1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Opener: Katie Berry
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • Early Print Culture
    • Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983) [abridged edition of 2-vol. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979]
    • Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987)
    • Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998)
    • Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)
  • The New Criticism
    • I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners, introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., biographical essays by Virginia Rock (1930; rpt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977)
      • John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time, The Fugitives and Agrarians: The Nashville Groups of the 1920's and 1930's, and the Writing of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965)
      • Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville, Tenn.: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1988)
      • Louis Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1959)
    • John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941)
    • Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1938)
      • Robert Penn Warren, "A Conversation with Cleanth Brooks," in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work, ed. Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976)
    • W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954)
    • John Guillory, "Ideology and Canonical Form: The New Critical Canon," in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 134-75
    • René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, Vol. 6, American Criticism, 1900-1950 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986 [esp. chapter 8 and following]
  • Literacy in the Information Age
    • Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury, 1979) (see discussion of the "careful and critical discourse" of the New Class)
    • E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Vintage, 1988) (first sentence of book: "To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.")
  • Other
    • Avital Ronnel, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989)

Four Transitional Moments of Interest in the History of Information:

Orality —> Writing
Writing —> Print
Print —> Mass Media (esp., print journalism, radio, television)
Mass Media —> Networked, Digital Information

Examples of Areas of Possible Research in Above:

The Moment of the New Criticism:

This class jumps from the the emergence of literacy to the early part of the twentieth century. Here we focus on the New Criticism's meditation on "close reading" amid an industrial, technical, and mass-media world that was moving to the paradigm of information. How did "close reading" as a powerful ideology of literacy arise in this context? What is the actual relationship of close reading and related paradigms of modern "critical thought" ("careful and critical discourse" or "CCD," Alvin W. Gouldner called it) to the mode of thought the Frankfurt School called technological rationality? What is the fate of close reading and its "rigorous" deconstructive successor in the era of easy "browsing"? And, thinking ahead to our next class: can browsing be understood as itself a positive rather than negative act (a different kind of rigorous reading rather than a lack of reading)?

A Short History of the Emergence of the New Criticism: (Note: these are highlights from an undergraduate lecture on the New Criticism. The material on the arrival of the New Criticism at Yale Univ. immediately in the 1940s is based on interviews of Yale emeritus faculty and research in the Yale archives by Alan Liu during his directorship of the Yale "Major English Poets" courses in 1986-87.)

Abstract: The New Criticism was (i) originally a distinctly Southern, avant-garde art movement (ii) that suddenly became a political movement (iii) before then turning its energies–its explicit political motives now subsiding–to literary theory and ultimately pedagogy.

(a) The place of origin was Nashville, TN, near the campus of the leading Southern university at the time: Vanderbilt. The time was 1915, when a group of John Crowe Ransom's students at the university (soon joined by Ransom himself) began meeting informally at the house of an interesting playwright, philosopher, mystic and general patron of intellect named Sidney Mttron Hirsch. The meetings began as socializing, debating, and listening sessions that evolved into a tradition of semi-regular talk-fests on all subjects (culture, religion, history, etc.). But under Ransom's tutelage, the meetings eventually began to focus especially on poetry. People would bring poems they had written; and the group would critique them.

(b) When WW I broke out, the still nameless group of intellects that had thus congregated evolved around Ransom disbanded temporarily (many going into service). But after the war, the group reconstituted in even greater strength in Nashville with the addition of such future luminaries of the New Criticism as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. (Other future New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks were never officially part of this early group, but were students of Ransom.)

(c) By 1922, the group had grown confident enough of its intellectual and literary strength, as well as of its general mission as the avant-garde art movement of the South, that it launched a poetry magazine, The Fugitive (1922), and became known as the "Fugitive Group." A common identity for the group had thus been formed–one that at this point was generally progressive and experimental in artistic matters and thus, through a vague kind of association, also apparently linked to the progressive political and economic agenda of the so-called "New South" movement. Like the New South boosters, who wanted to industrialize and modernize the South, the Fugitives were artists who fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South" in their effort to create a genuinely modern Southern literature. Yet it is important to stress that the loose association between the Fugitives and the New South was only vague and not thought out. The Fugitives were not yet really a politicized movement.

