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AFTER AND BEYOND 'NEW CRITICISM'

Joseph Buttigieg, ed. Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Cross-currents in Postmodern Critical Theory. Notre Dame: U Notre Dame P, 1987. 284 pp. $28.95 cloth. Ralph Cohen, ed. The Future of Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1989. 445 pp. $59.50 cloth; $19.95 paper. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, eds. Literary Theory Today. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. 249 pp. $44.95 cloth; $13.95 paper. Joseph Gibaldi, ed. Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. 2nd ed. New York: MLA, 1992. 362 pp. $35.00 cloth; $15.00 paper. Jeremy Hawthorn, ed. Criticism and Critical Theory. London: Arnold, 1984. 146 pp. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 375 pp. $43.50 cloth; $13.95 paper. Victor Kramer, ed. American Critics at Work: Examinations of Contemporary Literary Theories. Troy: Whitston, 1984. 447 pp. $30.00 cloth. Martin Kreiswirth and Mark Cheetham, eds. Theory between the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/Politics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990. 257 pp. $34.50 cloth. Richard Machinand Christopher Norris, eds. Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 406 pp. $54.50 cloth. Charles Moran and Elizabeth Penfield, eds. Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature. Urbana: NCTE, 1990. 237 pp. $16.95 paper. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. London, New York: Edward Arnold/Hodder & Stoughton, 1989. 291 pp. $49.50 cloth; $15.95 paper. Dennis Walder, ed. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP/Open University, 1990. 386 pp. $69.00 cloth; $14.95 paper.



These collections of criticism published during the late 1980s and the early 1990s are of two kinds (though two are mixed): representative essays, or readers (Hawthorn, Hosek and Parker, Kreiswirth and Cheetham, Machin and Norris, Rice and Waugh, and Walder) and surveys of diverse theories (Buttigieg, Cohen, Collier and Geyer-Ryan, Gibaldi, Kramer, and Moran and Pen-field). An attitude shared by perhaps all of the anthologists is a toleration of "many [critical] spheres which are in motion, all of which must be recognized as of valu . . . . All of these approaches, using inherited traditions or devising new ones, collectively enrich our critical procedure" (Kramer 2).

But some of the anthologists and many of the contributors are engaged in battle against one or more theory, and particularly--continuing a decades-long antagonism--against the "New Criticism," with its valorizing of texts as integrative constructs of dense linguistic texture rather than, say, as instruments of social change or more ethical readers. Hosek and Parker state in their first paragraph that the "New Critical" formalism beginning with I. A. Richards and increasingly influential into the 1960s inadequately serves the critical-enterprise. Their book introduces "the varieties of criticism and theory which have transformed literary interpretation in recent years--structuralist and poststructuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response," many of which have arisen "in opposition to" New Criticism, and they apply these theories to the analysis of poetic texts, "New Criticism's chosen ground" (7).

For those of us teaching in the United States especially, there are three ironies in this attitude. First, that New Critical formalism remains a dominant mode for critical writing in both the public schools and in colleges, despite declarations of its demise. Second, that the period of the supposed decline of New Critical formalism under the pressure of psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, reader-response, mythic, and other varieties of theory was in many ways a time of resurgent formalism following the alliance in the 1960s of linguists and literary critics in the creation of linguistic stylistics, now called simply stylistics (see such journals as Style and Language and Style), and the rise of structuralist concentration upon such textual, linguistic devices as binary opposition and metaphor/metonymy. And finally, that surely not one of these anthologists nor any of their contributors depreciate knowledge of the devices of language in literature, of the necessity of understanding the complex functions of point of view, tropes, and all of the thousands of techniques of communication in language. Rather, they assume this skill and argue, as my title suggests, that we must augment close reading of individual texts with an equally complex traditional, interactive, or radical hermeneutics (the art of interpretation). So instead of chasing a variety of issues in this review, I will focus on the attitude of each anthology toward the New Criticism, beginning with the collections of representative essays.

But first, what do I mean by New Criticism, since such a rich criticism, represented by so many brilliant critics, has naturally been characterized variously? The summaries by Shirley Staton in Literary Theories in Praxis and J. N. Patnaik in The Aesthetics of the New Criticism complement each other. Staton focuses upon five principles: 1) a work of art is an independent linguistic object susceptible to scientific (i.e., systematic) study; 2) it can be studied systematically because it is composed of language and language is rule (law) bound (by syntax, figurative language, etc.); 3) it is successful as art when it is unified, when all parts cohere; 4) because form (all the devices of language from point of view to grammar) and content are inseparable, meaning is therefore in the form; 5) therefore neither the social and historical conditions of the writer's life and writing, nor the author's intention, nor the reader's response is essential to a proper understanding (12-13).

