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
Tag: Literary criticism
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
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
The importance of difficulty
On one level, it is easy to see both Murry’s humanism and Woolf’s visions as a means of self-promotion, resting as they do on a personal engagement with the text rather than the detached, analytical methods of the newly professionalised humanities. This, of course, leaves both Woolf and Murry open to many of the charges levelled at literary criticism when its entry into university syllabuses was first mooted: that it … Read the rest
Virginia Woolf: Criticism as private experience
It is difficult to approach Virginia Woolf without being conscious not only of her Modernism, but also of her relationship to the concept of a feminine sensibility. Because many of Woolf’s subjects are women, and because the method of reading she advocates is linked closely to her attempts to explore the ‘unknown and uncircumscribed spirit’13 of woman, it is easy
to see how her criticism has been read as wholly … Read the rest
Literary criticism: The influence of scholarship
These attempts to define the nature of literary knowledge took place in a society where the audience for, and purpose of, literary criticism were undergoing a number of changes. A brief outline of these changes will enable the debates about criticism to be set in context, and illuminate the source of many of the tensions that surrounded them: the changing nature of intellectual authority, brought about by the professionalisation and … Read the rest
The importance of Classics: The literary tradition
These suspicions about the academic validity of the study of English literature were also apparent at Cambridge, where once again they crystal- lised around the inauguration of a professorship, the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature. This Professorship was established in 1910 as the result of a donation from the newspaper magnate Sir Harold Harmsworth (later Viscount Rothermere), and its holder was intended – according to Harmsworth’s stipulation – … Read the rest
Oxford and Cambridge: The development of criticism
Unlike London and the regional institutions, Oxford has played a central role in accounts of ‘the rise of English’. It is easy to see why this is the case. For one thing, its story has the attraction of controversy, in the form of the lengthy battle against the university authorities that was led by the lecturer and critic John Churton Collins. In addition, Oxford’s initial rejection of English on the … Read the rest
Literary Scripturism
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Character” (1866)
If there is anything in art that can take the place of religion, we should
like to see it.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, Every-Day Topics, 2nd series (1882)
That American thought before 1865 was markedly religiocentric is a
scholarly commonplace. Such was especially true of New England, owing
to the Puritan imprint, which Enlightenment … Read the rest
Planning Your Essay
If you have actively reread the work you plan to write about and have made notes or
annotations, you are already well on your way to writing your paper. Your mind has
already begun to work through some initial impressions and ideas. Now you need to
arrange those early notions into an organized and logical essay. Here is some advice
on how to manage the writing process:
® Leave yourself … Read the rest