aspiring authors. His most influential suggestion was to
combine the useful (utile) and the sweet (dulce) so as to satisfy a varied audience. Some
readers seek benefit, others seek pleasure, he explained, but both kinds of readers will
purchase writings that instruct and delight at the same time.

A weightier treatment of poetry appears in a 1st-century AD treatise, On the Sublime, long

attributed to a 3rd-century philosopher named Longinus. The unknown author of this Greek
text cites passages from Greek poets Homer and Sappho—as well as from orators, historians,
philosophers, and the first chapter of Genesis—to prove the superiority of discourse that does
not merely persuade or gratify its audience but also transports it into a state of enthusiastic
ecstasy. The author analyzes the rhetorical devices needed to achieve sublime effects but
insists that ultimately, “sublimity is the echo of a great soul.”

III MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

In medieval Europe, where Latin served as the common language of educated people, much
scholarly interest focused on Roman authors and their Greek models. To reconcile non-
Christian writings with the official doctrine of the Christian church, critics interpreted them
allegorically. Greek and Roman divinities, for example, might be viewed as personifications
of certain virtues and vices. Scholars applied similar interpretive methods to Hebrew
scriptures to show, for instance, how the biblical story of Jonah surviving in the belly of a big
fish foreshadowed the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even the parables and
metaphors of the Christian Gospels were felt to require allegorical, moral, and spiritual

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interpretation to achieve a deeper understanding of their meaning. By the 14th century, Italian
writers Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio suggested that works of nonreligious
literature could likewise reward multiple readings beyond the literal level.

Italian translators and commentators of the late 15th and 16th centuries were in the forefront
of the Renaissance rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, aided by the commentaries on Aristotle
written by Averroës, a 12th-century Arab scholar living in Spain. Ever since the Renaissance,
critics influenced by Aristotle focus on artistic representation rather than on an author’s
rhetorical and persuasive skills. But the view that persuasion is a major goal of literature,
based on the writings of Roman statesman Cicero and Roman educator Quintilian about
oratory, helped to shape literary studies well into the 18th century. Even today some critics
view all poetry, fiction, and drama as more or less concealed forms of rhetoric that are
designed to please or move readers and theatergoers, chiefly as a means of teaching or
otherwise persuading them.

English poet Sir Philip Sidney defended the poetic imagination against attacks from English
Puritans in his Defence of Poesie (written 1583; published 1595). Unlike historians or
philosophers, argued Sidney, a poet affirms nothing and therefore never lies, because a poet’s
works are “not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written.” Far from imitating
imperfect nature, the poet creates an ideal world of the imagination where virtuous heroes
invite admiring readers to imitate them. According to Sidney, philosophers outshine poets
when it comes to abstract teaching, but the power to move (or, in today’s language, to
motivate) makes the poet ultimately superior because, for teaching to be effective, we need
first “to be moved with desire to know” and then “to be moved to do that which we know.”

IV THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

The climate of criticism changed with the arrival on the literary scene of such giants as
Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Pedro Calderòn in Spain; William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and John Milton in England; and Pierre Corneille, Jean Baptiste Racine, and Molière
in France. Most of these writers specialized or excelled in drama, and consequently the so-
called battle of the ancients and moderns—the critical comparison of Greek and Roman
authors with more recent ones—was fought chiefly in that arena.

In his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), English poet and playwright John Dryden presented
the conflicting claims of the two sides as a debate among four friends, only one of whom
favors the ancient over the modern theater. One modernist prefers the dignified “decorum” of
French drama to the confusing “tumult” of actions and emotions on the English stage. By
contrast, Dryden’s spokesman prefers the lifelike drama of English theater to French tragedy,
which he considers beautiful but lifeless. All agree, however, that “a play ought to be a just
and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humors, and the changes of
fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.”

An Essay on Criticism (1711), by English poet Alexander Pope, put together in verse both
ancient and modern opinions. Pope considered nature, including human nature, to be
universal, and he saw no contradiction between the modern writer’s task of addressing a

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contemporary audience and the insistence by traditional critics that certain rules derived from
the practice of the ancients be followed: “Those rules of old discovered, not devised, / Are
nature still, but nature methodized.”

English writer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays,
observed that “nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general
nature.” Accordingly, he praised Shakespeare for creating universal characters “who act and
speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.”
Yet Johnson could not help objecting to what he saw as the playwright’s “lack of obvious
moral purpose” and “gross jests.” In an earlier essay, “On Fiction” (1750), Johnson cautioned
against the unselective realism of popular novels written chiefly for “the young, the ignorant,
and the idle.” In his view, such people are easily tempted to imitate the novelist’s portrayal of
“those parts of nature” which are “discolored by passion, or deformed by wickedness.”
Mindful of the impact of literature on the minds of all readers, Johnson demanded that vice, if
it must be shown, should appear disgusting, and that virtue should not be represented in an
extreme form because people would never emulate what they cannot believe—implausibly
virtuous heroes or heroines, for example.

