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Liberal Measures: Prolegomenon to a Poetics of English Modernism

Vincent Sherry

in The Great War and the Language of Modernism

This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results ... More

This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.Less

epilogue: A Memory for Modernism, the New Critical Constructions, and This Awful Truth of Pseudotruth

Vincent Sherry

in The Great War and the Language of Modernism

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism ... More

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.Less

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1925), and Edith Rickert, Scientific Analysis of Style (1926)

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

in The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

Disciplinary historians have seen I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) as foundational for modern pedagogy in English. This chapter turns instead to Richards’s ... More

Disciplinary historians have seen I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) as foundational for modern pedagogy in English. This chapter turns instead to Richards’s teaching notebooks for the Practical Criticism courses he taught at the University of Cambridge to show how, in the classroom, Richards sought to enlist his students as fellow researchers rather than study subjects. Edith Rickert, another 1920s pedagogical experimenter, enlisted the students in her University of Chicago course Scientific Analysis of Style to help her invent the “new methods for the study of literature” that would appear in her 1927 book of that title. Both Rickert and Richards demanded from students not polished readings of literary works, but their cooperation in the process of gathering and organizing bits of data about the formal properties of texts and the interpretive decisions of readers. Like other classroom experimenters and organizers of literary laboratories in the 1920s, Richards and Rickert believed that their new methods would elevate the discernment of individual students, but only in the context of what Richards called “co-operative inquiry.” They believed that collective literary study was both a valuable social activity itself and an important tool for elevating individual judgment.Less

One of Us: Eliot, Auden, and Four Quartets

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes ... More

Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes paradoxes like these redundant, and puts poetic language back into the world where sense has to be made, truths (like lies) can be told, and clarity of meaning is possible. Auden has come to be celebrated as an embodied paradox: he was the greatest poet, and the most sceptical about poetry; he was the most celebrated English poet, and the most misunderstood. From the mid-century onwards, British literary criticism and poetry were much taken up with Eliot. This chapter examines Eliot's engagement with I. A. Richards, his poem Four Quartets, and Tom Paulin's misreading of Eliot.Less

Afterword

Neil Rhodes

in Shakespeare and the Origins of English

This brief concluding chapter looks at Cambridge English in the 20th century and points out that its founding father, I. A. Richards, referred to Kames’s ‘great and novel venture’ in his lectures on ... More

This brief concluding chapter looks at Cambridge English in the 20th century and points out that its founding father, I. A. Richards, referred to Kames’s ‘great and novel venture’ in his lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’. It considers Raymond Williams’s valedictory Cambridge lectures, which focus on the importance of expression in English studies and seek in effect to reinstate rhetoric, though with more social and political contextualisation. It is argued that rhetoric not only represents the origins of English, but also offers a future for English through a recombining of the active, performative arts of writing and speaking with the more passive, analytical, and interpretative arts of reading.Less

Institutionalising English Criticism: Men of Letters, Modernism, Tradition and Theory

Gary Day

in Literary Criticism: A New History

This chapter argues that an English degree is closely tied to market and management philosophies. The continuity between the concepts of criticism and capitalist economics re-established that ... More

This chapter argues that an English degree is closely tied to market and management philosophies. The continuity between the concepts of criticism and capitalist economics re-established that connection, and challenges the conventional view that the values of literature stand opposed to those of commerce. Criticism is speaking or writing about literature, but its idiom, tone, priorities, and direction connect with wider ideas about the individual and society. I. A. Richards pioneered the use of practical criticism. Based on what he said, it is clear that the difference between good and bad art is that the former arouses, organises, and fulfils many more impulses than the latter. F. R. Leavis and Frederic Winslow Taylor used the concept of the part and the whole to understand the literary work and the factory organisation, respectively. Blog, self-publishing, and a potentially worldwide audience democratises the acts of writing and commentary.Less

‘Responsible Propagandists’: I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and Cambridge Experiment

Benjamin Kohlmann

in Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s

The discussion begins by revisiting the Richards-Eliot debate over the relationship between poetry and ‘belief’. This notorious debate helped to inscribe two mutually conflicting critical languages ... More

The discussion begins by revisiting the Richards-Eliot debate over the relationship between poetry and ‘belief’. This notorious debate helped to inscribe two mutually conflicting critical languages which cohabit incongruously in thirties literary and critical discourse. The controversy between Richards and Eliot registered belief as a passive presence in poetry which complicates the idea of a text-centred critical hermeneutics (this is the ‘weak’ version of the belief-problem), but it also reflected on the possibilities of advertising and propagating belief, whether religious or political, by artistic means (the ‘strong’ version). Both parts of the debate rose to prominence in the 1930s, when they became central to the new literary decade’s self-definitions. The chapter traces the development which these literary-critical arguments played in the incipient critical debates of the 1930s by focussing on the Cambridge little magazine Experiment.Less

