Worringer among the Modernists

It is Professor Holdheim's intent to demonstrate that Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy establishes a polarity which, properly understood and carefully developed, sheds important light on the complex problems torturing us today. In order to make his point Professor Holdheim has, first of all, to extricate or retrieve Worringer's classic from the clutches of those who have misread and misinterpreted it to such an extent that the importance of the polarity it posits has been lost, or at least forgotten. My intention in this brief response is to widen the scope of the discussion. Rather than voice my agreement or disagreement with Professor Holdheim's assessment of Worringer, I wish to regard his paper as the appropriate occasion to direct attention to those literary critics who used (or misused) Worringer's work. Why did the Modernist movement, or more specifically New Criticism, turn to Worringer's text to find the ideas it needed to buttress its own arguments? The corollary question is, of course, were these critics justified in co-opting Worringer the way they did? Professor Holdheim's exposition indicates that they were not. I will not offer an alternative reply; I will simply complicate the issue

American and British Literature Analysis · History · Themes in Literature Analysis

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