https://antonpokrivcak.academia.edu/ Return to Text Anton Pokrivčák University of Trnava https://antonpokrivcak.academia.edu/

Objective To show, through the re-reading of some canonical formalist and New Critical criticism, that if literary studies wants to highlight literature´s unique, literary handling of reality and culture, it is necessary to start paying much more attention to the text, to the concept of literariness, and less to various ideological temptations.

To analyse the role of literature at the present time is not easy, since many would say that the “present time” is not a literary one. Indeed, the early 21st century is the era of media and technologies rather than words and ideas, of visual images rather than meaningful letters.

Traditional reading of literary works has to compete with films, videos, internet applications, and many other “distractors” which are fast, colourful and simple, not requiring any unusual thinking effort from the “customers”.

general debilitating effect of mass media machinery encounter with literary works important discussions and analyses

The twentieth century saw many approaches to literature But “the major clash in the practice of literary criticism (was) that between so-called formalist and so-called nonformalist (especially "political"~ modes of reading (Frank Lentricchia;Andrew DuBois. Close Reading: The Reader (Kindle Locations 15-16)

In many theoretical approaches literary scholars as if wanted to substitute its object of study, literature, for something else not only philosophy, psychology, sociology, political sciences, as closest disciplines from social and human sciences, but in extreme cases even the disciplines from natural sciences.

literature with psychology Marxist approach cultural studies diaspora criticism gender and transgender criticism chaos theory ecocriticism digital humanities

As if literary scholars needed other sciences and methodologies to discuss literary works This is what makes literary studies unique since the willing giving up of its own methodology of research in fact undermines its own right to exist at least to exist as an independent, self-conscious scholarly discipline.

the sole source of literature´s artistic effect is verbal nature of literature it has to be analysed, researched, through methods applicable first of all to the way how words create meaning, and only secondarily to how this meaning relates to the realm outside verbal confines.

René Wellek New Critics

René Wellek (1903-1995) “literary scholarship has its own valid methods which are not always those of the natural sciences but are nevertheless intellectual methods. Only a very narrow conception of truth can exclude the achievements of the humanities from the realm of knowledge.” (Theory of Literature, 5).

A work of art “imposes an order, an organization, a unity on its materials”, and art in general, “imposes some kind of framework which takes the statement of the work out of the world of reality” (Wellek, René. Theory of Literature).

Wellek´s last articles, with the names themselves showing the author´s opinion about new trends, e.g. The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (1982).

New Criticism – explanation of the origin of their „manifesto“ work – Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren) This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are: Paraphrase of logical and narrative content; Study of biographical and historical materials; Inspirational and didactic interpretation. Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends. And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest is in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination as a document.

Another basic work by New Critics - example of „close reading“

New Critics John Crowe Ransom (1888 – 1974) Allen Tate (1899 – 1979) Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975)

Summary New Critics and René Wellek show us that the essence of literature, its study, lies in the text, therefore it is necessary to return to it through reading it closely. „close reading“ is ,in fact, one of the valuable contributions of New Critics Although “reading and responding to what one reads is an ancient practice, of which there exists a library of examples ecclesiastical ecstatic, pedantic, dogmatic, incidental, and so on” (Lentricchia;Andrew DuBois, Kindle Location 27), as a term close reading “is associated in critical history with the New Criticism, a mode of Anglo-American scholarship that began between the World Wars

If literary scholars do not return to their main object of research, the text, they risk becoming „the laughingstock on [the] local campus these days“ (Andrew Debanco, quoted in “Theory is Dead – Like a Zombie”). Or they will simply „ruin the humanities“ (Leo Siegel).