In her pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), English writer Mary
Wollstonecraft addressed the specific situation of women readers. She denounced shallow
novelists, who she felt knew little about human nature and wrote “stale tales” in an overly
sentimental style. Since most women of her day received little education, Wollstonecraft
feared that reading such novels would further hinder women’s “neglected minds” in “the
right use of reason.”

In the third quarter of the 18th century, French philosopher, novelist, and outspoken
autobiographer Jean Jacques Rousseau offered an alternative to the faith in universal human
reason propounded by Pope, Johnson, and other writers. Opponents of excessive rationalism
found in Rousseau an advocate of their own growing interest in the expression of emotion,
individual freedom, and personal experience. But most 19th-century concepts of literature
and criticism were to owe an even greater debt to a number of Germans who concluded or
began their intellectual careers between 1770 and 1800: philosophers Immanuel Kant,
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and writer-
critics Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and
the brothers August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel. All of these thinkers
influenced an important 19th-century movement known as romanticism, which emphasized
feeling, individual experience, and the divinity of nature.

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V THE 19TH CENTURY

—————————————————————————————————————

Ruskin on the Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin was the leading Victorian critic of art and literature. His Modern Painters (first volume
published in 1843) began as a defense of the English painter Joseph M. W. Turner. Ruskin’s
discourse extended to five volumes and led him to consider issues such as the need for and the
nature of truth in art. In this famous excerpt from the third volume, Ruskin moves away from
discussing truth and realism in art to consider the same problems in literature. He uses the term
pathetic to refer to the emotion pathos, with which a writer invests objects, and classifies with
remarkable clarity what he views as successful types of “false appearances” that communicate
poetic truths.

From Modern Painters

By John Ruskin

From “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”

Now therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out of our way, we may go on at
our ease to examine the point in question—namely, the difference between the ordinary,
proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when
we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as
being entirely unconnected with any real power of character in the object, and only imputed to
it by us. For instance— The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould Naked and
shivering, with his cup of gold.

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its
yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads
that it is anything else than a plain crocus?
It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always
found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But
here is something pleasurable in written poetry, which is nevertheless untrue. And what is
more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that
we like it all the more for being so.
It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds.
Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of willful fancy, which involves no real
expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the
feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall
have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error,
that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton
Locke— They rowed her in across the rolling foam— The cruel, crawling foam.

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The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these
characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent
feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external
things, which I would generally characterize as the “pathetic fallacy.”
Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical
description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because
passionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets
do not often admit this kind of falseness—that it is only the second order of poets who much
delight in it.
Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the hank of Acheron “as dead leaves flutter
from a bough,” he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own
clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with
the other. But when Coleridge speaks of The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as
often as dance it can,

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a life in it, and will,
which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment,
and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the
morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses,
Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and
has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of their departure. They
cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first
which appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and
terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet, addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:
“Elpenor! how camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou come faster on foot than I
in my black ship?” Which Pope renders thus: O, say, what angry power Elpenor led To glide in
shades, and wander with the dead? How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined, Outfly
the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?

I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the
haziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits are so painful now when they have
been pleasant to us in the other instances?
For a very simple reason They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of
the wrong passion—a passion which never could possibly have spoken them—agonised curiosity.
Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter: and the very last thing his mind could do at the
moment would be to pause, or suggest in an wise what was not a fact. The delay in the first
three lines, and conceit in the last jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful discord in
music. No poet of true imaginative power would possibly have written the passage.
Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of
fallacy. Coleridge‟s fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope‟s has set our teeth on edge.

Source: Ruskin, John. Of the Pathetic Fallacy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

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English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave memorable
expression to the romantic mindset developed by their German predecessors and
contemporaries. The romantics believed in the primacy of feeling, love, pleasure, and
imagination over reason; in the spiritual superiority of nature’s organic forms over
mechanical ingenuity; and in the ability of art to restore a lost harmony between the
individual and nature, between society and nature, and between the individual and society. In
revised versions of the preface to his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
declared that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and that “the
poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure.”
The pleasure derived from the writing and reading of poetry were to Wordsworth a loving
“acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe” and an indication that the human mind was
“the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.” The critical writings of
Coleridge in turn stressed the parallel between cosmic creativity and the poet’s godlike
creative imagination.

In A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840), English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
elaborated on similar romantic themes. Shelley also suggested that the utilitarian science and
technology of his time enhanced the “inequality of mankind” and that poetry should continue
to serve as an antidote to “the principle of the self, of which money is the visible
incarnation.” Throughout the Defence, Shelley speaks of poetry in a very broad sense as
visionary discourse.