Patnaik also lists five major tenets of New Criticism. First, it opposes the wholes of works of art to the analytical mode of science and technology, but it uses scientific terms and would give the study of art the legitimacy of science by a thoroughness and precision in describing artistic unities. Second, the work of art is ontological; it is unique and independent, a created microcosm, and its meaning depends upon knowing the relationships of the words in the whole. Third, the work of art is therefore timeless, because autonomous wholes are beyond space and time. Fourth, biographical information is irrelevant in art because a work of art shows what the writer was trying to do, and if it fails, then evidence from the author's life does not save the poem as art; and all works of art are dramatic, are spoken by a persona, a person not the author. And fifth, works of art are for contemplation, not utilitarian action.


READERS
The anthology by Rice and Waugh illustrates the conventional collection: in part I a selection by Shklovsky to illustrate Russian Formalism, selections by Lodge and Barthes for structuralism, three for Marxism (Althusser, Balibar and Macherey, and Eagleton), two for reader theory (Iser, Jauss), and two for feminism (Showalter and the Marxist-Feminist Collective). This section "deals with the initial break with the orthodoxies of literary studies . . . its less radical questioning and undermining of the literary studies enterprise" (4). The selections of part II adopt "a more interrogative and disrupting perspective" labeled poststructuralism (4). "What characterizes contemporary theory," they declare, is "its heterogeneity" and "its unprecedented attack on the grounding assumptions of the Anglo-American critical tradition" that includes of course those of the New Criticism (1).

Mactin and Norris offer us analyses of "interpretative opportunism: the importance of the text lies primarily in the way that it is made to enter current theoretical debate" (18). The old New Critical guaranties of meaning--cohesion, unity, ontology, timelessness--are jettisoned and replaced by the potential of language and literariness. The praxis of literary theory has become a creative activity on the same par with the literary work itself.

The other collections of representative essays are as dismissive of the New Criticism. Hosek and Parker declare their collection

designed to serve as an introduction to the varieties of criticism and theory which have transformed literary interpretation in recent years--structuralist and poststructuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response. . . Many of the newer criticisms have arisen since, and in opposition to, New Criticism . . . The essays in this volume . . . introduce their assumptions and strategies to the reader on New Criticism's chosen ground, the analysis of poetic texts. . . . The book, therefore, seeks to bring the reader the best of two worlds--the close analysis of poetry which was the greatest achievement of New Criticism and the theoretical speculation of more recent criticism--in a way that makes the latter readily accessible.
The preposition in Walder's title resonates with the meaning of Literature in the Modern World, for the "unifying principle of the book" is the placing of modern English literature inside various "opposed or undermining critical perspectives"; that is, within the "radical questioning of the traditional literary 'canon' in terms of class, gender, and race," Walder's contributors think of literature as part of the cultural mediation of these perspectives (1). Thus instead of the insular model of English literature, Walder proposes a global one on the basis of equity of representation "of American, Irish, and Scottish writing, of 'New Writings' from the former colonial countries, and of European writing in translation"--Sorley Maclean, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Cora Kaplan, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Chinweizu (2). In short, Walder chooses writers who believe that meaning exists in "social and political terms" more than formal. These previously published essays are intended "for understanding the issues and debates likely to dominate discussion of literary studies in the 1990s" (4).

Kreiswirth and Cheetham's collection differs from the others by concentrating on contemporary theory, particularly the ideas of Paul de Man.

As many of the . . . essays show, theory's self-resistance is generated not only from inherent linguistic instabilities but from manifold dialogic maneuvers of destabilization--from movements away from the verbal and rhetoric to the visual, from radical shifts of investigational perspective, from the transgression of disciplinary boundaries; from the dialogic insertion of other voices, contexts, contingencies. . . . Such questions of theory's role, legitimacy, and authority are dealt with . . . in almost all the essays collected in this volume. (4)
I place this anthology among those containing representational essays with trepidation, because it is not easily categorized; rather than mirroring the broad range of perspectives of the other collections, a half-dozen represent mainly deconstructive perspectives; but some four of the essays are explicitly political (all implicitly). One, for example, explains how literature, theory, and politics (power) are related, how art links with value and social reform in a civilizing mission. These political perspectives include two feminist essays, one on theory's constructions of and prescriptions for femininity.

I will employ Hawthorn's anthology, the earliest under review; to illustrate more concretely the wide range of oppositions to the old "New Criticism." A chief argument linking many of the essays is that of context. As Robert Crosman declares in the opening essay, "Is there such a thing as misreading?"; "reading is a contextualizing procedure" (4), and interpretation is significantly regulated by "the majority, or by the dominant minority" (11). So John Corner in "Criticism as Sociology: Reading the Media" studies media back to "originating conditions and contexts" and forward to its "social influence" (29), studying media as they connect to cultural and social organization both in the production and the reception (reading, viewing) (34), which relates closely to Iain Wright's essay on "History, Hermeneutics, Deconstruction." Wright advocates an interactive hermeneutics that investigates the origins of artistic works and consideration of present uses (84).