(d) Something then happened in 1925 to force the group suddenly and ferociously into political consciousness: the Scopes monkey trial (cast: Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, H. C. Mencken). The trial brought a flood of journalists from the North to Nashville to cover the trial. For these journalists, the trial became the emblematic centerpiece for a series of color stories characterizing the South as the great domain of backwater, redneck, Bible-thumping, spit-in-the-spitoon Crackerism. The identity of the leading intellects of the South, and especially in Nashville, was thus put on the line. The question for the Fugitive group became: were they still going to be implicit backers of the New South movement (whose agenda of Industrialism and Scientism and Progressivism could now be seen as a clearly Northern movement allied with the journalists who ridiculed the South)? Or were they going to stand up for the South?

(e) The group chose to stand for the South. But such a stand was problematic because if it now seemed impossible for the Fugitive group to be on the side of the New South with its creeping Northernism, so too it was impossible for it to stand for the Old South that was the other half of the binary in the New South/Old South controversy of the time. Therefore, the Fugitives had to create a different ideal of the south, what may be called a "New Old South," to stand for. The result was the publication in 1930 of I'll Take My Stand "By 12 Southerners," a political / economic / aesthetic work by Ransom, Tate, and others that created the mythic ideal of a "true" South or "New Old South" to stand for. The true South worth defending, the authors wrote, was the agrarian or pre-industrial South of the yeoman small-farm: a South whose life on the farm (every family owning and working its own small plot of sustenance crop, rather than cash crop) provided the true standard of a gracious, individually-fulfilling life out of which a genuine culture of artistic sensibility could arise. Ransom wrote: "He identifies himself with a spot of ground, and this ground carries a good deal of meaning. . . . He would till it not too hurriedly and not too mechanically to observe in it the contingency and the infinitude of nature; and so his life acquires its philosophical and even its cosmic consciousness" (pp. 19-20). With the publication of I'll Take My Stand, the group around Ransom that had been known as the Fugitives became known as the Agrarians.

(f) Perhaps not surprisingly, the Agrarian movement turned out to be impractical. Some of the participants in the movement continued to write and speechify in its interests. But others in the 1930s increasingly returned their attention to literature and criticism. It is in this phase of the late 30s and early 40s that the New Criticism as such emerged as a theoretical movement and critical movement in the journals. Beginning in 1937, Ransom edited The Kenyon Review and Brooks The Southern Review.

(g) When, in the 1940's the Yale University English Department adopted the New Criticism as its primary method (soon thereafter inviting Brooks, Warren, and others of the persuasion to join its faculty), the New Criticism at last decisively left its Southern roots behind. That was the price to be paid for making the method portable. In this regard, it is crucial to realize that the influential, early reception of the New Criticism at Yale had nothing to do with the socio-political roots of the method or even its explicit theory. Rather, the success of the method rested first of all on the power of the New Criticism as a practice of reading and discussing literature in the classroom (where the New Criticism very quickly came to dominate)—a practice of reading and discussing literature that American academic literary culture was just then primed for:

The crucial text in this regard is Brooks's and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938), an anthology with practical introductions, discussion questions, and analyses in the New Critical style (no history or biography) that marked the onset of New Criticism's triumph in the academy.

The crucial scene, which epitomizes the reception of the New Criticism in the academy, occured one afternoon in 1938 or 1939 when two younger memvbers of the Yale English faculty, Richard Sewall and Maynard Mack, met each other in Yale Station (the Yale post office). As Sewall tells it, Mack was unwrapping a parcel containing a publisher's examination copy of Understanding Poetry. "This is terrific!" Sewall remembers reacting when Mack showed him the new anthology. Both Mack and Sewall were hungry for such a new anthology. Mack had been teaching advanced prep school boys who already knew all the texts taught in Yale's introductory curriculum; Sewall had been teaching students at the recently formed Sheffield Scientific School who had no background in the history of literature. Catalyzed by Understanding Poetry, the Yale junior faculty rebelled at a dramatic meeting and, during 1939-41, convinced the senior faculty to allow them to try out the New Criticism and Understanding Poetry in introductory courses (at first monitored by senior faculty). The success of the New Criticism, which eventually won over older and unsympathetic faculty at Yale, is famous. Frederick Pottle, for example, serves as an eloquent witness:

