Literary Criticism

Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science .... What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them, and the refining of society which results from it.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

The subject for literary criticism is works of verbal art, which is to say fiction, poetry, and drama; and criticism’s traditional purpose has been the development of illuminating and objective methods of understanding and evaluation. The encompassing scrutiny of literature, begun with Aristotle’s generalizations in The Poetics, progressed through the Renaissance and subsequent centuries. By 1900 a distinct tradition of proposed solutions to the classic critical problems of judgment and analysis already existed. Criticism, at its best, has little more than subject (works of literature) in common with reviewing, which is the evaluative scrutiny (and recommendation) of fresh publishing produce; and reviewers, no matter how “good” or “courageous,” percipient or influential, are rarely able to contribute conceptually to the progress of criticism. Adjudication is critically valuable only where evaluative measure is essential, such as selecting a contemporary canon, or renaming the touchstones of a certain period or genre, Moreover, criticism, unlike scholarship, assumes all literature within its professional domain; therefore, the history of modern criticism has been forged less by “scholars” or specialists in a single subject, than the “theorists,” whose ideas and/or practice are relevant to all literary study and invariably underlie more specialized work. Literary criticism has historically achieved more influence, if not more conceptual progress, than, say, criticism of painting or music, in part because the possibility of printed quotations historically provided a comparatively more effective way of presenting evidence; yet critical insights rarely have truly scientific status, in spite of their inevitable subsequent consideration by others in the trade.

The earliest American literary study, around the turn of the century, combined an acceptance of hard-headed Germanic philology and a strong respect for methods emulating science with a weak nostalgia for European writing and critical hierarchies; so that while certain American critics emphasized the first set of biases, the popularizers, such as William Lyon Phelps or even James Gibbons Huneker, exploited the second. In the decade following the First World War arose, largely in the United States, a distinctly modern school of criticism, which reflected on one hand the rigor and empiricism of scientific experiments and yet remained aware of the peculiarly unscientific, or unverifiable, status of knowledge in and about imaginative literature. These activities were roughly called “The New Criticism,” the phrase taken from an essay that Joel Spingarn, then a Professor of English at Columbia, had published in 1910; and since the aim of every new criticism is a greater understanding of literature, the advocates of this New Criticism aimed to avoid the bibliographic accumulation of historical literary minutiae (especially the identification of “sources”) and a slick historicism that glibly regarded all literature as reflecting its times and/or insisted that to understand the literature of a past age the reader needed to immerse himself in its culture. In addition, these New Critics wanted to transcend both the use of non-literary, “extrinsic” criteria in critical evaluation and interpretation, and the inconsistencies, solipsism, and superficialities of subjective literary journalism and book-reviewing. Indicatively, many traditional issues no longer commanded serious attention from the New Critics. “Whether epic or tragedy, for example, is (or was) the ultimate literary achievement,” noted William Van O’Connor, “no longer strikes us as being a very significant question.”

These New Critics comprised an intensely articulate critical enterprise, regarding literature not as messages to be deciphered (“the heresy of paraphrase”) but as esthetic complexes to be experienced; and since such complexes could, by nature, be analyzed more objectively than the reader’s personal experience, the New Critics favored unprecedented close and detailed analysis of individual texts. Beyond that was a general concern with structural unity, imagistic and metaphoric coherences, linguistic texture, and ironic complexity—tearing the literary work apart, so to speak, precisely to demonstrate what holds it together. The resulting accumulation of elucidating insights, particularly in poetry previously regarded as inexplicably difficult (e.g., seventeenth-century metaphysical), suggested conclusively that genuine progress was still very possible in the critical comprehension of traditional literature.

In the intellectual history of this New Criticism, key assumptions stemmed from T. S. Eliot’s judgments of poets (and sometimes his ontological values too) and the Englishman I. A. Richards’s empiricist techniques of verifiable analysis (each man also emigrating to the other’s native country), along with the miscellaneous suggestions of Kenneth Burke. The New Criticism’s most accomplished practitioner included the Americans R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom and the Englishmen William Empson and F. R. Leavis; its most effective popularizations were the attitudinizing essays of Allen Tate (written very much in the Eliot tradition) and the much-revised textbooks that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren first introduced in the late thirties— Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Each New Critic emphasized, as well as valued, one particular attribute of poetic discourse—“texture” (Ransom), “tension” (Tate), “ambiguity” (Empson), “irony” and “paradox” (Brooks). Differences between them notwithstanding, these critics generally touted poetic knowledge as superior to scientific and yet emulated science in insisting that analysis or “explication” of a literary text precedes evaluation, because only a detailed knowledge of a poem’s workings and meanings could sufficiently support a just evaluation.

As many critics pointed out, however, the analytical methods of the New Critics assumed certain literary values (mentioned already) that, in a feedback process, not only favored Christian interpretations of experience, but also made certain texts more propitious than others; for what a critic finds in an artwork is in part reciprocally determined by what he wants (or is able) to see. That is, it became clear that only poems of a distinct kind, discernible by advance inspection, could offer sufficient material for a suitable sustained New Critical analysis. Typically, since many of the major New Critics also published poetry, their contribution to fiction criticism remained negligible. Historically, it was W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s essays on “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) that provided the most persuasive rationale for the primary methodological idea of regarding the literary work as completely autonomous—independent of reference to either the author’s intentions, no matter how explicit, or the reader’s subjective responses. Wimsatt, along with his Yale colleague Cleanth Brooks, also produced a highly parochial “short history” of Literary Criticism (1957), which appeared in the same year as Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, the first book capping an era, the second title fertilely initiating a new one.