By contrast, two mid-century American poet-critics addressed what they considered to be

unique features of poetry. In his essay “The Poet” (written 1842-1843), Ralph Waldo
Emerson argued that the poet uses symbols more appropriately than the religious mystic does,
because the poet recognizes the multiple meanings of symbols and the ability of language to
reflect a continuously changing world, whereas the mystic “nails” symbols to a specific
meaning. In a lecture on “The Poetic Principle” (1848), Edgar Allan Poe expressly
distinguished pure intellect from taste and moral sense. In Poe’s view, poets need to “tone
down in proper subjection to beauty” all “incitements of passion,””precepts of duty,” and
“lessons of truth” so that the resulting work may be sensitively judged by our faculty of taste.

In “A Short Essay on Critics”(1840), American author and editor Margaret Fuller described
three kinds of literary criticism: subjective indulgence in the critic’s own feelings about a
text, apprehensive entry into the author’s world, and comprehensive judging of a work both
by its own law and according to universal principles. These categories anticipate the
distinctions made by English poet-critic Matthew Arnold between three kinds of critical
estimations of the value of a literary work: the personal, the historical, and the real. In his
essay on “The Study of Poetry” (1880), Arnold assigned great cultural significance to the
unbiased critic’s “real estimates” because, in an increasingly nonreligious time, “mankind
will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain
us.” Yet he believed that critics themselves would have to transcend the narrowness of their
own society to perform their role of spiritual guidance. Only by exploring a variety of cultural
traditions could they learn and teach “the best” that has been “known and thought in the
world,” Arnold cautioned in his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
(1865).

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arnold’s broadly humanistic views found many
disciples. Some of Arnold’s younger contemporaries, however, demanded that writers
become more intensely involved with the particular problems of their society. French writer
Émile Zola, for example, advocated writing true-to-life works of so-called naturalistic fiction
that would reflect the ills of contemporary society with scientific precision, a view Zola
advanced in his essay “Le roman expérimental” (1880; translated as “The Experimental
Novel,” 1893). At the other extreme, English writer Oscar Wilde favored highly personal
literary styles and a critical stance acknowledging that “life imitates art far more than art
imitates life,” as he wrote in “The Decay of Lying” (1889). The case for subjective art and
criticism was presented most succinctly by French novelist Anatole France in the preface to
his La vie littéraire(1888-1893; translated as On Life and Letters, 1910-1924): “The good
critic tells the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. There is no more an objective
criticism than an objective art.”

VI 20TH-CENTURY APPROACHES

—————————————————————————————————————

Marrying High-Tech and the Humanities

Computer technology may seem an unlikely research tool for a literature professor hoping to
better understand William Shakespeare’s plays or for an artist creating a painting. Increasingly,
however, computers and software are becoming essential tools for literary criticism, academic
publishing, music composition, and sometimes even for the creation of fine art. In this article from
the May 1999 Encarta Yearbook, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Dirda explores the cutting
edge of this unlikely combination of computer-based technology and disciplines such as art,
literature, and music.

Marrying High-Tech and the Humanities

By Michael Dirda

The dancer jumps and bends and pirouettes across the stage. Instead of being watched by an
audience, however, she is monitored by a computer, which inputs data from her every move.
In an experiment by Joseph Paradiso, principal research scientist and director of the responsive
environments group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in
Cambridge, a dancer's shoes are fitted with sensors that measure pressure points, bend, tilt,
height off the stage, kicks, stomps, and spin. This information is then transmitted via a radio
link to a computer programmed to change the data into images or sounds. In this way the
dancer could simultaneously create a musical composition and a visual light show as she
performed, perhaps to be combined as part of a multimedia piece.
A flight of fancy or a glimpse of the future? Computers and digital technology are rapidly
expanding to influence every aspect of human activity at the end of the 20th century. The
ageless urge of the human species to produce works of art is no exception to this. Technology is

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becoming so important in so many categories of the arts that we seem to be in the midst of a
new Renaissance.
The examples of this flowering are everywhere. Powerful new computers are allowing more and
more data to be created and stored digitally, that is, in the binary code that makes up the basic
language of computers. Artists manipulate images to generate complex digital collages and
exhibit their digital and nondigital art on the World Wide Web. Novelists create branching
narratives called hypertext fiction, stories that are explored as much as read. Literary scholars
exchange ideas through online discussion groups and use computers to discover the author of
an unsigned poem hundreds of years old. Composers employ synthesizers and computers to
generate sounds never heard before, while librarians and museum curators digitize entire
collections of art and literature to be accessed online from anywhere in the world. As these
activities become more and more the standard rather than the exception, technology and art
will be further paired and enmeshed.

