SLSL Intro "What Happened at Chicago"

Sun Nov 3 20:47:43 CST 2002

   "The conflict in those days was, like most
everything else, muted.  In its literary version it
shaped up as traditional vs. Beat fiction.  Although
far away, one of the theatres of action we kept
hearing about was at the University of Chicago.  There
was a 'Chicago School' of literary criticism, for
example, which had a lot of people's attention and
respect.  At the same time, there had been a shakeup
at the Chicago Review which resulted in the
Beat-oriented Big Table magazine.  'What happened at
Chicago' became shorthand for some unimaginable
subversive threat." (SL, "Intro," p. 7)

"like most everything else, muted"

"everything else" inc., say, a posthorn?  Hm ...

"'Chicago School' of literary criticism"

   In 1937, John Crowe Ransom claimed that if the
fledgling movement "for the erection of intelligent
standards of criticism" were to succeed, "the credit
would probably belong to Professor Ronald S. Crane, of
the University of Chicago, more than to any other man.
He is the first of the great professors to have
advocated it as a major policy for departments of
English. It is possible that he will have made some
important academic history" ....
   Chicago criticism can be said to begin in 1935 with
"History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature"
.. the article in which Crane ... rejects the
privileged position hitherto given to history in the
study of literature and transfers it to criticism
(explication and theory).... 
   By 1952 it was clear that while Crane and his
colleagues continued to share with Ransom and the
other New Critics a belief in the centrality of
textual analysis in literary study, they had
significant disagreements about the best way to
perform that analysis based on differing theories of
literature and literary language....
   Ransom was probably right to attribute the failure
of the Chicago critics to win wide support to their
Aristotelian "hand book." ... however ... Aristotle's
analysis of literary texts was less important than his
general method of inquiry. What Aristotle offered them
was ... "a method similar to that of science" .... 
   Chicago critics focused on critical methods for the
study of literature .... Their efforts shared a desire
to introduce more rigor and precision into critical
discourse. Olson's observation that "criticism in our
time is a sort of Tower of Babel" is almost
commonplace in twentieth-century criticism. What
follows for him is not commonplace: "Moreover, it is
not merely a linguistic but also a methodological
Babel; yet, in the very pursuit of this analogy, it is
well to remember that at Babel men did not begin to
talk nonsense; they merely began to talk what seemed
like nonsense to their fellows. A statement is not
false merely because it is unintelligible; though it
will have to be made intelligible before we can say
whether it is true" .... "The moral," Crane argues,
"is surely that we ought to have at our command,
collectively at least, as many different critical
methods as there are distinguishable major aspects in
the construction, appreciation, and use of literary
works" .... Such calls for critical pluralism form a
recurring theme in Chicago criticism.

[...]

.. Criticism based on universal philosophic systems
(from G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels to Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre) is a
special object of distrust in Chicago criticism, but
the Chicago critics' most extensive critique is
reserved for the New Critics, whose exclusive concern
with figurative language and irony they thought was
limiting and reductive....
   The pluralism of the Chicago critics developed
along with a special, though not exclusive, interest
in the poetic method of Aristotle ... 
"Neo-Aristotelian" is thus a more accurate label for
their work than "Aristotelian."
   Two of the concepts the Chicago critics return to
repeatedly, namely, form and genre, developed from
their reading of Aristotle. Literary works are
imitations, objects made for the sake of their own
power and beauty. Literary form becomes a "principle
of construction ...." The task for the critic becomes
one of reconstructing those parts as the author
originally must have constructed them consciously or
unconsciously, in order, logically, to create the
whole work under discussion. The intentionalism of the
Chicago critics, then, follows from their acceptance
of Aristotelian mimesis.
   Their Aristotelian concepts of form and genre
follow naturally from their more general principles of
form.... One of the more controversial consequences of
their assumption that literary meaning is to be found
in the (generic) intention of the text is that like
Aristotle, they subordinate the function of literary
language to the larger structure of the work as a
whole....
   The Chicago focus on genre and method does not
preclude an interest in historical analysis.... 

[...]

   The concerns of the Chicago critics have been
developed by a second and third generation, many but
not all of whom studied at Chicago.... The general
trend, influenced largely by Wayne C. Booth, has been
from poetics to Rhetoric and from an almost exclusive
focus on text to an increasing interest in both author
and reader ....

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/chicago_critics.html

And see as well ...

Booth, Wayne C.  "Between Two Generations: The
   Heritage of the Chicago School," Profession 82
   (1982).

Leitch, Vincent B.  American Literary Criticism
   from the 30s to the 80s.  NY: Columbia UP, 1988.

McKeon, Richard.  "Criticism and the Liberal Arts:
   The Chicago School of Criticism," Profession 82
   (1982).

"'What happened at Chicago'"

At the University of Chicago, the Chicago Review,
under the editorship of Irving Rosenthal and Paul
Carroll, had been closely following the emergence of
what came to be called the San Francisco Renaissance: 

They excitedly set about gathering manuscripts from
writers who were getting to be known as Beat. The
Spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review was a special
San Francisco number. It included work by Kerouac,
Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, [...] and the first chapter of
Burroughs's Naked Lunch. 

A Chicago newspaper columnist got hold of this issue
and the Autumn issue (containing a second chapter of
Naked Lunch). He wrote a sensationalistic article
under the headline "Filthy Writing on the Midway,"
which resulted in the University administration's
suppression of the Winter issue. 

The incident sparked the resignation of Rosenthal,
Carroll, and four of the remaining five editors of the
Chicago Review. Jointly they decided to start their
own magazine, using the suppressed Chicago Review
material for their first issue. That magazine emerged
under the name Big Table, a name which had been
suggested in a telegram from Jack Kerouac.... 

http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/UnspeakableVisions/InPrintLiterary.html

http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/UnspeakableVisions/page1.html

And see as well ...

Campbell, James.  This is the Beat Generation:
   New York, San Francisco, Paris.  Berkeley:
   U of California P, 2001.   

http://www.poetrycenter.org/campbell.htm

Michelson, Peter.  "On Big Table, Chicago Review,
   and The Purple Sage."  The Little Magazine in
   America: A Modern Documentary History. Yonkers,
   NY: Pushcart Press, 1978.

Chicago Review

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/archive.shtml

Big Table

http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column39c.html

http://www.usps.com/judicial/1959deci/1-150d.htm

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