It is clear, in retrospect, that the energies of the New Criticism had subsided by the early fifties, its key practitioners becoming either platitudinous or ponderously abstract. Nonetheless, many of them, as well as their epigones, took over eminent academic departments, repeating familiar pieties to a larger but less enthusiastic audience. The Leavisites in England, largely gathered around the periodical Scrutiny (1932-1953), emphasized the evaluative function of criticism; so that not only did their taste in modern writing turn reactionary, despite the exemplary impact of Leavis’ own New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), but their increasingly less consequential magazine suspended publication by 1953. The fifties were clearly ripe for the celebration of counter-heroes opposed to the New Criticism, particularly those who wanted to regard both literature and criticism as simpler enterprises.

Although these people were less inclined than their predecessors to appreciate textual complexity and elaborate ironies, the blanket rejection of criticism in the name of Poetry, such as Karl Shapiro’s In Defense of Ignorance (1958), won only marginal support. Out of this new anti-analytic attitude grew the cult of Edmund Wilson, glorified particularly because he favored fiction over poetry and plot summary over detailed analysis. His champions were mostly book reviewers and literary journalists attempting to aggrandize their own practice—Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, et al; however, none of Wilson’s followers could equal the lucidity of his prose or the constancy of his engagement, particularly in the twenties and thirties, with the challenges of contemporary writing. As a result, the master’s collected reviews still belong among the most informative cultural histories of their respective periods. After 1945, however, Wilson himself turned from his earlier practice of courageous confrontation with unprecedented literary issues; so that neither he nor his followers significantly faced those milestones of contemporary writing that provide the toughest problems to the present-minded critic—James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the fiction of Beckett and Borges, post-Poundian poetry, etc.—or the more general issues of the revolutions in literary form. The truth is that for all the superficial progressiveness of their professed outlook, the post-Wilsonians represent an anti-intellectual reaction, neglecting, often out of ignorance, the genuine achievements of more profound literary criticism.

If we take, as one should, the deep illumination of the text to be the major purpose of criticism, the first post-WWII master was Erich Auerbach. Born in Germany in 1892, and exiled to Istanbul’s Turkish State University during the 1930’s, he came to America after the War, accepting a succession of academic positions until his death in 1957. The great book he wrote in German (while residing in Turkey) and first published in Switzerland, Mimesis (1946), was translated into English and published here in 1953, quickly becoming one of the most impressive and influential texts in post-WWII American criticism. Auerbach’s major idea has a familiar historicist cast—that the literary representation of reality has changed in time; but nothing before was so spectacularly illuminated as this analytic method. From the meticulous scrutiny of syntax, diction, and point of view in shrewdly selected passages by authors ranging in time from Homer to Virginia Woolf, he patiently reconstructed the world view found in each book; so that not only did he successfully demonstrate that minute details are keys to the broadest characterization of literary style, but his collection of texts and analyses finally weave an intellectual history of writers’ changing picture of the larger world. Like his justly famous essay on the changing meaning of the “figura” concept, Mimesis implied one of the great ideas of contemporary American criticism—the relativistic position that one form of literary reality was intrinsically no more valid or “real” than any other. As Auerbach wrote in an earlier book, subsequently translated as Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature (1961):

The notion of an objective reality common to all was replaced by realities differing in accordance with the consciousness of the individuals or groups contemplating them; and these persons or groups themselves, changing according to their mood or situation, also changed in their manner of envisaging the phenomena of reality.

His immense influence in America, exceeding his impact in Europe, stemmed from successfully combining a rigorously close stylistic analysis with larger historical and social issues, fulfilling the ideal of fusing strictly professional excellence with more general, extrinsic concerns.

In contrast to Auerbach, whose explicating methods served a larger historicism, another refugee scholar, Leo Spitzer, favored more strictly stylistic dissections, again beginning with syntax and diction, to define “microscopically” the particularities of an individual author’s motives and/or his interpretation of the world; and Spitzer’s highly empirical methods were, as he justly boasted, “factual, observable, irrefutable.” Also unlike Auerbach, who lived in the U.S. less than a decade and continued to write largely in his native German, Spitzer resided long enough in America, from 1936 to his death in 1960, to write books entirely in English, as well as do an unparalleled pictorial-linguistic explication of an advertisement for Sunkist Oranges, “American Advertising Explained as a Popular Art” (1949). (Similarly renowned for unusually detailed and thorough analyses of poetry, Roman Jakobson, born in Russia but first exiled to Czechoslovakia, became, after his immigration to America, more interested in linguistics; so that his contribution to, and influence upon, American literary criticism was negligible.)

A fourth émigré, Rene Wellek, a Czech born in 1903 who did graduate work at Princeton in the twenties and had his first book published here in 1931 (before returning to Europe for a decade), became after WWII the most prodigious American historian of the achievement of sophisticated literary criticism in all Western languages. Dividing the job of literary scholarship into theory, criticism and history, he offered rigorous and considered definitions of terms, concepts, and methods, endeavoring to provide the firmest intellectual foundation for that kind of literary study emphasizing the critical function—“the interpretation of literature as distinct from other activities of man.” Although this emphasis upon the developing idea of criticism has such a Germanic cast that these are not books a native American would write, in their American context Wellek became a powerful advocate for granting doctorates in “literature,” as distinct from the previous academic dominance of “philology.” By regarding criticism as compatible with scholarship, the book that Wellek co-authored with Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949), presented the most considered and influential formulations for including the critical study of literature within an academic system. These émigré scholars, who wrote as well as read in several languages, were the last exemplars of truly polylingual literacy that seemed impossible to inculcate in native American “scholar-critics.”