Crunching Texts

Computers have aided in the study of humanities for almost as long as the machines have
existed. Decades ago, when the technology consisted solely of massive, number-crunching
mainframe computers, the chief liberal arts applications were in compiling statistical indexes of
works of literature. In 1964, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) held a
conference on computers and the humanities where, according to a 1985 article in the journal
Science, “most of the conferees were using computers to compile concordances, which are
alphabetical indices used in literary research.”
Mainframe computers helped greatly in the highly laborious task, which dates back to the
Renaissance, of cataloging each reference of a particular word in a particular work.
Concordances help scholars scrutinize important texts for patterns and meaning. Other
humanities applications for computers in this early era of technology included compiling
dictionaries, especially for foreign or antiquated languages, and cataloging library collections.
Such types of computer usage in the humanities may seem limited at first, but they have
produced some interesting results in the last few years and promise to continue to do so. As
computer use and access have grown, so has the number of digitized texts of classic literary
works.
The computer-based study of literary texts has established its own niche in academia. Donald
Foster, an English professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, is one of the leaders
in textual scholarship. In the late 1980s Foster created SHAXICON, a database that tracks all
the “rare” words used by English playwright William Shakespeare. Each of these words appears
in any individual Shakespeare play no more than 12 times. The words can then be cross-
referenced with some 2,000 other poetic texts, allowing experienced researchers to explore
when they were written, who wrote them, how the author was influenced by the works of other
writers, and how the texts changed as they were reproduced over the centuries.
In late 1995 Foster's work attracted widespread notice when he claimed that Shakespeare was
the anonymous author of an obscure 578-line poem, A Funeral Elegy (1612). Although experts
had made similar claims for other works in the past, Foster gained the backing of a number of
prominent scholars because of his computer-based approach. If Foster's claim holds up to long-
term judgment, the poem will be one of the few additions to the Shakespearean canon in the
last 100 years.
Foster's work gained further public acclaim and validation when he was asked to help identify
the anonymous author of the best-selling political novel Primary Colors (1996). After using his

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computer program to compare the stylistic traits of various writers with those in the novel,
Foster tabbed journalist Joe Klein as the author. Soon after, Klein admitted that he was the
author. Foster was also employed as an expert in the case of the notorious Unabomber, a
terrorist who published an anonymous manifesto in several major newspapers in 1995.
Foster is just one scholar who has noted the coming of the digital age and what it means for
traditional fields such as literature. “For traditional learning and humanistic scholarship to be
preserved, it, too, must be digitized,” he wrote in a scholarly paper. “The future success of
literary scholarship depends on our ability to integrate those electronic texts with our ongoing
work as scholars and teachers, and to exploit fully the advantages offered by the new medium.”
Foster noted that people can now study Shakespeare via Internet Shakespeare Editions, using
the computer to compare alternate wordings in different versions and to consult editorial
footnotes, literary criticism, stage history, explanatory graphics, video clips, theater reviews, and
archival records. Novelist and literary journalist Gregory Feeley noted that “the simplest (and
least radical) way in which computer technology is affecting textual scholarship is in making
various texts available, and permitting scholars to jump back and forth between them for easy
comparisons.”
Scholars can also take advantage of computer technology in “publishing” their work. Princeton
University history professor Robert Darnton has written of a future in which works of
scholarship are presented digitally in a pyramid-like layering. One might start, he suggests, at
the top with a concise account of a subject, then proceed to detailed documentation and
evidence, continue with a level of questions and discussion points for classroom use, and end
with a place for reports and commentary from readers.

The Power of the Web

Using computers for high-level research such as textual scholarship became feasible as more
and more literary works were digitized during the 1980s. But an important piece of the puzzle
was missing: a way to easily distribute these texts and other digital data. As the 1985 Science
article noted, “There is always the possibility … that students will be able to download both text
and programs directly into the memories of their microcomputers, but it is difficult to imagine
national centers able to distribute files to millions of students around the country.”
This unlikely concept became a reality in the early 1990s with the development of the World
Wide Web. In 1989 British computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee designed the Web for the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) so that scientists working in various locations
could share research and collaborate on projects. But the idea of sharing information soon
spread far beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Humanities scholars and students were quick
to realize the potential of this technology.
Suddenly, a professor in India could post his latest paper about Irish writer James Joyce to be
analyzed by other Joyce scholars around the world, and get quick feedback through e-mail
messages. The Web also allowed a student writing a paper in her dorm room in California to
access a rare original text on a computer in New York or Nigeria. Why bother actually going to
a bricks-and-mortar library? “The World Wide Web has replaced the library, for many of our
students, as the obvious site for conducting original research,” Foster noted.

Virtual Libraries

The rise of the Internet, the so-called Information Highway, has started to transform that
cornerstone of academic research, the library. Increasingly, libraries are becoming places to visit

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online rather than in person. The New York Public Library, for example, “dispenses so much
information electronically to readers all over the world that it reports ten million hits on [visits
to] its computer system each month as opposed to 50,000 books dispensed in its reading
room,” wrote Darnton in the New York Review of Books in March 1999.
The Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C., the unofficial national library of the
United States, has long been a leader in the use of digital technology. Chief among these
efforts is its drive to create a National Digital Library. Begun in the early 1990s, this vast,
ongoing project aims to put much of the LOC's collections of historic and archival documents
online. Some of these documents are too fragile to be handled by the public and were
previously unavailable, but now even a 7-year-old can peruse them on the Web.
About 1.7 million items had been put up on the Web site by April 1999, with a goal of 5
million by the time the library celebrates its 200th anniversary in April 2000. However, library
officials have a long way to go before reaching their ultimate goal of 80 million unique items
online.
Recently the LOC received grants to digitize its collections relating to American inventors
Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B. Morse. Library officials point with pride to the
widespread use of its Web site, American Memory: Historical Collections for the National
Digital Library, from which one can view extensive photographs and documents about the
history of African Americans or a digitized collection of 2,100 early baseball cards from the
years 1887 to 1914. Users can also search the library's enormous holdings or access reading lists
for kids (“Read All About It”).

