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
Tag: T. S. Eliot
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
Using Critical Sources and Maintaining Academic integrity
Certain literary works, because they offer intriguing difficulties, have attracted professional
critics hy the score. On library shelves, great phalanxes of critical books now
stand at the side of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s allusive poem The Waste
Land. The student who undertakes to study such works seriously is well advised to
profit from the critics’ labors. Chances are, too, that even in discussing a relatively
uncomplicated work, … Read the rest