The historical role cut by Kenneth Burke is anomalous and idiosyncratic. Born in 1897, he was first known for his poetry and fiction, before becoming, among other roles, a primary figure in the development of the New Criticism. Indeed, the penultimate chapter of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s prodigiously detailed celebration of the movement, The Armed Vision (1948), was devoted entirely to Burke’s attempts to use in various ways “all there is to use.” Precisely because Burke’s inclusive intelligence transcended the limited taste, methodologies, and academic careerism of the other New Critics, as well as found no occasion to compromise his earlier principles, he was the only pioneer to do much fresh and first-rate literary criticism after the War. On the one hand, such books as A Rhetoric of Motives (1945) and A Grammar of Motives (1950) were less devoted to literature than their predecessors—the dominant concerns being human behavior and communication (and his “dramatistic” sociology preceding that of the sociologist Erving Goffman); so that certain critics of criticism, such as Wellek, charged erroneously that Burke had abandoned literature for another role (“an oracle of an abstruse philosophy”). In fact, however, not only did A Grammar deal with the language and imagistic structure of philosophic systems, but Burke continued to produce a steady stream of critical essays, published mostly in literary journals, many (though not all) of the best of them collected in Literature as Symbolic Action (1966). Historically, Burke functioned as an exemplary transitional figure, connecting his own generation’s emphasis upon close rhetorical, symbolic, and psychological analysis with a subsequent generation’s concern with the encompassing structural elements in literature. (For that reason, incidentally, so brilliant a study as Simon Lesser’s Fiction and the Unconscious [1957] seems to belong to an earlier time and to represent an historical terminus to the psychoanalytic approach, even though its textual analysis exhibit a shrewdness, accuracy, and sensitivity far beyond previous “Freudian” commentary.)

Burke is ultimately less an esthetic philosopher or a rigorous, literary theorist than a polymathic, unfocused fountain rich with related hypotheses that can be eclectically turned to various critical uses; for his is the kind of philosophically pitched intelligence that, though academic philosophers invariably judge it amateur or deficient, has great influence upon practitioners. Erudite in unorthodox ways, Burke deals less in universally relevant critical systems (though certain Burkean formulations imply such aspirations) or academically definitive interpretations than in diffuse expositions filled with sporadically percipient, indubitably original insights and critical suggestions, often innumerably more than any other commentator might offer. His extremely fertile, grasshopper’s mind prevents him from pursuing any thesis too thoroughly, as his sentences leap from insight to insight, perspective to perspective, assertion to qualification, argument to criticism, swift allusion to extended aside, with dazzling rapidity and abundance; so that the whole essay is rarely quite as cohesive, or comprehensible, as individual remarks. (For example, though a Marxist by intellectual conviction during the thirties, Burke was never single-minded enough to write Marxian criticism as rigorous or lucid as that of the Englishman Christopher Caudwell; nor did any other American.) For these reasons, not only do convoluted passages often spark suggestions, but Burke’s prose also evokes the image of a highly persistent and inquisitive mind vainly encircling incorrigibly elusive truths.

Burke’s critical method is a various, selective, and transforming mix of formulations, most of which usually figure, in various measures, in his extended essays. The first, emphasized in his earliest criticism, holds that the individual work is an organic collection of “strategies” or rhetorical devices that “aim” to affect its audience in certain discernible ways; so that the first task of criticism lies in identifying “some principle of unity which in turn involves division into interrelated parts.” 2.) Narrative usually functions as “symbolic action” for a mythic base; and the principal ritual in literature (“the arousing and fulfilling of an audience’s expectations”) portrays various forms of rebirth. 3.) In creating a literary work the writer suffers a ritual of personal purification through the articulation of subconscious conflicts; and a successful work relates to life by offering model strategies for “encompassing situations.” Thus, on one hand, the analysis of someone’s language can be understood as revealing his deepest psychology; on the other hand, Burke echoes the Aristotelian idea of poetry as cathartic to its audience, the work thus requiring the “completion” or fulfillment of the expectations it creates. “Symbolic action,” therefore, involves the relations of both work to author and work to spectator. Committing the intentional fallacy in addition to the affective one, Burke regards both language and thought as modes of action, for reader as well as the writer, and thus life and literature as entwined domains. 4.) Methodologically, a poem should be studied first as literature, and then as knowledge and portraiture. That is, only after treating it in isolation, or totally within its own frame, can the critic then consider its author’s other writings, particularly to deduce repeated idiosyncrasies in vocabulary and imagery (“emotional clusters”), as well as favorite structural (or mythic) patterns. After these coherences are established, then the critic can safely consider the author’s biography and background history. Statements of intent, however, carry less authority than the work itself, whose symbolic action, as Burke repeatedly showed, may subtly contradict not only the author’s stated purposes but also the apparent thrust of his narrative. It is indicative, in this respect, that no other poet-critic can find so many subconscious meanings in his own imaginative work. 5.) The critical tools developed in literary analysis can also be applied to non-literary expository texts to reveal their imaginative, “dramatistic” organization.

