4 results
Chapter 3 - Passage Work
- from Part I - Nation and Empire
- Edited by James Purdon, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- Book:
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
- Published online:
- 07 December 2021
- Print publication:
- 02 December 2021, pp 75-90
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Summary
From Walter Raleigh’s The Study of English Literature (1900) to the Newbolt Commission’s report, The Teaching of English in England (1921), the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the consolidation of ‘English’ as a school subject and university discipline, within and against a critical culture that was often international, anti-institutional, dissonant. This chapter tells the parallel and divergent stories of this disciplinary formation and this critical explosion: institutionally, university chairs and formal examinations in English literature were established; counter-culturally, new manifestoes and little magazines blasted past forms of critical discourse. But histories of this criticism have often remained parochial, in both scope and method. Focusing on three figures (Leonard Woolf, Sarojini Naidu, and Caroline Spurgeon), the chapter shows how their various passages – geographical, social, and literary – might offer both an alternative, global, critical history for these decades, and a new sense of how we might tell that history.
Chapter 4 - Feelings under the Microscope: New Critical Affect
- from I - Origins
- Edited by Alex Houen, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- Affect and Literature
- Published online:
- 16 January 2020
- Print publication:
- 06 February 2020, pp 83-99
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Summary
Emotion in close reading is a coil, spring or spiral (labelled Stage V) that comes towards the end of our labyrinthine experience of lines of verse – or so I. A. Richards suggests in the ‘Arcadia’ diagram of Principles of Literary Criticism. For the early practical critics on whom Richards experimented, this coil of feeling was an unfortunate vortex from which little affective intelligence emerged: modernist close reading revealed only inhibitions, sentimentality, stock responses. This chapter explores how practical criticism navigates an unsettling new matrix for understanding the experience of feeling in reading and of ‘tone’ as a critical category. It examines the crisis of affect within literary criticism’s early disciplinary history by focusing on Richards’s understanding of ‘pseudo-statement’ and by tracing his contemporary dialogues (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot) and later interlocutors, such as Sianne Ngai. The chapter re-considers the figure of the critic as cultural confidence man and challenges the flattening of new-critical ‘tone’ in recent affect theory.
9 - T. S. Eliot as Literary Critic
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- By Helen Thaventhiran, University of Cambridge
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
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- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
- Published online:
- 01 December 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 131-144
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Summary
Who can doubt that Criticism, as well as Poetry, can have wings?
This epigraph is not by T. S. Eliot, nor is it something he could have written. Nor, for all the imaginative brilliance of his work in both forms, criticism and poetry, is it a phrase we would be likely to encounter about Eliot. It is instead the epigraph to J. E. Spingarn's Creative Criticism, which Eliot reviewed for the TLS in 1926. Eliot, whose critical eye was often drawn to fragmentary forms such as epigraphs, quotes these words, enjoying the borrowed flight of whimsy, but then adds a stern coda. Spingarn's criticism, he writes, undeniably does have “wings”; alas, “like the fabulous bird of paradise, it has wings but no feet, and can never settle” (CP2 805). Literary criticism, for Eliot, might launch, then soar. Nonetheless, it should have firm foundations: tradition, order, precision, and criteria. In the year of this review, Eliot had just emerged from the pseudonym, Crites, champion of the ancients, under which he had written his regular editorial “Commentaries” for the Criterion. Spingarn's fancifulness earns him a place in the ranks of the “Imperfect Critics” that Eliot began to assemble from his earliest ventures into literary judgment, granting this title to the second chapter of The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). His first chapter in this book addresses the more singular (perhaps, by implication, near-mythical) case of “The Perfect Critic”: the quest both to delineate and to become this figure gives form to Eliot's prose.
To begin with unattributed words that do not belong to their apparent subject – in fact, that illustrate something that their subject would not have said – was one of the most characteristic tactics of Eliot's own criticism. Lecturing on Matthew Arnold, for example, in the series The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot opens with a long quotation from an authoritative nineteenth-century voice, urging “a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.” Arnold's vision for civilization, the audience might presume, only to be told: “these words are not only not Arnold's, but we know at once that they could not have been written by him” (CP4 654, italics added).
9 - T. S. Eliot as Literary Critic
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- By Helen Thaventhiran, University of Cambridge
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
-
- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
- Published online:
- 01 December 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 131-144
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Who can doubt that Criticism, as well as Poetry, can have wings?
This epigraph is not by T. S. Eliot, nor is it something he could have written. Nor, for all the imaginative brilliance of his work in both forms, criticism and poetry, is it a phrase we would be likely to encounter about Eliot. It is instead the epigraph to J. E. Spingarn's Creative Criticism, which Eliot reviewed for the TLS in 1926. Eliot, whose critical eye was often drawn to fragmentary forms such as epigraphs, quotes these words, enjoying the borrowed flight of whimsy, but then adds a stern coda. Spingarn's criticism, he writes, undeniably does have “wings”; alas, “like the fabulous bird of paradise, it has wings but no feet, and can never settle” (CP2 805). Literary criticism, for Eliot, might launch, then soar. Nonetheless, it should have firm foundations: tradition, order, precision, and criteria. In the year of this review, Eliot had just emerged from the pseudonym, Crites, champion of the ancients, under which he had written his regular editorial “Commentaries” for the Criterion. Spingarn's fancifulness earns him a place in the ranks of the “Imperfect Critics” that Eliot began to assemble from his earliest ventures into literary judgment, granting this title to the second chapter of The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). His first chapter in this book addresses the more singular (perhaps, by implication, near-mythical) case of “The Perfect Critic”: the quest both to delineate and to become this figure gives form to Eliot's prose.
To begin with unattributed words that do not belong to their apparent subject – in fact, that illustrate something that their subject would not have said – was one of the most characteristic tactics of Eliot's own criticism. Lecturing on Matthew Arnold, for example, in the series The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot opens with a long quotation from an authoritative nineteenth-century voice, urging “a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.” Arnold's vision for civilization, the audience might presume, only to be told: “these words are not only not Arnold's, but we know at once that they could not have been written by him” (CP4 654, italics added).