New Medium

More than just a revolutionary tool for indexing, analyzing, or transmitting content, digital
technology is actually reshaping the creation of art and literature. “Just as film emerged as the
dominant artistic medium of the 20th century, the digital domain—whether it is used for visual
art, music, literature or some other expressive genre—will be the primary medium of the 21st,”
wrote New York Times columnist Matthew Mirapaul in early 1999. More and more writers,
artists, and musicians are using computers and the Internet to enhance, animate, or completely
remake their art, with unconventional and remarkable results.
Publishing, a print-based business that to some people is beginning to represent the past, is
attempting to adapt to the new digital world. Marc Aronson, a senior children's book editor at
the publishing house Henry Holt and a longtime student of the impact of changing technology
on publishing, describes this impact as a kind of blurring or hybridization. “The keynote of the
digital age is overlap, multiplicity, synergy. The digital does not replace print, it subsumes it,”
Aronson said. “Print becomes a form of the digital, just as the digital has a special place when it
appears in print.” Especially in books for young people, he notes, more authors and artists are
trying books with multiple storylines or told from various points of view.
One strain of this new type of nonlinear writing is popularly known as hypertext fiction. At its
simplest, hypertext fiction mimics the Choose Your Own Adventure books that became
popular in the early 1980s. In these books, readers directed the story by choosing which page to
turn to at key points based on what they wanted the character to do. In hypertext fiction, the
reader explores different branches of a story on a computer by clicking on hyperlinks in the
text. The result is a fragmented, slightly surreal narrative in which time is not linear and there
is no obvious conclusion.
Michael Joyce, like Foster a professor of English at Vassar, is a leading theoretician and author
of hypertext fiction. He wrote what is widely considered the first major work of hypertext

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fiction, afternoon, a story (1990). The piece consists of more than 500 different screens, or pages,
which are connected by more than 900 links. afternoon centers on a man who witnesses a
serious car accident that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and son, who may or may
not have survived. Joyce has also published Twilight, A Symphony (1996), about a man estranged
from his wife who is on the run with their infant son.
Joyce defines hypertext fiction as “stories that change each time you read them.” He notes that
“interactive narrative does not necessarily mean multiple plot lines, but can also mean
exploring the multiple thematic lines or contours of a story.”
Not surprisingly, hypertext has frequently come under attack from traditional critics. Perhaps
the most powerfully simple critique, however, comes from Charles Platt, a contributing editor
for Wired magazine and a prominent science-fiction writer and critic. “Could it be,” wonders
Platt, “that storytelling really doesn't work very well if the user can interfere with it?” People
really want the author, scriptwriter, or actors to do the heavy lifting of narrative, he argues. On
the other hand, Platt suspects that we have hardly begun to explore true interactive media and
that it will be utterly different from fiction as we know it today.

Roll Over, Beethoven

Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact
disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and
recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital
Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has
given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music.
“The MIDI interface enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only
in expensive recording studios,” Platt observed. “It enables synthesis of sounds that have never
existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple sound
tracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition program
and a $500 synthesizer, any musically literate person can write—and play!—a string quartet in an
afternoon.”
Serious music scholars and composers are also utilizing computers to forge new paths in music.
A prime example is David Cope, professor of music at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, who began developing a computer music program in the early 1980s. Cope originally
wanted a program that would help him overcome mental blocks when he composed. Through
years of tinkering, the software, called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), has become a
full-fledged compositional program. Cope supplies bits of musical information to EMI, which
has been designed to recognize a variety of styles and patterns, and the program then processes
this material to generate pieces of original music.
The result is “disturbing,” said composer Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). “You can actually get pretty good
music.”
Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod
Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music.
As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered
hyperinstruments: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create
sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a “virtual baton,” or moving their entire
body in a “sensor chair.”
Similar work on a “virtual orchestra” is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computer
music program at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore,