Burke’s practical criticism, as noted before, has appeared less in his books than in extended essays, many of them over 10,000 words in length, on such classic subjects as Shakespeare’s plays, Goethe’s Faust, and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; and each of these essays demonstrates the possibility of step-ahead criticism of much-combed texts. Burke’s analysis of St. Augustine’s Confessions, as an example of The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), brilliantly scrutinizes the language used to characterize major actions, while an abundantly multiple illustration of “indexing,” written in 1954, ostensibly on James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, represents Burke at his best—rich in terms, strategies, and insights specific in a particular context and yet applicable to other works of literary art. By the late fifties, indeed, Burkean critical practice became far more important, and influential, than his theoretical suggestions; and among the masterworks of Burkean criticism also belong Francis Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theater (1949), on “ritual expectation” in drama, especially that of purpose-passion-pain-perception, and Stanley Edgar Hyman’s compendious analysis of imaginative strategies in the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, James G. Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, The Tangled Bank (1961).

The declining influence of the New Criticism’s close rhetorical analysis created an opportunity for other critical emphases to earn their way. Perhaps the potentially most illuminating approach, came from “archetypal” critics. Their interests differ noticeably from their predecessors, in form as well as content; for whereas the New Critics accented the singular qualities, mostly rhetorical, of a particular text, the archetypal critics emphasized its universally resonant underpinnings—the deepest structures of not only an individual text, but even a whole body of related work. This emphasis upon the focusing influence of larger forms resembles certain strains in Burke; but in contrast to the sociological critics, as well as most book reviewers, the archetypal critic appraises the work’s fidelity to mythic reality, rather than social surfaces. The presupposition here is as this universal element is what ultimately moves the reader of literature, the first task of the artist lies in articulating this archetypal material and then endowing it with mediumistic excellences and worldly verisimilitude. (By this criterion of rare virtue, rather than the common currency of mythic resonance, is good art distinguished from bad.) This view of literature derives, on one hand, from the steadily growing interest in the mythic dimensions of human culture—from Edward Burnett Tyler and James Frazer in the late nineteenth-century to the Cambridge anthropologists of the early twentieth, down to such recent American popularizers as Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts. A second tradition stems from the psychoanalytic discoveries, more pronounced in Jung than in Freud, of psychological beliefs and structures common to all human beings. A third source of the mythic view, as we shall see, grows from inductive literary study that unveils a few general patterns which, in turn, can best be attributed to mythic origins. The best new archetypal criticism, however, overcame both the abusive illiteracy and conceptual fuzziness of earlier “myth” criticism.

One of the neatest and most useful theoretical formulations of myth’s place in literature appeared in Leslie A. Fiedler’s “Archetype and Signature” (1952), where the first term means “any of the immemorial patterns of response to the human situation in its more permanent aspects: death, love, the biological family, the relationship with the unknown, etc.” Signature thus becomes “the sum total of individualizing factors in a work”—the artist’s craft or style, as well as expressions of his psychic makeup—so that literature “can be said to come into existence at the moment a Signature is imposed upon the Archetype.” Fiedler’s scheme is eminently Freudian by analogy—with Archetype representing the unconscious, Signature the ego, and literary conventions, by implication, the super-ego. Therefore, too, the degree to which myth informs literature, or Signature controls the form and content (both of which are mythical at base) varies with the individual writer. His practical criticism marks Fiedler as particularly adept at extracting the repeated patterns, always emphasized with overtones of irony, in a writer’s books, or a large corpus of literature, and in his own brilliant Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966), as well as Roy Harvey Pearce’s The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), dominant motifs are rightly regarded as “myths” defining the singular character of American writing.

The most schematic and penetrating of the archetypal critics was, indicatively, also the single most influential literary theorist of the times, the Canadian scholar Northrop Frye, He came to his general outlook from Fearful Symmetry (1947), a systematic and detailed study of not only William Blake’s dominating ideas but his invention and use of myth, and then an aborted analysis of Edmund Spenser. As Frye describes his progress in the “polemical introduction” to the single foundation of his thought, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), wide reading in all literature led him to recognize remarkably few “recurring principles” of literary structure (just as the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus discovered that the world’s myths resemble each other to a surprising degree). This observation in turn led Frye to posit as a “hypothesis” in “social science” the “total coherence” of all literary creations (in all languages and in all periods), and within this theory of a few basic archetypes, literature is then defined as “displaced mythology.” If individual works are temporal representations of myth (defined as “a body of knowledge assimilated to or informed by a general view of the human situation”), then all literary structures can be seen as descending from (or reducing to) mythic origins. What Fiedler calls “signature” is “displacement” to Frye—“the techniques a writer uses to make his story credible, logically motivated, or morally acceptable.”

Coupled to this archetypal hypothesis was the ideal, indebted to Aristotle’s Poetics, of criticism as a comprehensive body of related generalizations that were deduced from literary study, rather than extrinsic systems of knowledge. If his study of Blake revealed that “poetic thought is inherently schematic, criticism must be so too.” The study of myths and archetypes also “leads to a special emphasis on conventions, genres and the principles of literary structure and imagery.” As Frye’s formal categories cut across history and culture, they are therefore applicable to all written evidence, not only creative literature but also other kinds of imaginative discourse, such as utopia or cosmology. Though these categories are frequently criticized as less than perfectly exclusive or consistent, Frye, like other founders of definite positions, has since devoted most of his energies to elaborating, or defending, his grand scheme, mostly on behalf of his announced goal of an endlessly developing “structure of thought and knowledge” of literary works—a supreme fiction, so to speak. It follows that this tradition of interpretation and its analytic techniques, rather than works of literature alone, should be what the student masters in a “literary” education. Frye’s classic aphorism for the critical enterprise notes that: “Criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy is to wisdom: a verbal imitation.” Thus, while literature clearly changes in time, criticism is susceptible not just to change but also to progressively greater insight, or demystification, much like any other comprehensive scrutiny of social artifacts. If Burke regards literary works as providing and reflecting strategies for life, Frye defines literature as a closed system, with new works relating largely not to life but to other writings. Precisely because literature can be created and comprehended without first-hand experience of its worldly subject, “No work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work,” and literary response and analysis should thus be as personally “disinterested” as possible. Indeed, esthetic evaluation as such has no place in Frye’s critical theory, where the canon of suitable subjects seems determined by a consensus of scholarly interest; and among his eminently democratic purposes is the emancipation of both criticism and literary study from the snobbishness implicit in claims to “taste.” If Burke’s mind instinctively digresses, Frye pursues his argument with syllogistic determination. Not only is his scheme smoothly articulated, but a witty, concise, and often aphoristic prose animates his points.

