New Criticism

I sat in a crowded undergraduate lecture theatre today ( I'm in England, so that's theatre) listening to a Cambridge don introduce these kids to 20th century literary theory. One of the themes of the lecture was pointing out the theory-laden training that the students have received thus far. Without their knowing, they have acquired skills in 'close reading' that carry with them a certain sort of literary theory highly indebted to the New Criticism of the early 20th century. It seemed that one of the points the lecturer wanted to impress upon the students is the key assumptions behind 'close reading' and New Critical stances towards literariness. What theory offers, she claims with Jonathan Culler, is ways of disputing what would normally be regarded as 'common sense' in reading, what we take for granted as the 'natural' way of reading.

Carefully avoiding taking a position herself, she destabilized students' notion of 'how to read' by casting suspicion on some of the assumptions of close reading. She did not take them apart completely; rather, she indicated their instability as concepts, their debt to an early 20th century moment, and their 'religious' sensibility. Interestingly enough, she spent a fair amount of time listing and then noting the instability of the liberal humanist approach to the idea of 'literature' and 'reading'. What seemed sad to me is that many of these concepts, though they may seem naive to a critically informed reader, can be powerfully defended and better nuanced with the insights offered by contemporary literary theory than the lecturer indicated. It was a bit of a debunk, it seemed to me, and the underlying message was 'while Cambridge may require you to learn to be a close reader, that choice of reading is somewhat arbitrary, culturally conditioned, and indebted to the sensibilities and values of the past.' As a student, I might have come away with a sense that I've been 'taken in' by my past teachers. Anyhow, I thought I'd list her set of assumptions of the 'liberal humanist' approach to literature and my re-articulations of some of them. See which ones you would tick off--and which ones you would seriously miss!

1. "The best literature is timeless and universal in its appeal. When we talk about a 'classic', we are referring to a work that transcends the vagaries and contingencies of history, local custom, class, gender, race, sexuality, etc."
- Note: the key words that tip this idea towards being out-dated are: 'universal' and 'transcends'. A more nuanced point would acknowledge the embeddedness of a classic within its time and the work you often need to do to understand a text culturally distant from you. Also, and this will come up again later, this statement assumes something like a shared 'human nature' that would enable universal appeal. The idea of a 'human nature' is, as you might be aware, quite suspect in academic circles these days. Even so, it is not uncritically naive to conclude that such a thing exists.

2. It is possible to construct a canon with broad consensus and only minor disagreements. "The idea of a canon, like the idea of a 'classic' work of literature, assumes that it is possible to evaluate literature."
- Note: here the key word is 'evaluate', not 'canon'. What is red-flagged here for the lecturer is the claim that this work is better, more worthy, than another; that this work is worthy of a certain kind of attention, even a certain kind of respect because of its having certain kinds of excellences that can be perceived as such. Again, while it is not straightforward to create a list of criteria of excellence, nevertheless, it is still intellectually legitimate to critisize! Not my interest to show that here, though... ;)

OK, back to the PhD - will edit this post and add more later. Just wanted to highlight first of all the trouble with the ideas of human nature and evaluation in order to suggest a possible question for later: ought a Christian literary theory recognize as one of its givens a certain sort of human nature and an ability of humans to discern literary excellences? ALSO, and this is just half-baked at the moment (like so much of our blog! lots of goo and little true crumb), would a recognition of human nature in terms of ensouled bodies make a critic better able to negotiate some of the tensions between the situated and the transcendent that plague theory? Currently the move is often to debunk the transcendent as a power ploy, but perhaps that is inhumanly materialist, just as an over-emphasis on the transcendent could be regarded as a gnostic rejection of embodiedness?