This historical emphasis on the conditions of creating and reading texts is given particular emphasis by the three feminist essays: "'A Wreath Upon the Grave': The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Feminist Critical Theory," by Barbara Righey; "Feminism and Form in the Literary Adaptation: The French Lieutenant's Woman," by Terry Lovell; and "Blanche," by Maud Ellmann. And R. A. Sharpe stresses readers in "The Private Reader and the Listening Public," comparing readers to performing artists--actors, pianists--all interpreters of works. Readers perform a reading just as a pianist performs a concerto or an actor Hamlet.

The reconstructive attack on New Criticism is represented by Christopher Butler's "The Pleasures of the Experimental Text," where the case is made that such texts. (Sukenick, Barthelme, Barth, et al.) thwart the pleasure of the traditionally unified text by undercutting coherence. From I. A. Richards to Northrop Frye (and of course the tradition of classical unity continues today), convergence and cohesion prevailed, but because these new fiction experimenters perceive no reliable framework for belief, they undermine their structures, plots, and themes through radical irony and comedy: But deconstruction itself receives a strong assault from P. D. Juhl, who sees it and New Criticism as similarly repugnant in their rejection of the author. Deconstruction is "an extension of developments which began with New Criticism"; that is, a loosening of the "connection between meaning of a work and the author's intention" (71). And both emphasize the pleasure in a text, New Critics finding it in the centripetal coherence of the whole, while deconstructivists enjoy the centrifugal play of language.


SURVEYS
The transformation of collections of surveys in recent years is illuminated by comparison with earlier anthologies. For example, in the first edition (1982) of Modern Literary Theory edited by Ann Jefferson and David Robey, six chapters treated Russian formalism, linguistics, New Criticism, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theories. Their second edition (1987) added chapters on reading and interpretation (hermeneutics, phenomenology, reception theory) and on feminist theory.

The collection most resembling Jefferson and Robey's by offering a definite collection of surveys is Gibaldi's, published by the MLA. Here are fifteen essays on linguistics, historical scholarship, literary theory, feminist and gender studies, ethnic and minority studies, cultural studies, and so on. The essays discuss "the nature, value, philosophy, and underlying assumptions of their subjects; outline the history of relevant scholarship; survey major issues and approaches of the past, present, and foreseeable future" (Preface). Gibaldi's book, highly welcome during this time of ferment, is the only real collection of surveys of the six under review.

Kramer's anthology might be placed in either category, for it contains both survey and exemplary selections. For example, David Bleich discusses the debate or "negotiation" among Wayne Booth, Meyer Abrams, Rene Wellek, J. Hillis Miller, and others, while Norman Holland offers a "transaction" of a poem. We might treat this anthology of surveys first for another reason--that, except for Gibaldi's, it is more accepting of past theories and practices than are the others. In his first section he contrasts three traditional critics--Murray Krieger, Nathan Scott, Jr., and Gerald Graff--to four supporters of Derrida--Vincent Leitch, Joseph Riddel, William Spanos, and J. Hillis Miller. Krieger scrutinizes a poem as a determinate, knowable, special constructed object, and Kramer warns that the valuable insights of earlier critics, such as the New Critics Ransom and Brooks, might be dismissed as simplistic if not read. But this conciliatory and connecting attitude is much less urgent to him than his belief that interpreting literature "does not explain so much as it arrests our attention," that "one of the roles of the contemporary critic" in contrast to the New Critic "is not to rest assured in finding any definitive answer" (8). Part two contains several surveys--psychoanalysis, reader response, etc., while part three examines three critics--Jameson, Eliade, and Geertz, and the collection ends with an essay on autobiography.

Collier and Geyer-Ryan give us a triple content--some exemplary essays, some surveys, and some "problem" essays, in which particular issues within a particular theory are discussed. In fact, these editors emphasize the "spirit of critical and self-critical inquiry which has inspired this volume of original essays. . . . The contributors to this book show how important, and exhilarating, it is for them to call into question the bases of their own interpretative activity. Certainly, no one critical language can now claim hegemony" (7-8). An exemplary essay is by Sarah Kofman, who analyzes Freud's analysis of The Merchant of Venice "to deconstruct an over-simplified psychoanalytical symbolism" (6). Elaine Showalter surveys the developments and prospects of feminist criticism, and Stephen Greenblatt weighs the dialectical process involved in hermeneutics, when past meets present.

