What We Owe the New Critics

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By MARK BAUERLEIN

When Garrick Davis told me he had assembled an anthology of New Criticism, I reached across the table and shook his hand. Davis is the founder of the Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com), an online magazine that covers the poetry scene inside academe and out, and he had wanted to compile a selection of essays by that loose cohort of academics from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s who had advanced a formalist study of literary language and tried to erect a discipline upon it. Davis came to literary study through Practical Criticism (I.A. Richards), Seven Types of Ambiguity (William Empson), The Well Wrought Urn (Cleanth Brooks), The Verbal Icon (W.K. Wimsatt Jr.), Language as Gesture (R.P. Blackmur), and other midcentury classics, and he remains a devotee. The New Critics taught him to focus on a poem's verbal detail -- not its historical context or political/psychological/philosophical ideas, but its metaphors, ironies, and ambiguities. In graduate school in the 90s, he never succumbed to the postmodernist insight on the impossibility of meaning and objectivity and closure, and the blandishments of various political criticisms left him cold.

That makes him, of course, a throwback. For most graduate students interested in literary theory of any kind in the 80s and 90s, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, et al. were a passion. Students might have felt a thrill when they read Hegel on tragedy or Nietzsche on nihilism, but the latest thinkers had an added aura of the new. They bore the romantic air of radicalism, and if they were the revolutionaries, then their predecessors were the ancien régime, quaintly obsolete. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks put it a few years ago, "The coming to America of continental 'theory' in the 1970s created a new avant-garde of sorts — a genuine one, I think." It changed fields in the humanities so quickly and sweepingly that it joined the ranks of other great paradigm shifts in the career of thought, this one given momentous titles such as The Poststructuralist Turn.

In a few short years, the whole vocabulary of criticism changed, and so did the idols. Students flocked to Cornell University, the Johns Hopkins University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Yale University to hear the most up-to-date purveyors. When the "theory turn" happened, those who didn't participate suddenly sounded old-fashioned and out of it, and younger scholars and students took the lead. They emulated the radical-reader pose, as in Wlad Godzich's introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism: "Caution! Reader at Work!" They savored the breathless, adventuresome phrasings of Derrida's Of Grammatology, absorbed the transvaluation of bourgeois values in Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and overlaid their own prose with melodrama and historic import (proclaiming about "criticism in crisis," "ideological unmasking," "the posthuman," etc.). And the more disciples credited grand theorists with breakthrough insight and radical rethinking, the more the New Critics faded into the past.

A few of the early theorists, it should be said, retained respect for the New Critics, my own professor Joseph N. Riddel included. He taught literary theory at the University of California at Los Angeles, and his study The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams was the first book-length deconstructionist analysis by an American critic. He was a Derridean all the way, but he nonetheless had his students work through pre-theory literary theory from T.E. Hulme to Northrop Frye before deciphering the works of the Deconstructor. Instead of casting the New Critics as unenlightened oldsters, as naïve thinkers unlucky enough to mature before the 1966 Hopkins conference on structuralism touched off the new wave of thinking, Riddel honored them as a great generation. He recommended a host of lesser-known formalist-oriented critics, too, such as Ronald S. Crane, Charles Feidelson, John Crowe Ransom, and Earl R. Wasserman, reconstructing for his students the kind of group that Charles Sanders Peirce, 19th-century polymath and semiotician, had called a "community of inquirers," people addressing the same questions in conflictual ways but with a common purpose of advancing the critical enterprise. The formalist critics refined the practice of literary analysis, as opposed to literary history and philology, Riddel insisted. While the dismantling skepticism of the theorists better fit the intellectual tenor of the 70s, the New Critical faith in concrete universals, organic unity, sharp disciplinary distinctions, and scientific reading was no less rigorous and philosophical.

That was how many first-generation theorists regarded their predecessors. Yes, one of their figureheads, Paul de Man, could say in a 1967 essay: "Well-established rules and conventions that governed the discipline of criticism and made it a cornerstone of the intellectual establishment have been so badly tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse." But six years later, de Man could maintain in another essay, "It can legitimately be said, for example, that, from a technical point of view, very little has happened in American criticism since the innovative works of New Criticism."

By 1980 the assumption had changed. Intoxicated with the nearest precursors, younger critics felt no obligation to remember the farther ones. Second-generation theorists looked not directly at the New Critics, but through the eyes of their mentors, the first-generation theorists, and they assumed only the negative side of their mentors' critique. Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism and Geoffrey H. Hartman's Beyond Formalism had discussed New Critical theory closely, but for younger readers the message lay all in the titles. De Man and others contested the New Critics at length about organicism, self-referentiality, intention, and irony, but their students didn't recognize the respect implied in mounting arguments against precursors. All they heard was, "The Old Guard was wrong." Why bother with them? Why read them? It was easier to win, casting them as benighted apostles of "transhistorical truths," "timeless verities," "objective interpretation," and other exploded notions.