"Then, during the war, I taught a freshman division one summer term, using Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry. . . . Though I was rather antagonistic to the expressed and implied theory of the book, I tried to play fair with it. Brooks and Warren identify authors and cite dates, but they provide no biographical or historical apparatus. . . . The task set for the student was simply to comprehend a short poem and evaluate it in terms proposed by the text. . . . I found the results very interesting, far more sophisticated, as it seemed to me, than those we had received in the course before. . . . I also began about this time to teach the undergraduate lecture course in the Age of Wordsworth, and found myself receiving fine extended critical papers which clearly reflected the method of Understanding Poetry. My eyes were opened. . . . (The Wordsworth Circle, 1978)

—Cleanth Brooks at the MLA, circa late 1980's

—Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926)

Excerpt from the presentation:

• Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
• Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
• Borgmann, “Realizing Information: Reading”

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

“Signs are vehicles and vectors.  The meaning they convey directs us beyond themselves to things.  They are instructions for the construction of some reality [. . .]” (Borgmann 85)

“Really to read is to comprehend.” (Borgmann 87)

Fruit flies like bananas, time flies like an arrow.

“Intimacy and privacy are the hallmarks of today’s reading.” (Borgmann 91)

 “To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. [. . .] we distort the relation of the poem to its ‘truth,’ we raise the problem of belief in a vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its ‘form,’ and its ‘content’.” (Brooks 964)

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

“The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an ‘imitation’—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” (Brooks 968)

A poem should not mean
But be

“Intelligent reading of fiction and poetry, far from being an escape, is a tacit conversation with actual reality.” (Borgmann 92)

“The essential structure of a poem [. . .] resembles that of a ballet or musical composition.” (Brooks 964)

        Tori Amos, “Liquid Diamonds”:

         Seamus Heaney, “Bog Queen”

To paraphrase MacLeish, Brooks, and Borgmann (with a touch of Ong): We live in a society which gleans its information from “secondary orality.”  We live in a postliterate society.  We need our space.  Temporality, we cry, makes us queasy.  And yet we are obsessed with this temporal prefix: postliterate/post-oral/poststructural/postmodern.  For those particularly distressed by this temporal paradox, we offer the alternative of “multinational capitalism.”  Within a certain context, these signs are all synonyms.  Or, more broadly,  these signs are paraphrases.

syn o nym noun a word having a meaning similar to that of another word in the same language.

par a phrase noun a restatement of a text or passage in another form or other words, often to clarify meaning.

We are not illiterate.  We are beyond literate. 

We real cool.  We
Left school.  We
Lurk late.  We
Strike straight.  We
Sing sin.  We
Thin gin.  We
Jazz June.  We
Die soon.

Most of these “structural ambiguities” are rooted in the heresy of experience.  A poem should not mean/But be.  Perhaps images paraphrase experiences, but whose experiences do these images appropriate?  Our experiences, muted and musty from misremembrance, or someone else’s experiences, falsely acquired?  We read images, and sometimes the images remind us of Nature.  They impart natural information and depict natural settings.  Cursors are budding flowers; desktop themes suggest gathered stones; screensavers show green leaves and crawling caterpillars.  If you do not have time for direct observation, you can enjoy Spring, paraphrased more or less, within the space you call a screen.  

There is no place like home.
There is no place like home.
There is no place like home.

No matter where in the world I am, I am never farther away from my homepage than three clicks on a mouse.

Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

We are not illiterate.  We are post-oral.  We close read images.  But what are images, and what kinds of images do we read?  Can an image be paraphrased, or is an image a paraphrase?  If images are metaphors for experience, whose experiences do these images paraphrase?  More specifically, what is a paraphrase?  If intelligent reading is a “tacit conversation” with actual reality, how then shall we define reality?  If we as a society are dependent upon orality and aurality, why is this particular conversation tacit?

1. Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926)
2. Cleanth Brooks, from "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (1947)
3. John Crowe Ransom, from The New Criticism (1941)
4. Albert Borgmann, from Holding On to Reality (1999)

[What does the "as" mean when MacLeish says that a poem should be "palpable and mute / As a globed fruit"?]

[What does this mean: "A poem should be equal to: / Not true"?]

[Is the middle movement of the poem ("A poem should be motionless in time . . .") a sentence?]

["For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf. // For love / The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea --": What does "for" mean here?]

[How does this poem answer its namesake: Horace's "Ars Poetica"?]

2. Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (1947) (text from Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) (instructor's initial interrogations or comments in RED)

        The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings. But even here one needs to make important qualifications: the principle is not one which involves the arrangement of the various elements into homogenous groupings, pairing like with like. It unites the like with the unlike. It does not unite them, however, by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out another nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.
         The attempt to deal with a structure such as this may account for the frequent occurrence in the preceding chapters of such terms as ambiguity, paradox, complex of attitudes, and—most frequent of all, and perhaps most annoying to the reader—irony. (p. 962)

[It may be said that the New Critics practised ambiguity, paradox, and irony but preached unity. Why is "unity" necessary in close reading at all? Why was unity necessary circa 1915-1940 during the period of the method's emergence? Or 1940-60 during the period of the method's dominance in the American higher-educational classroom?]

[How does close reading compare to oral culture as studied by Walter Ong?]

[How does close reading compare to Plato's "dialectic"?]]

The conventional terms are much worse than inadequate: they are positively misleading in their implication that the poem constitutes a "statement" of some sort, the statement being true or false, and expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or beautifully; for it is from this formula that most of the common heresies about poetry derive. (p. 962)

[What would Plato say?]

[The New Critics identified a number of "fallacies" of reading (e.g., the "affective fallacy," the "biographical fallacy"). Here, however, Brooks speaks of "heresies." Why heresy? Does this language seem overdetermined?]

For the imagery and the rhythm are not merely the instruments by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase is directly rendered. Even in the simplest poem their mediation is not positive and direct. Indeed, whatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the "meaning" of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifiying and revising it. (p. 962)

To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the relation of the poem to its "truth," we raise the problem of belief in a vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its "form" and its "content"—we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology. (p. 964)

The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the "statement" which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations developed through a temporal scheme.
       Or to move still closer to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play. . . . (pp. 964-65)

[If a poem is a play in which there are no authorial views but merely poetic "personae" playing a role, then who is responsible?]

[If a poem is a play, then is classroom discussion of a poem also a play?]

The characteristic unity of a poem (even of those poems which may accidentally possess a logical unity as well as this poetic unity) lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet has "come to terms" with his experience. The poem does not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. The conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means—by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not a formula. It is "proved" as a dramatic conclusion is proved: by its ability to resolve the conflicts which have been accepted as the données of the drama. (p. 966)

[A challenge for New Critical reading:]

Charles Bernstein, "You" (1983)

Time wounds all heals, spills through
with echoes neither idea nor lair
can jam. The door of your unfolding
starts like intervening vacuum, lush
refer to accidence or chance of
lachrymose fixation made
mercurial as the tors in crevice lock
dried up like river made the rhymes
to know what ocean were unkempt
or hide's detain the wean of
hide's felicity depend.

If the structure of poetry is a structure of the order described, that fact may explain (if not justify) the frequency with which I have had to have recourse . . . to terms like irony and paradox. . . . irony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context. . . . Morever, irony is our most general term for indicating that recognition of incongruities—which, again, pervades all poetry to a degree far beyond what our conventional criticism has been heretofore willing to allow. (pp. 966-67)

There should be no mystery as to why this must be so. The terms of science are abstract symbols which do not change under the pressure of the context. They are pure (or aspire to be pure) denotations; they are defined in advance. They are not to be warped into new meanings. But where is the dictionary which contains the terms of a poem? . . . [T]he word, as the poet uses it, has to be conceived of, not as a discrete particle of meaning, but as a potential of meaning, a nexus or cluster of meanings. (p. 967)

[The poet's] task is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an "imitation"—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience. (p. 968)

[Is a poem in the New Critical reading "natural" information in Albert Borgmann's sense? Is it "aura" in Benjamin's sense?]