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Maryland. Wright uses conductors' batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data
about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into
instructions for a synthesizer to produce music.
In Machover's best-known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each
other and a group of hyperinstruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical
performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributed
by people on the Web, and Machover's own music. Machover says he is motivated to give
people “an active, directly participatory relationship with music.”
More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground
museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through
a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various
multimedia rooms. Machover composed the music and designed many of the interactions for
these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads
shaped like diamonds. “By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the
room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a
single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of the
group.”
Machover believes that music is in general poorly served in elementary schools and hopes to
change this. His inventions, including some intended specifically for children, are designed to
help bring music education and appreciation to a wider audience. Machover is convinced that
computer science will eventually become a permanent part of regular musical training.
Machover's projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating
devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible. Machover describes one
of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and
miniature speakers inside. “We've recently figured out how to send digital information through
fabric or thread,” he said. “So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze and
where you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to
high or low, or harmonize with other balls.”
Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin
Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio's Performance Today, explains why: “I think that a
reason a great moving piece of computer music hasn't been written yet is that—in this instance—
the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human
connection,” Goldsmith said. “All that would change in an instant if a very accomplished
composer—a Steve Reich or John Corigliano or Henryk Górecki—were to write a great piece of
computer music, but so far that hasn't happened. Nobody has really stepped forward to make a
wide range of listeners say, „Wow, what a terrific instrument that computer is for making
music!‟ ”

But Is It Art?

The art world has also seen the impact of digital technology in varying degrees and methods. As
is often evident in their work, many artists constantly push the boundaries of art and the tools
and materials with which they work. New mediums are not burdened by the weight of history,
and they provide the artist with a fresh means of expression.
Digital art can be generally divided into two areas: art that is either made with or relies on
computers and can be printed out or is otherwise three-dimensional, and art that is completely
contained within the digital world. Early physical pieces were mostly printouts from computer

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graphics programs, but a November 1998 show at the School of Visual Arts in New York City
included elaborate interactive art.
One piece at this show, Office Plant #1 (1998), is a sort of mechanical flower that blooms or
wilts—and even groans—in reaction to the contents of e-mail messages on an attached computer.
Other pieces have audio soundtracks, video displays, and moving parts. Another show, the
Boston Cyberarts Festival held in May 1999, included a wide variety of new technology art.
One featured example was the work of French artist Christian Lavigne, who is a pioneer in the
field of cybersculpture (virtual sculpture on the Web) and robosculpture (sculpture done with the
aid of computer-controlled machines).
One unique approach to computer art is the path taken by British artist Harold Cohen, who
became interested in computers and art as far back as the late 1960s. Cohen, a well-known
abstract painter in his own right, has spent more than two decades creating and refining a
“robot artist” he calls Aaron. Cohen has painstakingly programmed Aaron to draw and paint
with a mechanized arm, from basic shapes to, more recently, human forms. Cohen has had to
program the computer with data on proportion, depth, visual angles, color, and other
concepts. No two of Aaron's paintings are alike, and the results are impressive enough to cause
some people to wonder who is actually creating the art, the human programmer or the
computer.
With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, much recent attention has
focused on online art. In December 1995 art critic and writer Robert Atkins wrote in the
magazine Art in America that the 1994-1995 art season would be known as “the year the art
world went online.” The first commercial art galleries opened on the Internet, and physical
installations such as Antonio Muntadas's The File Room (1994)—a detailed look at the history of
censorship—also went up on the Web. Other works soon followed that mixed Web-based
design with artistic statements. Artists began to see the Internet not just as a means for
publicity or distribution of art works but also as a medium of expression in itself.
A little over three years later, Atkins described in the same publication the growing number of
“original, interactive works that can only be experienced on the Net, rather than the digitized
images of paintings or photographs that characterize most gallery or museum [Web] sites. Many
online pieces now capitalize on the burgeoning capacity of the Web to deliver video and sound,
as well as text and graphics.” Atkins points to one striking work, American Friederike Paetzold's
I-Section (1998), in which the visitor “dissects” a torso, removing organs to reveal multiple
layers of imagery and text.
By combining elements of hypertext fiction and computer music with visual media such as
photographs and video, digital artists are breaking down old artistic barriers and producing
works for all the senses. Science fiction and fantasy author Richard Grant sees this as the
ultimate goal. “When I think of hypertext—and computer-driven art forms in general—these
days, I think of opera. Specifically, I think of [German composer] Richard Wagner, his idea of
the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work), a sort of Grand Unified Field Theory in which opera is
seen as the final summation of all previous art forms: music, literature, drama, painting,
sculpture (present in the construction of the sets), poetry, dance, public ritual, and sheer
spectacle (or what would now be called special effects).” Increasingly, academic programs—such
as the Consortium for Research and Education in the Arts and Technology (CREAT) at the
University of Central Florida in Orlando—are bringing students from various disciplines
together to generate such innovative multimedia pieces.

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Future Shakespeares?

New technology has always led to innovation in the arts. After all, the favorite watchword of
the poet, painter, or composer is “Make it new.” For this artists can use new tools, and the
computer is one of the most powerful tools in human history. As the digital future looms ever
closer, the biggest difference may be that the artists of tomorrow will use digital tools as a
matter of course. The next genius to reshape the world of the arts—the next Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Pablo Picasso, or William Shakespeare—could be a 14-year-old just now beginning to
experiment with her home computer. And she will not be alone. At the cusp of the new
millennium, digital technology seems poised to make artists and creators of us all.