All these principles might remain merely theoretical if not for Frye’s incomparable capacity for persuasive comprehensive generalizations, which are served by a truly global literary. In his Anatomy (or “science of structure”, with its analogies for species, genera, and phyla), pathos, for instance, is structurally defined as “the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong,” or fictional forms, say, are reduced to five distinct modes—mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic—or all the myths of literature are reclassified into four categories: romance, tragedy, irony and comedy, which “may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth.”

Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvelous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Soaragmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized, or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy.

That central myth to which he refers is not Burke’s “rebirth” but the “quest” which Frye finds at the root of all narrative, thus making literature as a cumulative enterprise primarily about man’s purposes on earth. (This theme of “quest” as the fundamental story, or “monomyth,” also informs Joseph Campbell’s earlier The Hero of a Thousand Faces [1949].)

These awesomely reductive formulas instill in Frye’s practical criticism a particular attention to the synoptic patterns in an individual’s writings (generally regarded spatially, as though they comprised a single literary work, rather than temporally, as a developing interest); and his structural categories generally do illuminate the dominating themes. “The critic thus projects a syntax—a generative grammar—of imagination upon the work which is made to match his structural model,” notes the critic Murray Krieger. “Literature and other discourse are seen as many versions of the Platonic Forms through which imagination, feeding itself and upon itself, grasps and creates its reality.” Indeed, Frye’s own critical essays on circumscribed subjects, such as Canadian literature (1965), or T. S. Eliot (1963), or Shakespeare’s comedies in A Natural Perspective (1963), brilliantly combine encyclopedic erudition with an unerring synoptic eye. This scholarship provides, indeed, convincing evidence for Frye’s theoretical contentions that criticism, unlike literature, can exhibit progressive development and that “the power to understand” imaginative writing has a cultural status equal to “the power to create” it.

He was less percipient, however, at the analysis of individual style, and its relationship to meaning; so that an essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake characteristically deals only with Blake-like myth, rather than that book’s unusual forms. His critical outlook is so intrinsically unresponsive to stylistic innovation that, even if it is acknowledged, Frye’s homogenizing formulas implicitly suggest that the idiosyncratic work, such as the Wake, is less uncommon than it really is. (Indeed, the theories have a consensual, pastoral quality, combined with a sense of nature-governed inevitability, that Frye finds characteristic of Canadian writing in general.) Furthermore, it is the strategy of simple-minded academic disciples of Frye to identify one archetypal dimension in a single literary work and then find analogies for the others—the methodology again revealing that common mythic base in an uncommon work of literary art. “Archetypal analysis,” notes the critic Geoffrey H. Hartman, “can degenerate into an abstract thematics where the living pressure of mediation is lost and all connections are skeletonized.”

Caveats notwithstanding, the real achievement of the Anatomy is, in Frye’s own words, “a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism,” so that regardless of whether the archetypal hypothesis remains pervasively applicable, his definition of a “synoptic theory of criticism” remains an abiding ideal. In that respect, although Frye did not found a “school” of like-minded colleagues, his example has inspired systematic reconsideration of literary categories, such as Angus Fletcher’s highly abstract and yet encompassing essay on Allegory (1964).

The greatest challenge for contemporary critical perspicuity have been those works of recent literature that made the most divergent break with nineteenth-century work—in sum, that body of writing we have come to call “modernist.” In brief, modernist literature grew out of “avant-garde” emphases upon authenticity, formal originality, transcendence of conventions, idiosyncratic style, and new ways of comprehending experience. These great modernist works tend to be unsentimental, structurally innovative (if not superficially confusing), and rich in both unusual language and resonant symbols, so that understanding their basic nature generally requires continual rereading. More specifically, the literature establishing the modernist tradition, ran from Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé through Guillaume Apollinaire and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in poetry; in fiction from Gustave Flaubert through Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust to James Joyce and William Faulkner; and in drama from August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov through Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. No sophisticated reader could doubt that revolutionary transformations had taken place and that the more radical forms of new literature remained impenetrable before some of the old critical approaches and their exponents.

The same superficial obstacles of modernist writing, so often dismissed by “general readers,” implicitly posed a collective problem to the developing intelligence of modern criticism, which had indeed become more adept at clarifying what seems at first inscrutable. Although no major Anglo-American critical school acknowledged novelty in literature to the same degree that the Russian Formalists of 1915-30 did, British critics remaining particularly immune to the appeals of modernism, the problems posed by advanced contemporary work were courageously confronted by the younger poet-critics emerging in America after World War I—not only in the meaningful polemics of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams but particularly in the essays that Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur and others wrote on Pound, Eliot, and Proust. However, though the newer New Critics emphasized the close reading of individual writers or texts, no American produced successful analyses of the recent literary revolution that are as comprehensive and definitive as, say, Marcel Raymond’s spectacular De Baudelaire au Surrealism (1933); yet many telephone-books about modern writing appeared—full of insensitively ordered titles, names, dates and other obvious facts.