Cohen's collection (1989) offers twenty-two selections that emphasize theoretical progression and mutation. In his Introduction Cohen conceives of "four types of theory change": "I. Political Movements and the Revision of Literary Theory; II. Incorporating Deconstructive Practices, Abandoning Deconstructive Ends; III. Non-Literary Disciplines and the Extension of Literary Theory; IV. Seeking theing the Old, and the Pleasures of Theory Writing" (vii-xx). Under political movements Cohen includes feminist and black theorists (Catherine Stimpson, Elaine Showalter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), and the conflict model advocates of explicit definition of conflicting theories in writing and in the classroom (Gerald Graff, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Christopher Butler). The essays on deconstruction (by Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Jonathan Culler, and Martha Nussbaum) "describe deconstructive theory in decline" (xii), the practice of sophisticated reading retained by incorporation into other theories, while abandoning the extremities of linguistic and rhetorical analysis associated with de Man. Cohen's third category of perspectives in his anthology is how literary theory has "altered conceptions of disciplines from psychoanalysis to history, sociology, anthropology and art history" (Roy Schafer, Hayden White, Martha Nussbaum, Arthur Danto) (xiv). For Danto literary theory is "the paradigm of the human sciences" (xvii). Cohen's final type of theory downplays cultural contexts to emphasize literary theory as studies in their own right (Wolfgang Iser, Alastair Fowler, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Gregory Ulmer). To Iser literature and theory deal primarily with self-realization; Fowler proposes to reformulate theory in terms of genre. And the autobiographical, personal essays by Helene Cixous and Gregory Ulmer suggest a new way to compose theory. The New Critical formalism is conspicuously absent.

The collection by Moran and Penfield derived from the annual Summer Institute for Teachers of Literature to Undergraduates sponsored by the NCTE. According to these accounts, "The text is dethroned; New Criticism is not 'true' or 'false,' but is a culturally situated set of assumptions about the nature of texts, readers, and the transactions between the two. . . . Literature is no longer a simple, discrete entity. It is an aspect of a larger system, one that includes not only texts and readers but the cultures that produce both" (2). One contributor describes his move from a New Critical teaching method to a reader response and cultural practice. There are essays on poststructuralism (arguing for and against), reader response, canons (several), canon formation and theAfrican-American tradition, learning theory as the theory missing from theoretical discussion, feminism, and culture. The first group of essays developed from the lectures given by the guest experts; the second group are by teachers grappling with theories in the classroom.

Perhaps the most radical collection is indicated by its title: Criticism without Boundaries, edited by Buttigieg. The "critical task of criticism" entails "taking action against the erection of exclusionary disciplinary boundaries . . . militating against all institutionalized configurations of power. . . . Above all . . . its practitioners must work incessantly against all those barriers that diversely shield intellectuals . . . from the major social, cultural, political, economic, and moral struggles of their times" (20). So far this revolutionary program has failed to make significant inroads into the academic establishment despite lamentations to the contrary (Buttigieg devotes twelve pages to a refutation of "the authoritarian viciousness" of W. Jackson Bate's "The Crisis in English Studies" [5-17]). And this establishment includes "the New Critical old guard against whom much postmodern criticism has been specifically levelled" (6). For several decades the New Critics "enforced its dogma of the autonomy of the work of art" combined with "adherence to the values . . . of the mainstream theological tradition" (15). The New Critics "succeeded in putting into place the disciplinary machinery that would ensure the enforcement of conformity" (15-16). Instead of centripetal unity, the essays assembled by Buttigieg advocate "centrifugal heterogeneity," against the "power and privilege camouflaged by the rhetoric of scholarly discourse" (21).


CONCLUSION
Our New Critical precursors and mentors have been found lacking, yet indispensable to the new. If these anthologies reflect reality, the unified work of art as the supreme authority for literary success has received a mortal wound, yet its ghost lives palpably among competitive authorities. Likewise, successive emergent voices struggle to become dominant and themselves become the object of opposition. Thus, the poststructuralist subversion of the New Critical ontology by the celebration of a radical, "agonistic" freedom opposed to limits over interpretation (Newton 212) is now under attack from right and left.

For example, because they seek "to change existing social arrangements" (2), Zavarzadeh and Morton in Theory, (Post)Modernity, Opposition apply three frames (ethical, rhetorical, and political) in opposition to the dominant postmodern theory which denies such distinctions and claims the dissolution of the ethical in the political and the rhetorical. I suppose their desire for change toward a more ethical world refers to the global totalitarianism, militarism, wars, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, bigotry, commodification, impoverishment, family breakdown, hunger and malnutrition, global warming, overpopulation, growth leading to deforestation and species holocaust, and other inconveniences of the planet today. If political institutions and practices are to be transformed (and the world cries out the need), ethical distinctions must be maintained against the new authority of indeterminacy, they argue. As the new theories called for new postformalist reading, Zavarzadeh and Morton hail the new reader as "an interventionist" through theory as commitment for "social transformation" (4). Perhaps the widening openness of debate characterizing contemporary theory within the context of global human urgencies will lead to this. But there is little evidence in these dozen anthologies of such a hope.

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