Added to that, when racial, sexual, and political themes arose during the 80s, several New Critics looked less like literary theorists than backward conservatives, and their demise became irreversible. They dropped off syllabi and waned in anthologies. The extent of their fall became clear by 2001 in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, whose 2,624 pages do not contain anything by the main originator of New Criticism, Richards, one of the greatest and most influential literary theorists of the century.

The loss is a damaging one. Figureheads and schools of thought come and go, to be sure, but the disappearance of the New Critics isn't just another evolution in intellectual history. It's a critical gap — with present-day implications. For when literary, cultural, and textual critics ignore the New Critics, they misconstrue their own genesis and identity, forgetting that the New Critics were the first professional theorists, the first humanists to make theory into a recognized disciplinary activity. They devised principles of interpretation that were both ingenious and convertible into disciplinary standards. For instance, they recast the proposition that an author's intention was identical to the meaning of a text as the "intentional fallacy." The argument derived from complex ideas in semantics and psychology, but it also allowed for direct application in the freshman classroom. It joined other concepts to impart basic lessons in reading right, so that learning New Criticism equaled training in a field and distinguished literary analysis from philosophical, historical, etc., analyses (and distinguished the English department from history, psychology, etc.). It gave teachers a useful pedagogy, professors a sure footing on campus, and theorists a job specialty.

The example of the New Critics, then, bears directly upon the enterprise of theory as we've come to know it today. They weren't the first to theorize about literature, but they were the first to establish theory as a distinct practice in the humanities. Like the theorists who came after, they regarded texts as dense and multilayered, and scorned interpretations that overlooked the figurative and formal aspects of the work. On the other hand, the New Critics erected disciplinary walls, while the theorists who followed knocked them down. The former eschewed political interpretations, while the the latter often define their practice as political through and through. The New Critics derived principles in part from classroom observations, whereas one can find few texts more remote from the educational needs of undergraduates and their reading problems as are the classics of High Theory.

Those contrasts and similarities should solidify the place of New Criticism in the institutional memory of the humanities. That is the rationale for Davis's anthology. It preserves an episode of intellectual history that should be preserved, and it gives teachers a tool to carry it on. New Criticism will carry on only if it survives in the classroom, which is to say only if instructors have a handy anthology to assign. They'll get it in early 2008, when Ohio University Press, in partnership with Swallow Press, issues Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism.

It almost didn't happen. And the reason why raises broad questions about how humanities fields progress, and what becomes of prior works and ideas once professors assume they have progressed beyond them. The New Critics pose a special complication, for while they wrote essays and established programs that helped solidify an academic field, they often collected their works in volumes that were published by nonacademic trade presses. The works no longer have commercial value, but many of them remain in trade-press hands. That is a problem for professors who still value them, who not only face the disregard of colleagues but also the copyright practices of publishers. It is remarkable, in fact, how the treatment of New Critical works in the publishing world shores up the fashions of literary and cultural theorists who pledge to "always historicize" at the same time they forget their own precursors.

Once the Ohio press accepted Davis's proposal a year ago, he assumed that completion would involve only the ordinary tasks of selecting, arranging, and introducing the entries. But soon he encountered another hurdle, this one just as troublesome as the shortened memories of contemporary theorists. It arose as Davis began what anthology editors find a tiresome process: getting permissions. The first choices were painless. T.S. Eliot's "The Perfect Critic," his introduction to The Sacred Wood, and other pieces lay in the public domain, and hence were free to use. So was Ezra Pound's "A Retrospect." Davis wanted a selection from Pound's "How to Read," too, which New Directions owned, charging $100 for inclusion. New Directions also charged $100 for Yvor Winters's "Preliminary Problems" and $60 for Ransom's "Wanted: An Ontological Critic." The Nation asked $50 for Randall Jarrell's "The End of the Line," and Hugh Kenner's widow charged $100 for Kenner's essay "Some Post-Symbolist Structures." The Kenyon Review came through with only $50 each for Robert Penn Warren's "Pure and Impure Poetry," Delmore Schwartz's "The Isolation of Modern Poetry," and Jarrell's "Texts From Housman."

For other choices, the fees went up. The University Press of Kentucky wanted $300 for Wimsatt's "What to Say About a Poem," and Charles Scribner's Sons (now a division of Simon & Schuster) asked $550 for Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and $550 for his "Poets Without Laurels." Davis wondered, he recalls, why a not-for-profit university press would charge another not-for-profit university press $300 for a largely unknown essay by Wimsatt, and why a distinguished old literary press would ask nine times as much as New Directions had for a Ransom piece.