Indeed, not until the 1940’s, with another generation, did American critics display more general comprehension of the great changes in imaginative writing. For instance, the perspective found in young Randall Jarrell’s short but highly comprehensive analysis of the new poetry, “The End of the Line” (1942), simply did not exist in American criticism a few years before; and not until 1951, it seems, could Northrop Frye strike this practically priceless insight about new writing:

Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries, and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic of pictorial image at the other. The attempts to get as near to those boundaries as possible form the main body of what is called experimental writing.

Not until the 1940’s could North Americans manage to write not only some of the great studies of literary modernism, but also major books solely about Joyce, Pound, or the other exemplars of the new literature.

One of the major breakthroughs in modernist understanding appeared as in Sewanee Review in 1945, as its author, Joseph Frank, was turning twenty-seven (and working in Washington, D. C. as a labor journalist); and the radical thesis announced in its title, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” remains definitive. The apparent “chaos” expressed by modernist fiction represents, in Frank’s analysis, an attempt to create an alternative form for the organization of prose—a discontinuous spatial form quite contrary to earlier literature in general and the linear sentence in particular. In writing of this kind, the reader is forced “to apprehend. . . spatially in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence,” for the essence of a work, both its form and its meaning, “strikes the reader’s sensibility with an instantaneous impact.” This insight, in Frank’s hands, becomes the key to defining spatial organizing principles not only in Eliot and Pound but also in such distinctly modernist prose as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (“a static situation, not a narrative”). It is also this spatial structure, fundamentally descended from lyric poetry, that enables Joyce’s work to generate so much literary space out of less than twenty-four hours of events. “As a result, the reader is forced to read Ulysses in exactly the same manner as he reads modern poetry, that is, by continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive inference, he can link them to their complements.” Frank’s essay also gave to subsequent critics the permission to “read” any discontinuous modern novel as though it were a poem—connecting symbols, references, and other resonant remarks into a unity that cuts across sequential space. Although Frank’s own later criticism has focused upon older, rather than newer problems, his conception of “spatial form” remains one of the truly great insights of modernist literary criticism.

Implicitly extending Frank’s crucial point was the great formal difference between modernist literature and previous writing, the most comprehensive and richly insightful discussions of those literary works marking the greatest difference appeared in L. Moholy-Nagy’s chapters on “literature” in his Vision in Motion (1947), which the Hungarian-American artist/author wrote in English in Chicago. First of all, this essay shrewdly defines the avant-garde traditions as we still know them—the repudiation of Victorian conventions in Whitman, Lautrémont, and Rimbaud; the isolation of linguistic essentials in Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein; and both simultaneity and inventive typography in Marinetti and El Lissitzky’s visual renderings of Mayakovsky; the new sense of “nonsense” in Dadaist writing, the visual poems of Morgenstern and the sound poems of Kurt Schwitters; the representational freedoms of the surrealists; and finally the last two novels of James Joyce, where Moholy-Nagy found the most successful realization of several modernist tendencies. (His omissions, it should be noted, include Proust, Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann—in sum, the half-hearted modernists.) It was Moholy-Nagy’s critical talent, here and elsewhere, to define a reasonable purpose and art-historical place for even the most untraditional artistic phenomena.

Not only did he repudiate the conservative position, often heard after the Second War, that literature was by its nature incapable of the modernist revolutions experienced by the other arts, but he rightly demonstrated that examples of literature could be as radically untraditional as new painting and new sculpture—“they actually dynamited convention.” By dealing with the most wayward phenomena, Moholy-Nagy made modernism’s unprecedented qualities more explicit; and it was his critical leap to discern that truly modernist writing would parallel the two great revolutions of high modernist art—intermedia, and kinesis. Thus, as one form of new poetry emulated visual art, so another approached the condition of music; and in the second respect, Moholy-Nagy’s unusually insightful, though brief, analyses of particular works demonstrate particular attention to their idiosyncratic representation of space and movement.

Acknowledging Kenneth Burke’s ideal of literature as “equipment for living,” Moholy-Nagy regarded the revolutions in form and content as emancipating contemporary sensibilities from the “bourgeois” conventions of the nineteenth-century—formal transformations in art contributing to parallel changes in society. In the new literature was embedded “the consciously absorbed or passively endured reality common to all people” living today. In short, it was typical of Moholy-Nagy’s critical genius to see, for instance, that in reading visual poetry (which became more abundant decades later), “One perceives the words with a combined sharpness of the eye and the ear,” or that the new poetry superceded “the one-dimensional linear form” of the old verse, or that “the dadaistic poem shows more freshness than the surrealist literature,” that “the peculiarity of Joyce’s language is its multiple meaning,” or that the writings of psychotics and children relate to the avant-garde aspiration for alternative syntax, or that modernist writing was not “incoherent” but marked by new kinds of coherence. Back in the middle forties, Moholy-Nagy’s sixty-eight pages defined nearly all the examples, details, insights and concepts there were to know about avant-garde writing.

