Max Sawicky wrote:
> 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.
This pedagogical practice has deeper roots than any given critical theory -- in fact in so far as critical theories do develop to rationalize the practice, it is the cause and they are the effects. No one on pen-l responded to my lengthy post there arguing that the most acute intellectual problem of the last 300 years was deciding what important books *not* to read. But I was quite serious, and I have in fact been wrestling with this topic for almost a quarter of a century.
There are just too many crucially important (even great) books for one person to read, even if that one person is a professional scholar with a small teaching load. Milton and Pope both recognized this crisis as it was developing, but could only image it roughly in their works.
The huge advantage of the new criticism, of chicago aristotelianism, of structuralism, of deconstruction, of reader response theory, and of almost every other form of criticism invented in the 20th century is that they all avoid the problem of actually selecting and defending a canon that *every* intelligent person must read. Such a canon existed in every major (and I suppose minor) culture from early (pre- literate) times up through the 17th century and has not existed since.
Besides the obvious sources -- printing, increase in literacy, increase in population (increasing the pool of potential good authors) -- there has been the additional opening up of innumerable additional genres of writing. The scholar of the middle ages or the (sometimes almost actual) cultured gentleman of the early Renaissance could choose his reading from a relatively narrow selection of genres, but in the 17th c. you had an explosion of travel writing, political writing, economic writing, theology aimed at other than theologians, drama, natural philosophy, new kinds of philosophy aimed at a general audience, social essays (e.g., Addison, Steele, Johnson), the novel, letters, history (how many on this list, I wonder, have read Gibbon?), etc.
This had become obviously impossible by the time Pope wrote the Dunciad, and Milton had obviously sensed it when he trashed Greek literature in the temptation of Athens (there are complexities here, but *one* of the readings of that episode should be this one). But of course the discrepancy between what an "educated man/ woman" had to know and what it was possible to know has increased steadily ever since.
In so far as the new criticism did shift to the study of "poems," emphasizing the mode of reading of individual works, it offered a sort of exit from this intolerable clutter of excellence.
And please don't confuse what I'm talking about here with the much chattered about "information overload" of the present. I am not talking about information or even knowledge, I am talking about an intolerable overload of wisdom, insight, and beauty.
(There is a marxist dodge here which just won't do -- the hauling out of the concept of cultural decadence, and a subsequent easy assumption that "bourgeois culture" is now decadent and worthless. True, it is vicious, but it is not decadent. That is a concept applicable only to cultures grounded in tributary modes of production.)
How many on this list have read Burton's *Anatomy of Melancholy*? Except for the professional economists, how many have read Adam Smith? How many have read Elizabeth Barret Browning's fine epic, *Aurora Leigh*, or her magnificant and vitriolic polemic, "A Curse for a Nation" (the nation being the U.S., but she writes a prologue doubting the right of a citizen of such a vile nation as England of cursing even the U.S.).
To descend from the great to the merely crucial, how many have read
Thomas Laqueur, *Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud*
Jerome G. Miller, *Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System*
Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg, *Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars*
The New Critics and the Deconstructionists have/had their rationale, and
it was essentially a rationale to confront (however inadequately) a true
cultural crisis, one growing for over 300 years..
Carrol