His wonderment turned to dismay with the next answer he received. He asked Harcourt Inc. for permission to reprint an essay by Blackmur entitled "A Critic's Job of Work," and Harcourt came back with the outlandish price tag of $2,350. That sum was 23 times what New Directions had asked for a Pound essay. That must be a mistake, he thought. Blackmur's essay has no commercial value, and, as far as he knew, no for-profit press planned to reissue Blackmur's works. The Ohio press is small and will be happy if the volume sells a few hundred copies a year.

Davis replied with an indignant note about the out-of-sight fee and asked for a reduction. Harcourt replied curtly and refused to negotiate. "Because of the amount of material contained in the essay we are not willing to reduce the fee to what you are able to pay," Christine Smith, paralegal, wrote. "I have canceled the agreement and am sorry you will not be able to include it in your anthology." She didn't explain what she meant by "amount of material contained in the essay," but her phrasing seems to refer to simple word count.

Davis responded with questions about other rights held by Harcourt:

Dear Christine Smith,
As you can read below, Thomson wants less than $200 for UK rights to this piece by I.A. Richards. How much does Harcourt want for the US rights? I still have not heard from you regarding your exorbitant Blackmur fees.
Regards,
Garrick Davis

Harcourt again:

Thank you for your e-mail. Please complete the standard online permission request form at permissions.harcourt.com.
Because, as you were informed, the Blackmur agreement has already been canceled you will need to reapply if you care to use that material. Your previous e-mail was forwarded to Kent Wolf, Adult Subsidiary Rights Manager in our New York office.

Davis ran out of patience:

Ah wonderful, my e-mail has been forwarded to Mr. Wolf — and thus I am working my way up from the lowly paralegals. And how should I get in touch with him? Or will he get in touch with me?

As ever, your minimal help is minimally appreciated,
Garrick Davis

Nobody at Harcourt ever answered.

Davis discovered that Joseph Frank, the literary theorist and Dostoyevsky biographer whose great essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" could have qualified for inclusion in the anthology, was the literary executor for Blackmur, and Frank granted permission for him to include two essays not controlled by Harcourt. A nice outcome after the frosty exchange, but the larger problem remains. Do publishing houses retain absolute rights to works they have previously published?

According to the U.S. Copyright Office, control of works under copyright before January 1, 1978, can be renewed for "a total term of protection of 95 years" (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html). That includes Blackmur's works, and Davis tells me that Harcourt also owns works by Brooks, Richards, and Kenneth Burke, not to mention the later essays of Eliot.

That puts Harcourt in a powerful position. That The Kenyon Review only charged $50 underscores the former publisher's irresponsible guardianship. Harcourt is a commercial press that aims to maximize its profits, but Blackmur is a midcentury critic whose writings have little commercial value. They do possess, however, significant historical and scholarly value. In owning the work, Harcourt has an obligation to acknowledge that and weigh what it does in terms of audience and preservation. Davis won't make any money off the project. He wants to sustain a legacy of literary thought. Harcourt gave that goal no consideration at all, nor did it consider the memory of American criticism, nor did it even accept maintaining the readership of one of the works it holds. In its paralegal office in Orlando, Fla., copyright doesn't entail any role in the care of tradition.

Those are the wrong hands to carry intellectual history. A legacy sits on the desk of people who don't understand what they've got, who don't realize the difference between commercial value and scholarly value. If you copyright a work of historical value, you have a duty to foster its appreciation. Or rather, if the free market doesn't appreciate the work, don't charge scholars who do appreciate it fees that stymie them.

If publishers do charge high fees, in effect they make those works disappear. Blackmur's essays are a case in point, but it may be that important works in other disciplines are in the same situation, with a commercial press charging prices that throw them into disuse. If so, then scholars and teachers need to act soon. One option might be to ask a professional group like the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions to send a letter to Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers, to apprise her of the problem. The legal and permissions offices of the trade presses may be unaware of (instead of indifferent to) the obligations they have to intellectual legacies, and it may require only a concerted request to loosen them up and lower fees.

Whatever the tactic, professors owe respect to the past of their own fields. It is up to them to safeguard intellectual history, to keep the pressures of money and fashion at bay. The actions of a commercial press here demonstrate that if professors take their field's past for granted, or if they regard that past as an inferior practice, it will fade and disappear. They should realize that, for all the adversarial postures toward the market and bourgeois values, their "presentism" (or "post-1966ism") combines all too smoothly with the bottom line of the corporations who own their forebears.

Whether the threat comes from revolutionary feelings among scholars and teachers who erase their forebears, or from business enterprises' selling intellectual goods at exorbitant prices, professors need to stir up a counterforce. If they won't respect their predecessors, why should anyone else?

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.