The critical challenges posed by the modernist revolutions have scarcely all been answered, let alone approached; but future work will undoubtedly draw upon more specialized studies, such as Marshall McLuhan’s essays, belatedly collected in The Interior Landscape (1969), on the transformations in creative procedure separating modern poetry from Victorian and romantic; Harvey Gross’s sophisticated, empirical analysis of Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (1964), which shows how even the “freest” verse reveals rhythms different from mundane prose; or two books on new developments in the fictional portrayal of personality, Robert Humphrey’s highly insightful Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954) and Leon Edel’s more stylish The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950 (1955). A series of intelligent books, essays and anthologies by Eric Bentley, particularly The Playwright as Thinker (1946) and The Life of the Drama (1964), single-handedly defined and popularized modernist “dramatic writing” that was literate, relatively realistic, and intellectual, perhaps at the expense of an anti-realistic, non-literary performance-theater that has always had a stronger tradition in America. Leslie A. Fiedler’s definition of the “ideology” found in (rather than imposed upon) modernist literature, as elaborated in his essay “No! in Thunder” (1960), remains more persuasive than the alternatives offered by, say, Frederick J. Hoffman, Harry Slochower, and several French critics; for it is Fiedler’s perception that the most unifying purpose is the negation of established forms and platitudes in both life and literature. Indeed, precisely in their scrupulous repudiation of the status quo have the great modernists particularly offended the pious bourgeois reader.

So fruitful has the American critical enterprise been that some of the very best studies of avant-garde European literature should come from Americans, some of them refugees—not only Vision in Motion, but also Vladimir Markov’s Russian Futurism: A History (1968), at its publication the only extended publication on the most avant-garde Russian modernists; Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism (1955), also the sole book on a comparable group of Russian critics; Walter H. Sokel’s essay on the German expressionists, The Writer in Extremis (1959); and Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1958), on the origins of the avant-garde in pre-WWII France. Thus, too, it is indicative that the most profound criticism of modernist masterpieces written in English should come largely from Americans, illuminating not only the more difficult novels of William Faulkner and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, but also the most challenging (and culminating) of modernist works, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In fact, just as the most elaborate biography of Joyce was written by an American scholar, Richard Ellman, who also edited the most abundant selection of Joyce’s correspondence, so Wake studies have become an all-but-exclusively North American enterprise (perhaps because the obsessive eccentricity informing its creation seems more American in quality than English, or even Irish). The first piece of literature patently derived from the Wake was Thornton Wilder’s play, The Skin of Our Teeth (1945), and two younger American scholars, David Hayman and A. Walton Litz, have provided the most detailed documentation of the masterwork’s composition. Indeed, it is not unfair to judge that humility before the Wake is probably the surest index of belief in literary modernism; and not unlike the Bible, the Wake can inspire a limitless multitude of related interpretations that are “right” at least in part.

The preliminary sections of Work in Progress, as Finnegans Wake was originally entitled, appeared in transition, a little magazine edited in Paris by expatriate Americans. Edmund Wilson courageously discussed these sections in his Axel’s Castle (1930), correctly identifying the primary Wakean technique as embroidered multiple symbolism. (However, he misled subsequent Wake criticism by setting the book in “the single night’s sleep of a single character” and attributing all inexplicable passages to “the language of [Earwicker’s] dream,” but not only is the narrative’s point of view more omniscient than individual, but subsequent criticism has demonstrated that almost everything in the book is more allusive, specific, coherent and consistent than dreams.) Wilson, typically, was among the first reviewers of the finished book, published in 1939; and his two essays published in The New Republic that summer were subsequently combined as “The Dream of H.C. Earwicker” and incorporated into The Wound and the Bow (1941). With characteristic doggedness, Wilson defined reasonable purposes behind superficial difficulties, if not the rather simple themes embedded in complex means, noticing, for instance, the influence of Vico’s philosophy of historical recurrence (across time and space), the symbolist technique of regarding Dublin as a microcosm of the world, and the richness of references to nearly all dimensions of experience. However, his attempt to trace a single narrative line leads Wilson to miss the book’s larger, multiple architecture, while the identification of earlier literary “sources” ultimately illuminates little in such an inclusively allusive book. The American critics John Peale Bishop and Harry Levin also wrote extended reviews soon after publication, the latter incorporating his remarks into the first critical monograph ever published on Joyce (1941). The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), an essential exegesis by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, recognized the multiple metaphors for the familial theme of “mutually supplementary antagonisms” and the repeated patterns of cyclical history, especially in their awesomely close analysis of the Wake’s opening pages; but most of their essay follows Wilson in attributing surface confusion to “dream” (that rationalization also explaining nothing of critical use) and in reducing the multiple plot to a single line of events, their “method” implicitly transforming the revolutionary book into an all-too-familiar narrative.

