The Tory Anarchist

I haven’t read enough of the New Critics to have a well-formed opinion on them. I’m skeptical of the rote denunciation of more recent trends in literary studies in this Wall Street Journal piece, however — not because the new trends aren’t awful, but because such “conservative” moaning about liberal or radical or leftist literary criticism is usually a cover for philistinism of the right. I don’t know whether that’s the case here. In any event, this article does good by bringing attention to a new anthology of the New Critics, and I like this passage:

The New Critics … thought that the study of literature — especially poetry — was a valuable activity because, as Allen Tate put it, “the full language of the human situation can be the vehicle of truth.” In his lively foreword in “Praising the New,” William Logan notes that the most important objection to contemporary theorizing may be that, in the end, it offers “a very dull way to look at poetry.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Culture. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.