About the author: Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Book World.
He received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

For further reading:

Atkins, Robert. “State of the (On-Line) Art.” Art in America. April 1, 1999.

Cope, David. Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Computer Music and Digital Audio
Series, Volume 12). A-R Editions, 1996.

Dewitt, Donald L. (ed.) Going Digital: Strategies for Access, Preservation, and Conversion
of Collections to a Digital Format. Haworth, 1998.

Dodge, Charles, and Jerse, Thomas A. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and
Performance. Schirmer Books, 1997.

Dodsworth, Clark, Jr. Digital Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology.
Addison-Wesley, 1998.

Foster, Donald W. Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution. University of Delaware Press, 1989.
Holtzman, Steven. Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Eastgate, 1990.

Joyce, Michael, and Synder, Ilana (eds.) Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic
Era. Routledge, 1998.

Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (2nd
ed.) Prentice Hall, 1996.

McCorduck, Pamela. Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold
Cohen. W. H. Freeman, 1991.

Spalter, Anne Morgan. The Computer in the Visual Arts. Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Theberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology.
Wesleyan University Press, 1997.

Source: Encarta Yearbook, May 1999.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Page 15 of 20
The social, cultural, and technological developments of the 20th century have vastly
expanded the Western critical tradition. Indeed, many critics question just how “Western”
this tradition can or should remain. Modern critics in the established cultural centers of
Western Europe must heed not only Central Europe and North America but also areas once
considered remote, including Russia, Latin America, and, most recently, the newly
independent countries of Asia and Africa. At a growing number of universities, professors of
literature and related fields pay increasing attention to long-neglected areas of study—for
example, works by women and by non-Western writers. The following sketch of various
20th-century approaches names few living critics because it is impossible to predict who
among the tens of thousands of writers publishing criticism today will ultimately outshine the
others.

A Formalism, Structuralism, and New Criticism

A text-based critical method known as formalism was developed by Victor Shklovsky,

Vladimir Propp, and other Russian critics early in the 20th century. It involved detailed
inquiry into plot structure, narrative perspective, symbolic imagery, and other literary
techniques. But after the mid-1930s, leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
its subsequent satellites in Eastern Europe demanded that literature and criticism directly
serve their political objectives. Political leaders in those countries suppressed formalist
criticism, calling it reactionary. Even such internationally influential opponents of extreme
formalism as the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin and the Hungarian Georg Lukács would often find
themselves under attack.

The geographical center of formalist orientation started to shift westward in 1926 when
scholars of language and literature, most of them Czech, founded the Prague Linguistic
Circle, adopting and refining some of the methods of formal analysis developed by their
Russian colleagues. Beginning in the late 1940s anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, critic
Roland Barthes, and other mid-century thinkers and scholars initiated French structuralism by
applying linguistically inspired formal methods to literature and related phenomena.
Structuralism attempted to investigate the “structure” of a culture as a whole by “decoding,”
or interpreting, its interactive systems of signs. These systems included literary texts and
genres as well as other cultural formations, such as advertising, fashion, and taboos on certain
forms of behavior.

The text-centered methods of the formalist critics were also welcomed in the United States
because they meshed well with the concerns of so-called New Critics, who focused on the
overall structure and verbal texture of literary works. By the 1940s, when Russian linguist
Roman Jakobson and Czech literary theorist René Wellek settled at Harvard and Yale
universities, respectively, the study of literature in North America had been greatly
influenced by the work of Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics. Like his British
contemporary Sir William Empson, Brooks applied the skill of close reading chiefly to the
analysis of ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies in individual texts.

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Many New Critics looked at metaphor, imagery, and other qualities of literary language apart
from both a work’s historical setting and any detailed biographical information that might be
available about the author. Other New Critics, however, were more historically or
philosophically inclined. New Criticism as a whole was therefore meaningfully supplemented
by the work of German-born literary historian Erich Auerbach and of American philosopher
Susanne K. Langer, who sought to place individual texts into larger historical and theoretical
contexts. Auerbach emphasized historical development in his 1946 book Mimesis, which
chronicled changing styles of the literary representation of reality from Greek poet Homer to
English author Virginia Woolf. Langer in turn argued that the significant emotions depicted
or aroused by literature and other arts are universal human feelings symbolized by the work
rather than personal sentiments expressed by a particular writer or artist.