[What does "experience" mean? Compare John Dewey in roughly these years.]

[If the New Criticism is a defense of reading against information as "statement," is it also a defense of reading against the other aspect of mass media at the time: entertainment? What is the experience of reading a poem like, for example, as compared with Benjamin's "distraction"?]

What sort of liberties does the poet take with a discourse when he sets it to meter? And what sort of discourse is prepared to permit those liberties?

An argument which admits of alteration in order that it may receive a meter must be partly indeterminate. The argument cannot be maintained exactly as determined by its own laws, for it is going to be un-determined by the meter.

Conversely, a metrical form must be partly indeterminate if it proposes to embody an argument. It is useless to try to determine it closely in advance, for the argument will un-determine it. . . .

I offer a graph, which will be of course an oversimplification, to show the parts which meaning and meter play in the act of composition.

DM stands for determinate meaning, or such of the intended meaning as succeeds in being adhered to; it may be fairly represented by the logical paraphrase of the poem. IM stands for indeterminate meaning, or that part of the final meaning which took shape not according to its own logical necessity but under metrical compulsion; it may be represented by the poem's residue of meaning which does not go into the logical paraphrase. DS stands for the determinate sound-structure, or the meter; and IS stands for whatever phonetic character the sounds have assumed which is in no relation to the meter. . . .

For the sake of the pictorial image, I assume the final poem to be the body of language lying between the intersecting arcs at the center; the one arc (on the left) representing the extreme liberties which meaning has taken with meter, and the other arc (on the right) representing the extreme liberties which meter has taken with meaning. . . .

[Poetry] is a discourse which does not bother too much about the perfection of its logic; and does bother a great deal, as if it were life and death, about the positive quality of that indeterminate thing which creeps in by the back door of metrical necessity. I suggest the closest possible study of IM, the indeterminate meaning.

(pp. 298-303)

[Why is this core statement of poetic theory in Ransom so scientistic in its discourse? Does poetry, as indicated in the diagram, really follow the inverse square law of the propagation of electromagnetic waves?]

The process of converting the instructions of a design into something real I call realizing information. The paradigmatic kinds of such realization are reading, performing, and building. Realizing information is to take an abstract design and to have it come to life in the concrete world. This can be an exhilarating as much as a perilous event. A grand conception becomes a reality; yet no conception can entirely anticipate and control the conditions of its realization. The contingency of the world, its vagaries and frailties as well as its vigor and resourcefulness, assert themselves in unsurpassable ways. Realization of information is always the encounter, and sometimes the struggle, of the structure of a design with the contingency of reality. (pp. 85-86)

[Is Borgmann a New Critic?]

Whatever the complexities of parsing, it is clear that the context helps to resolve the structural ambiguities of sentences. Supplying a rudimentary framework by way of an introduction prompts the reader to settle on a particular parsing. But such prompting, though solving the contextual problem in one sense, aggravates it in another. The introduction, after all, is one more piece of information, beset by its own ambiguities and requiring yet another context to acquire a definite meaning. (pp. 87-88)

Intimacy and privacy are the hallmarks of today's reading. No sound comes between the reader and the text, no listener can intrude into the reader's comprehension. Though various contraptions and devices have been invented to disburden readers, the typical reader has been found in the same position for centuries—seated, holding the book, and turning the pages. Typically also the reader sits in an enclosure, a room, a garden, or the shade of a tree. The truly devoted and collected readers in fact create an aura of seclusion and concentration wherever they happen to read. Though they seem to be absorbed in their books and lost to the world, readers are actually engaged in a vigorous and consequential enterprise. (p. 91)

[Can truly devoted and collected readers discuss a poem together in a class?]