Max Sawicky wrote:
> Before there was pomo, there was "New Criticism,"
> which is what they fed me at Rutgers. There were
> no authors. We did not go so far as to call things
> we read "texts" -- just poems etc. whose only life
> was in the words themselves.
Max, Max, now you are full of shit. I was trained under the co-author (Austen Warren) of the Bible of the New Criticism, Wellek and Warren, *Theory of Literature*, and my copies of Tate and Blackmur and Brooks and Brooks and Warren (Robert Penn), and Wimsatt are all worn to tatters. I recite them in my sleep. And my remarks on Guthrie were perfectly according to the New Critical Canons. Even Wimsatt, in his classic statement of the "Intentional Fallacy" makes it very clear that part of the meaning of words is their history and that this requires reference to (among other things) authors.
In the case of Guthrie, under any system of interpreting texts I know of from Dryden to Hillis Miller, the very words of the text, and thus the text itself, differ according to your prior categorization of Guthrie. Given your obvious categorization, all one would have to do to make the Divina Commedia an exercise in sentimentality would be to attach Guthrie's name to it.
Carrol