Content area
Full Text
New Criticism & Contemporary Theory The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities. William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, eds. New York London: Garland. 1995. xx + 432 pp. $68.00
NEW CRITICISM'S PUBLIC IMAGE has gone through several stages, all of them at the center of an evolving debate over how to read. It meant first a "literary-critical" (and thus perhaps dilettantish) rebellion against solid historical scholarship, and subsequently an entrenched method attacked from diverse cultural perspectives for its literary and political conservativism. In the last decade, New Criticism has been seen as a necessary but still-embarrassing evil: an historical phenomenon whose paradigm of close reading made possible, and still permeates, a range of otherwise dissimilar modes of American criticism including deconstruction, response criticism, and New Historicism. It was Paul de Man, after all, who remarked that in America (as opposed to France), New Criticism prepared the ground for deconstruction.
Such is the evolution illustrated and examined by this collection, which is organized as a sequence of early New Critical documents, retrospective essays from the seventies and eighties, and speculative analyses written especially for this volume. It is intended to be, and is, a useful overview: in addition to nineteen essays and an interview, it offers a short annotated bibliography that incorporates capsule biographies of the included New Critics. Readers may remember the 1989 MLA special session that gave the impetus for this publication; Cleanth Brooks was the panel respondent, and he is respectfully interviewed here by co-editor William Spurlin at the end of the essays. The volume itself joins eight others, all published during 1994-1995, in the new series of Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture, edited by WiUiam Cain.
William Spurlin's succinct and informative introduction provides the necessary background for a book that may well make a good classroom text for seminars in literary theory. Recalling the origins of New Criticism, and distinguishing between New Critical theory and its widespread institutional practice, Spurlin proposes neither to defend nor reject the movement but rather to examine its survival in current theories that repudiate it.
Each section contains a mix of position papers and retrospective analyses. Part I, "New Critical Documents," collects four early essays by John Crowe Ransom, Allen...