A Short History of Practical Criticism

T HAT AT PRESENT preoccupies scholars and students in the / literary humanities is clear: the lack of interaction between v v their profession and the mainstream of society. Though this is a recurrent problem, I. A. Richards had thought to find a secure place for literary studies by denying the existence of a phantom aesthetic state and basing the critic's work on two pillars. two pillars upon which a theory of must rest are an account of value and an account of communication.1 Having established these principles, an eminently criticism became possible; the book Practical Criticism appeared some fifty years ago, in 1929; and the term, in its modesty and common sense, helped to assure the success of literary techniques of close reading. Although in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) this effort at close and discriminating reading already showed a quasi-theological strain, and signaled Trouble Ahead for those who wished to bound the infinite of interpretive studies, certain developments of the 1930s led to an institutionalization of the practical approach to literature, which came to be known as the New Criticism. First, the political and economic unrest of that time made it important to protect the study of art from imperious demands of an ideological nature, emanating from politics, but also from positive philosophy and science; then, a move toward mass education, speeding up significantly after World War II, meant that teachers could not rely as much on the patience or privileged background of their students. Teachers had to educate as well as initiate; and new textbooks were developed to give students more quickly than proved possible a modest mastery of the cultural goods. The expansion of literary studies within an academic framework meant that English took its place beside History and the Moral Sciences as a School to train the judgment. Practical Criticism was subtitled A Study of Literary Judgment, and literary judgment was deemed to be the best or most liberal preparation for other kinds of judgment in

Art · Criticism · Literature · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Publishing and Scholarly Communication · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• Who's afraid of… Roland Barthes

  Martin G Grisel•The European Legacy•1996

  Add to list