Guilds were associations of men and sometimes women that performed a combination of social, religious, and economic activities. More prevalent in urban areas, they tended to be either parish organizations created to perform religious devotions, or craft or trade fellowships designed to regulate their organizations (membership, craft standards, and other activities), protect their business from local and overseas competition, and expand trade in national and foreign markets. With the wool … Read the rest
Author: bookworm
The place of criticism: A wider view
What has emerged from this discussion of the reform of English Literature at A-level is that the tension between the specialist discipline of English and the private act of reading is still ongoing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this tension took two easily distinguishable forms: the intellectual authority that was used to underwrite the new literary scholarship was resisted by critics both inside and outside the universities, … Read the rest
The resistance to knowledge
The reluctance of AQA Specification A to embrace the critical and theo- retical possibilities of the new subject criteria came as no real surprise. Since the new specifications were launched, there have been a number of objections to the critical principles they represent: to the idea that the study of literature should involve anything other than a personal encounter with the text. This strand of complaint bears a number of … Read the rest
The new A-level: The treatment of contexts
Reactions to the revised specifications were mixed. One English teacher, Pamela Bickley, described QCA’s new version of English Literature as ‘positively encouraging’. Its emphasis on contextuality made it a welcome alternative to ‘the A-Level tendency to study a work of literature as a discrete entity that springs to life fully formed’ and offered ‘far less possibility for indulging in the “This poem makes me feel sad” school of literary criticism’.40 … Read the rest
A-level reform: A brief introduction
The introduction of Curriculum 2000 was the result of a long period of debate about post-compulsory education in England and Wales. The changes it implemented were intended to broaden the post-16 curriculum and increase the number of students choosing to stay on after GCSE. The main focus of its attention was the A-level, a qualification intro- duced in the 1950s and aimed then at the small proportion of students who … Read the rest
Revising English: Theory and Practice
The difficulty of resolving the ‘Arnoldian paradox’ – of closing the gap between culture and society so that the former could be brought to bear on the problems of the latter – remained an important theme in the literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. During these decades, the need for a stable, humane culture was given a new sense of urgency. For some, this stemmed from the threat of … Read the rest
F. R. Leavis: The university and the sage
Richards’s sense of the narrowness of literary scholarship is apparent in the direction taken by his career. After the publication of Practical Criticism in 1929, he spent relatively little time in Cambridge: in 1934, he was commissioned by the General Education Board in New York to recom- mend a set of improvements in the teaching of interpretation, and subsequently directed his energies towards the definition and teaching of ‘Basic English’. … Read the rest
I. A. Richards: Meaning and value
Eliot’s rejection of the ‘lemon-squeezer school of criticism’ also adds an ironic twist to Tillyard’s claim that Eliot was himself a central figure in the development of such a school, promoting critical rigour and the need for the ‘minute exegesis’ of difficult texts. By 1956, Eliot had become con- vinced that criticism should be directed towards enjoyment as well as understanding, and was afraid that analysis would put the ordinary … Read the rest
Personal authority and the retreat from scholarship
Such a focus on language gives many of Eliot’s writings a characteristic structure that is at once an echo of Walter Bagehot’s notion of the ‘review-like essay’,33 and a potential blueprint for an academic essay that could demonstrate the capacity for judgement as well as know- ledge that he praised in the work of W. P. Ker. Eliot’s early periodical essays typically begin by quoting an accepted view of the … Read the rest
Eliot and scholarship: Method and judgemen
Eliot had his own doubts about the desirability of an academic form of literary criticism. His misgivings stemmed, in part, from his belief that the qualities needed to be a critic included a kind of taste that developed in a gradual, organic manner, rather than being a skill to be taught. In the Introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot stated that he was … Read the rest