SLSL Intro "Chicago School"

[Fergus Ginsberg]

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> > Are there authors who speak of lit-crit as an
> influence in their writing?
> 
> Pynchon certainly does: <
> 
> I see a reference to lit-crit, and vague general
> comments. Nothing about its
> *influence on his development as a writer* except in
> the most superficial
> way.

It's not really fruitful to attmpt to divorce lit-crit
from literature or its production. I don't think its
possible unless we refute the entire history of both.
And to say that Pynchon was born in some kind of
lit-critless cradle is to turn him into some sort god
or saint (see Faucault on the St. Jerome Modern
method). 

Nobokov has a bit of funn with the critics, so does
Joyce, I imagine Pynchon does. Someplace in Adda there
is a heated argument, the combatants exchange insults
(kinda like the arguemtns in GR) and each reply sinks
to a new low, 

"you are a rat"

"You are a rat ass"

It ends when with

"LITERARY CRITIC!" 

No reply is possible, the defeated party surrenders. 


Nobokov, in brushing aside as somewaht beside the
point the seemingly absurd and convoluted critical
readings of Ulysses as an allegory based on Homer's
Epic (he's right) and the other stuff on the parts of
the human body, admits that he reads the critics and
that they influence his lectures even as he dismisses
them out of hand. 


Literary criticism also called (jocularly, and chiefly
in academic contexts) lit-crit, is a discipline
concerned with a range of inquiries about literature:
criticism asks what literature is, what it does, and
what it is worth. I find it rather astounding that
anyone here would not be somewhat familiar with the
facts of lit-crit history. There is reciprocity
between authors and critics that is indispensable to
the progress and evolution of both literature and
criticism. This reciprocity, often a conflict, is what
Pynchon is talking about in the Introduction.  Pynchon
mentions the Chicago School. Aristotle was literary
critic. Those reading The Wandering Scholars are
reading about some of major battles in lit-crit
history. Lit-crit can be hostile to literature. Plato
didn't think that Poets should be permitted in his
best of all possible States. Reading Waddell, if we
didn't know already, we discover the irony of this is
that so many of the early poets and wandering scholars
were Platonists. Later dialectical philosophy will we
used to attack poetry. Waddell's book traces some of
the most important fights, swings, ironic turns, in
the history of the arts, including lit-crit. 

The last fight, a battle royal, brings theology and
humanism into the ring, with tag-teams that include, a
giant red-headed Irish men with a sharpened tongue and
the greatest wandering mind in history, Puritans,
Utilitarians, Dominicans and other orders, proverb,
prose composition, logic, dialectical philosophy,
rhetoric, sophism, Grammar, and finally, the lawyers.
The lawyers, family types mostly, strangle both
theology and literature. 

       The Western critical tradition can be said to
have begun with  Plato in the 4th century BC. In the
Republic he attacked the poets on two fronts: their
art is merely imitative, and it appeals to the worst
rather than to the best in human nature. 

Only a generation later, the philosopher's philosopher
and great-great-great-grandfather of Richard McKeon
and the Chicago school, Aristotle, in his Poetics,
countered these charges and developed a set of
principles of composition that were of lasting
importance to European literature. 

Politics, Aristotle says, in his Politics, is the most
important science because it determines what sciences
and arts will exist, be funded, studied, and
developed. However, in the Metaphysics he seems to
contradict this assertion when he claims that
Metaphysics is the most important. Aristotle does not
contradict himself. His approach is architectonic: of
or relating to the scientific systematization of
knowledge,  from Greek arkhitektonikos. And his
approach is pluralistic. So, politics is not beside
the point. But neither is Poetica. 



Count the poets that are critics and you can fill a
library. 
_______________________________________________


An Introduction to Lit-Crit from M.  Webster's

At the end of the 16th century Sir Philip Sidney,
(note how Waddell ties Sidney in with the Wandering
Scholars) argued inThe Defence of Poesie that it is
the special property of literature to express moral
and philosophical truths in a way that rescues them
from abstraction and makes them immediately graspable.
A century later, John Dryden, in Of Dramatick  Poesie,
An Essay (1668), put forward the less idealistic view
that the business of literature is primarily to offer
an accurate representation of the world for the
delight and instruction of mankind. This remains the
assumption of the great critical works of 18th century
England, underlying both Alexander Pope's An Essay on
Criticism (1711) and the extensive work of Samuel
Johnson. William Wordsworth's assertion in his Preface
to the second edition of theLyrical Ballads(1800) that
the object of poetry is truth . . . carried alive into
the heart by passion marks a significant change from
the ideas of the mid18th century. Other important
statements of critical theory in the Romantic period
were Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
(1817) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry
(written 1821). The later 19th century saw a
development in one direction toward an aesthetic
theory of art for art's sake and
in another direction toward the view, expressed by
Matthew Arnold, that the cultural role of literature
should be to take over the sort of moral and
philosophical functions that had previously been
fulfilled by religion. 

The volume of literary criticism increased greatly in
the 20th century. An early example of this in the
Englishs peaking world was I.A. Richards' Principles
of Literary Criticism (1924), which became influential
as the basis of Practical Criticism. From this
developed the New Criticism of the 1940s and '50s,
which               was associated with such American
critics as John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks. The
premise of the New Critics, that a work of literature
should be studied as a separate and self-contained
entity, set them in opposition both tobiographical
criticism and to those schools of criticismMarxist,
psychoanalytical, historical, and the likethat set out
to examine literature from perspectives            
external to the text. The late 20th century witnessed
a radical reappraisal of traditional modes of literary
criticism. Building on the work of the Russian
Formalist critics of the 1920s and the examinations of
linguistic structure carried out by the Swiss
philologist Ferdinand de Saussure, literary theorists
began to call into question the overriding importance
of the concept of the author as the source of the
text's meaning. Structuralist and poststructuralist
critics, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida of
France, instead directed attention toward the ways in
which meaning is created by the determining structures
of language and culture. See also Chicago critics;
deconstruction; feminist criticism; Formalism;
Freudian criticism; GENEVA
SCHOOL OF criticism ; Marxist criticism; New
Criticism; new historicism; poststructuralism;
practical criticism; reader-response criticism;
structuralism .

 Source: Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
(c)1995.  Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. 



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