New Criticism and Authors

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Mon Mar 8 11:34:04 PST 1999



> 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,

Give me a break. All I did was a B.A. in English lit. I'm not posing as an authority on it, only on what I remember of it.


> 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.

I recognized that, I think. I was reacting more to your imputations of disapproval of WG on my part. I wasn't thinking well or unwell of WG in reacting to the song. I listen to enough of that stuff myself.


> 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.

That isn't what Dick Poirier and Tom Edwards told me. Maybe I was just getting new-critic-lite. Our only prof who introduced biographical or 'extraneous' (e.g., other texts) material was Marius Bewley. Everything else was talking about one poem/novel/whatever at a time.


> 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.

One reason I drifted away from lit was because I believed, in my own muddled undergraduate Marxist way, more or less the same thing.

mbs



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