Empathy: Counting Words with Vernon Lee and I. A. Richards

Benjamin Morgan

in The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature

This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational ... More

This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational in professional literary study. Analyzing the literary critic Vernon Lee’s unusual synthesis of German physiological aesthetics, British aestheticism, and American quantitative textual analysis, the chapter shows how the concept of empathy became at once quantitative and embodied in Lee’s literary theory. In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee and her lover, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, developed strategies for empirical introspective analysis that were meant to demonstrate the effects of paintings and sculpture on the body. As Lee learned about the stylometric analysis of literature carried out in the United States, she expanded her empirical approach to include counting words and issuing surveys. Although this intersection of quantitative and affective approaches was largely disregarded by I.A. Richards and his progeny, it represents a vital prehistory of current approaches to the quantitative and empirical analysis of culture.Less

Night of the Living Dead: Legal Realist Anticonceptualism

in Legal Realism Regained: Saving Realism from Critical Acclaim

This chapter focuses on the contemporary sources of realist anticonceptualism and how these were put in realist legal theory. It discusses the linguistic theory of Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards, ... More

This chapter focuses on the contemporary sources of realist anticonceptualism and how these were put in realist legal theory. It discusses the linguistic theory of Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards, Oliver Wendell Holmes's strategy for linguistic clarification, and John Dewey's pragmatic view of language and the problem of imprecise legal terminology.Less

. Close Reading: Marshall McLuhan, from Modernism to Media Studies

Jessica Pressman

in Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media

This chapter introduces the father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, as a modernist New Critic and argues for the understanding of how close reading serves his foundational writing. McLuhan studied ... More

This chapter introduces the father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, as a modernist New Critic and argues for the understanding of how close reading serves his foundational writing. McLuhan studied at Cambridge under such eminent New Critics as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. McLuhan adapted the New Critical practice of close reading and applied it to objects not traditionally considered literary. He built media studies from literary studies. Taking seriously McLuhan’s training in literature as well as his writerly prose, this chapter claims that close reading is crucial to understanding not only McLuhan’s theories of media but also the larger field of media studies that grew out of them.Less

Literary Criticism's Failure

Simon During

in Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations

This chapter gives an account of the antidemocratic and anticapitalist origins of modern literary criticism. It focuses on T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis arguing that modern techniques of ... More

This chapter gives an account of the antidemocratic and anticapitalist origins of modern literary criticism. It focuses on T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis arguing that modern techniques of close reading emerged in their work and teaching in the 1920s as an effort to recapture and maintain regimes of experience that had been destroyed by enlightened democratic capitalism. It traces how the original practice and spirit of modern literary criticism was gradually transformed and then forgotten, and makes an elegiac case for its continuing relevance.Less

Modernist Close Reading

Max Saunders

in Modernism and Close Reading

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. ... More

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itselfLess

Do They Believe in Magic? The Word as Myth, Name, and Art: (C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Frege, George Orwell, Bakhtin, Saussure)

Ken Hirschkop

in Linguistic Turns, 1890-1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory

Chapter 6 is devoted to writers hostile to the mythical element of language, who believe that myth must be defeated and who have a strategy for defeating it. The strategies are varied: Ogden and ... More

Chapter 6 is devoted to writers hostile to the mythical element of language, who believe that myth must be defeated and who have a strategy for defeating it. The strategies are varied: Ogden and Richards turn to science, Frege to logic, Orwell to a particular kind of prose, Bakhtin to the novel, and Saussure to language itself. Antipathy to myth and word magic is sometimes framed in explicit political terms (in Ogden and Richards, Orwell, and Bakhtin) and sometimes not. The claim in this chapter is that myth figures as a tendency of ‘language as such’ that must be vigilantly monitored and countered with alternative forms of discourse; lurking within the fear of myth is nervousness about the demagoguery within popular democratic politics.Less

Word Bridges

Thomas Harrison

in Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account

If metaphor is understood etymologically as a “carrying from here to there,” then language itself is an irreducibly metaphorical operation. Nietzsche, Calvino, and Paul Valéry express skepticism ... More

If metaphor is understood etymologically as a “carrying from here to there,” then language itself is an irreducibly metaphorical operation. Nietzsche, Calvino, and Paul Valéry express skepticism toward these bridging operations of words, confessing that linguistic significance is more figural than literal, more poetic than prosaic in nature. Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida positively affirm that poeisis is the foundation of meaning tout court. The full reach of this linguistic metaphoricity is examined next, from everyday grammar to the two-in-one discourse of I. A. Richards and of parables, stories, and novels, making way for an exegesis of Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive of Metaphor,” a poem praising the cognition of “half colors” and “quarter-things,” or of bridging ambivalence and ambiguity. The chapter concludes by examining Hart Crane’s extraordinary applications of metaphor in the tenuous, far-reaching poetics of his epic poem The Bridge (1930).Less