B Other Critical Methods

In and after the 1920s American-born British poet T. S. Eliot explored how well individual
European writers measured up to his aesthetically liberal but politically conservative view of
the Western tradition. Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in contrast, opposed any viewpoint
narrowed by regionalism or specific ideologies; he attempted to find common elements in the
worldwide multiplicity of literary traditions in his book Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye
and like-minded critics around the globe saw literature and other art forms as manifestations
of universal myths and archetypes (largely unconscious image patterns) that cross cultural
boundaries. In advocating this view they took cues from British anthropologist Sir James
George Frazer and Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

In the 1960s and 1970s German philosopher-critic Hans-Georg Gadamer and French
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault offered contrary models for addressing literary
and cultural traditions in literary criticism. Gadamer sought to engage past texts in fruitful
dialogue with the present by examining different interpretations of literature throughout
history; so do German critic Wolfgang Iser and other proponents of Aesthetics of Reception,
which examines readers’ responses to literature in a cultural and historical context. In
contrast, Foucault wanted to challenge certain basic notions about the Western tradition that
most Westerners take for granted. He hoped to discredit Western heritage and its powerful
institutions by exposing, or “demystifying,” the repressed origins and oppressive applications
of that power. Among literary critics, American Stephen Greenblatt and other so-called New
Historicists have similar objectives.

Today’s widespread tendency to interpret texts as hiding rather than revealing what is most
significant about themselves has three major sources: the writings of German philosophers
Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche and of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Influential
studies along Marxist lines of the social and economic underpinnings of culture were
undertaken by German critic Walter Benjamin before World War II and by Welsh critic
Raymond Williams between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Marxist and Freudian
methods of literary criticism were productively combined from the 1920s on by several
American writer-critics, including Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke. Viewing humans as
symbol-using and symbol-misusing animals, Burke approached literary works as often

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deceptive or self-deceptive symbolic actions that should be critically reenacted, rather than
passively contemplated, by their readers.

In a comparably skeptical spirit, current feminist critics in many countries draw attention to
literary evidence of ingrained prejudice against women or stereotypic views of women. Their
methods often emulate Marxist critiques of oppressive ideologies or Freudian excavations of
repressed desires. Contemporary feminist writings are also influenced by the gender-
conscious essays of English novelist Virginia Woolf and by The Second Sex (1949), a book-
length plea by French thinker and novelist Simone de Beauvoir against the second-class
treatment of women. Feminist criticism explores issues relevant to women as authors, as
readers, and as fictional characters, and also raises the controversial question of the possible
existence of distinctly female writing—recognizably different in the character of its language
from discourse shaped by male patterns of thought.

Like feminist, Marxist, and some Freudian critics, nonwhite Western critics and critics
emerging in countries newly freed from colonial rule also have challenged many aspects of
European and North American culture as socially and psychologically oppressive. Although
these so-called multiculturalist critics are united in their opposition to Western domination,
they take many different positions on particular issues of race, class, gender, language, and
national or ethnic identity.

The frontal attack, initiated by Nietzsche, on any use of language as an instrument of

mystification and domination has its most unwavering advocates today in scholars who
practice the interpretive technique known as deconstruction. Following French philosopher
Jacques Derrida and Belgian-born American critic Paul de Man, deconstructive critics
assume that attributing even the most complex single meaning to a text violates the boundless
signifying potential of language in a world where there are no facts but only indeterminate
meanings and unresolvable conflicts of interpretation. Proponents of deconstruction elaborate
on textual ambiguities and paradoxes that most earlier interpreters (including the New
Critics) attempted to resolve. For deconstructors and other so-called postmodern critics,
special difficulties in the interpretation of complex literary works forcefully suggest the
general resistance of all texts to definitive meanings.

Recent nontraditional criticism does not represent a complete break with a critical tradition
that has always proven hospitable to challenges to its principles. In fact, so-called Western
criticism has already begun absorbing the insights of its best contemporary challengers.
Undergoing transformation once again, it prepares to encounter what German writer and
critic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe hoped would eventually emerge as Weltliteratur: the
diverse but intertwined literatures of the world.

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Web Links:
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal
CLCWeb is an online learned and peer-refereed journal for comparative literature and
culture.
http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/

A Celebration of Women Writers

This site provides an extensive directory of links to biographical and bibliographical
information about women writers, along with the complete texts of books written by women.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/

IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection

The Internet Public Library provides a database of more than 2,000 critical and biographical
Web sites about authors and their works.
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/

American Comparative Literature Association

The American Comparative Literature Association is the principal learned society in the
United States for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures; it offers
information about its organization and membership.
http://www.acla.org/

—————————————————————————————————————

Further Reading:

Criticism, literary

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester University Press, 2002. A guide to 11
major types of theoretical thought encountered in school literature courses.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd ed.
Prentice Hall, 2002. Examines each school of literary theory and criticism.

Cuddon, J.A., and Claire Preston. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary
Theory. 4th ed. Penguin, 2000. Definitions of technical terms and descriptions of literary
movements.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2000.
A good starting point for understanding contemporary schools of literary criticism.

Guerin, Wilfred L., and others. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed.
Oxford University Press, 1998. Offers readers and students a variety of ways of looking at
literature.

Page 19 of 20
Murray, Chris, and Frank Northen Magill, eds. Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and
Criticism. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. A two-volume set that includes 375 entries on both
Western and non-Western literary traditions.

Richter, David, ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd ed.
Bedford, 1998.

Contributed By:
Paul Hernadi
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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