With its circular narrative structure, whose end flows into its beginning, and innumerable repetitions of similar events, the Wake exemplifies Joseph Frank’s principle of spatial form, and among the first critics to take the necessary leap in approaching the Wake’s unprecedented nature was L. Moholy-Nagy in several pages of Vision in Motion. He rightly avoided any attempt at plot summary for an encompassing formal description in which, as Joseph Frank put it, “the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity”—as a work of visual art, say, is customarily understood. Acknowledging the organic principle that every part epitomizes the whole, Moholy-Nagy notes, for example, “There is no ‘up’ and ‘down,’ no ‘forward’ or no ‘backward,’ no sequence of direction, position, time, space.” Instead of attributing the book’s unprecedented prose to processes of dreaming, he recognizes that the Wake’s “language is composed of all languages and all the contemporary slangs in order to make understandable the present, past, and future travail of the world in its variegated and yet eternal recurrence.” Thus, a multiple and encompassing language is the most appropriate medium for an equally multiple and encompassing history of human life. In addition to reprinting Leslie Lewis’s valuable explanatory chart, where an overlapping grid of circles and radii accurately depict the book’s many-leveled parallels, Moholy-Nagy acutely defines the Wake’s unity-within-multiplicity as “very similar to the technique of the cubist painter who superimposed and interpenetrated elevation, ground-plan, and cross-section into a space-time coherence.” It was by taking off from Moholy-Nagy’s kind of insights and perspective that subsequent Wake criticism became more profound and substantial—particularly Bernard Benstock’s Joyce-Again’s Wake (1965), miscellaneous remarks in the books and essays of Marshall McLuhan, and the detailed “reader’s guides” of William York Tindall.

The aim of every new criticism is, of course, the greater understanding of literature, and as the best New Criticism explicated the details and esthetic organization of an individual work far more insightfully than before, so the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye and the symbolic structuralism of Kenneth Burke concentrated upon identifying the larger forms present in a literary work, or a body of writing. This success, it should be noted, represented not just the triumph of a particular method but also the critical intelligence of its exponents; for as Spitzer judged, “Any method that is able to explain more features extant in a work of art must be held more correct.” Though inclined at times to outrageous reductionism, due in part to the nature of their classifying purposes and the limited collection of counters in Frye’s scheme, this structural criticism registered the most profound new understanding of the literary enterprise; and particularly in dealing with classic texts, as noted before, was Frye himself able to illuminate what had previously gone unnoticed, justifying his claim that “criticism in the sense used here has hardly begun.” No respected criticism in the United States, unlike in Europe or the Soviet Union, broaches the arrogance of prescribing what and/or how writers should write; and it is indicative that in no major school of contemporary American criticism do value-judgments play an important role.

The best North American critics remain more concrete and empirical than the highly ideological and abstract criticism of the most famous Europeans. Indicatively, the unprecedented empiricism of computer-assisted textual analysis has been a largely American effort, although the results so far of this potentially fertile approach have been limited to two kinds of problems—statistically verifying critical hunches about stylistic predilections in large amounts of evidence (rather than initiating new hypotheses); and settling long-standing questions of attribution, such as the real authorship of a disputed text. Aspirations to concreteness should also presuppose that kind of humility before the difficult text that is perhaps particularly necessary for criticism of modernist literature. Indeed, it is paradoxical that despite the brilliance of American criticism in understanding the new literature, the book reviewers in newspapers and Sunday supplements, not to speak of those in the liberal weeklies too, are still inclined to scrutinize new novels, say, as though the modernist revolution never occurred. Nonetheless, the achievement of the American critical enterprise made the best critics not only eager to confront the continuing challenges of modernism, but also able to reexamine the currently reigning methods and force alternative approaches. The century remains, in Frye’s phrase, “an age of great self-consciousness about critical methods.”

* * *

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1953.

———. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. N.Y.: Meridian, 1959.

Benstock, Bernard. Joyce-Again’s Wake. Seattle: Univ. of Washington, 1965.

Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1939.

———. Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.

Burke, Kenneth. Counterstatement. Third ed. Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1968 (1931).

———. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ., 1941.

———. A Grammar of Motives. N.Y.: Prentice-Hall, 1945.

———. A Rhetoric of Motives. N.Y.: Prentice-Hall, 1950.

———. A Rhetoric of Religion. Boston: Beacon, 1961.

———. Literature as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1966.

Campbell, Joseph. A Hero of a Thousand Faces. N.Y.: Bollingen, 1949.

———, and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1944.

Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism. Second, revised ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1965 (1955).

Dembo, L.S., ed. Criticism. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1968.

Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1949.

———. The Human Image in Dramatic Literature. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

Fiedler, Leslie A. “Archetype and Signature” (1952), in No! in Thunder. Boston: Beacon, 1960.

Fletcher, Angus. Allegory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ., 1964.

Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), in The Widening Grye. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ., 1963.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1947.

———. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1957.

———. T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963.

———. Fables of Identity. N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1963.

———. A Natural Perspective. N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1965.

———. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1963

———. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1964.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision. N.Y.: Knopf, 1948.

———. The Tangled Bank. N.Y.: Atheneum, 1961.

———, ed. The Critical Performance. N.Y.: Vintage, 1956.

Leary, Lewis, ed. Contemporary Literary Scholarship. N.Y.: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1958.

Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. Boston: Beacon, 1957.

Markov, Vladimir. Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1966.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Interior Landscape. Ed. by Eugene McNamara. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.

Moholy-Nagy, L. Vision in Motion. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946.

Rueckert, William. H. Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1963.

———, ed. Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1968.

Sokel, Walter. The Writer in Extremis. Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1959.

Spitzer, Leo. Linguistics and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1948.

———. Essays on English and American Literature. Ed. by Anna Hatcher. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1962.

Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow, 1969.

Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. N.Y.: Noonday, 1959.

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism. Four volumes. New Haven: Yale Univ., 1955, 1965.

———-. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale Univ., 1963.

———, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials. N.Y.: Farrar, 1950.

———. With the Bit Between My Teeth. N.Y.: Farrar, 1965.

Wimsatt, William K., Jr. The Verbal Icon. Lexington; Univ. of Kentucky, 1954.

———, and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. N.Y.: Knopf, 1957.