6) Literary Criticism

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Literary Criticism

Encyclopdia Britannica Article

Introduction

the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to anyargumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato's cautionsagainst the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus oftentaken as the earliest important example of literary criticism.

More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called practical criticism, the

interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Criticism in this narrow sense can bedistinguished not only from aesthetics (the philosophy of artistic value) but also from other

matters that may concern the student of literature: biographical questions, bibliography,historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method. Thus, especially inacademic studies, criticism is often considered to be separate from scholarship. In

practice, however, this distinction often proves artificial, and even the most single-mindedconcentration on a text may be informed by outside knowledge, while many notable works ofcriticism combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature andthe principles of assessing it.

Criticism will here be taken to cover all phases of literary understanding, though theemphasis will be on the evaluation of literary works and of their authors' places in literaryhistory. For another particular aspect of literary criticism, see textual criticism.

Functions

The functions of literary criticism vary widely, ranging from the reviewing of books as theyare published to systematic theoretical discussion. Though reviews may sometimes determinewhether a given book will be widely sold, many works succeed commercially despitenegative reviews, and many classic works, including Herman Melville's Moby Dick(1851),have acquired appreciative publics long after being unfavourably reviewed and at firstneglected. One of criticism's principal functions is to express the shifts in sensibility thatmake such revaluations possible. The minimal condition for such a new appraisal is, of

course, that the original text survive. The literary critic is sometimes cast in the role ofscholarly detective, unearthing, authenticating, and editing unknown manuscripts. Thus, evenrarefied scholarly skills may be put to criticism's most elementary use, the bringing of literaryworks to a public's attention.

The variety of criticism's functions is reflected in the range of publications in which itappears. Criticism in the daily press rarely displays sustained acts of analysis and maysometimes do little more than summarize a publisher's claims for a book's interest. Weeklyand biweekly magazines serve to introduce new books but are often more discriminating intheir judgments, and some of these magazines, such as The (London) Times LiterarySupplement and The New York Review of Books, are far from indulgent toward popular

works. Sustained criticism can also be found in monthlies and quarterlies with a broad


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circulation, in little magazines for specialized audiences, and in scholarly journals and

books.

Because critics often try to be lawgivers, declaring which works deserve respect andpresuming to say what they are really about, criticism is a perennial target of resentment.

Misguided or malicious critics can discourage an author who has been feeling his way towarda new mode that offends received taste. Pedantic critics can obstruct a serious engagementwith literature by deflecting attention toward inessential matters. As the French philosopher-critic Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the critic may announce that French thought is a perpetualcolloquy between Pascal and Montaigne not in order to make those thinkers more alive but tomake thinkers of his own time more dead. Criticism can antagonize authors even when itperforms its function well. Authors who regard literature as needing no advocates orinvestigators are less than grateful when told that their works possess unintended meaning orare imitative or incomplete.

What such authors may tend to forget is that their works, once published, belong to them only

in a legal sense. The true owner of their works is the public, which will appropriate them forits own concerns regardless of the critic. The critic's responsibility is not to the author's self-esteem but to the public and to his own standards of judgment, which are usually moreexacting than the public's. Justification for his role rests on the premise that literary works arenot in fact self-explanatory. A critic is socially useful to the extent that society wants, andreceives, a fuller understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him. Infilling this appetite, the critic whets it further, helping to create a public that cares aboutartistic quality. Without sensing the presence of such a public, an author may either prostitutehis talent or squander it in sterile acts of defiance. In this sense, the critic is not a parasite but,potentially, someone who is responsible in part for the existence of good writing in his owntime and afterward.

Although some critics believe that literature should be discussed in isolation from othermatters, criticism usually seems to be openly or covertly involved with social and politicaldebate. Since literature itself is often partisan, is always rooted to some degree in localcircumstances, and has a way of calling forth affirmations of ultimate values, it is notsurprising that the finest critics have never paid much attention to the alleged boundariesbetween criticism and other types of discourse. Especially in modern Europe, literarycriticism has occupied a central place in debate about cultural and political issues. Sartre'sown What Is Literature? (1947) is typical in its wide-ranging attempt to prescribe the literaryintellectual's ideal relation to the development of his society and to literature as a

manifestation of human freedom. Similarly, some prominent American critics, includingAlfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth Burke, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe, began aspolitical radicals in the 1930s and sharpened their concern for literature on the dilemmas anddisillusionments of that era. Trilling's influential The Liberal Imagination (1950) issimultaneously a collection of literary essays and an attempt to reconcile the claims ofpolitics and art.

Such a reconciliation is bound to be tentative and problematic if the critic believes, as Trillingdoes, that literature possesses an independent value and a deeper faithfulness to reality than iscontained in any political formula. In Marxist states, however, literature has usually beenconsidered a means to social ends and, therefore, criticism has been cast in forthrightly

partisan terms. Dialectical materialism does not necessarily turn the critic into a mereguardian of party doctrine, but it does forbid him to treat literature as a cause in itself, apart


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from the working class's needs as interpreted by the party. Where this utilitarian viewprevails, the function of criticism is taken to be continuous with that of the state itself,namely, furtherance of the social revolution. The critic's main obligation is not to his texts butrather to the masses of people whose consciousness must be advanced in the designateddirection. In periods of severe orthodoxy, the practice of literary criticism has not always

been distinguishable from that of censorship.

Historical development

Antiquity

Although almost all of the criticism ever written dates from the 20th century, questions firstposed by Plato and Aristotle are still of prime concern, and every critic who has attempted to

justify the social value of literature has had to come to terms with the opposing argumentmade by Plato in The Republic. The poet as a man and poetry as a form of statement both

seemed untrustworthy to Plato, who depicted the physical world as an imperfect copy oftranscendent ideas and poetry as a mere copy of the copy. Thus, literature could only misleadthe seeker of truth. Plato credited the poet with divine inspiration, but this, too, was cause forworry; a man possessed by such madness would subvert the interests of a rational polity.Poets were therefore to be banished from the hypothetical republic.

In his Poeticsstill the most respected of all discussions of literatureAristotle counteredPlato's indictment by stressing what is normal and useful about literary art. The tragic poet isnot so much divinely inspired as he is motivated by a universal human need to imitate, andwhat he imitates is not something like a bed (Plato's example) but a noble action. Suchimitation presumably has a civilizing value for those who empathize with it. Tragedy does

arouse emotions of pity and terror in its audience, but these emotions are purged in theprocess (katharsis). In this fashion Aristotle succeeded in portraying literature as satisfyingand regulating human passions instead of inflaming them.

Although Plato and Aristotle are regarded as antagonists, the narrowness of theirdisagreement is noteworthy. Both maintain that poetry is mimetic, both treat the arousing ofemotion in the perceiver, and both feel that poetry takes its justification, if any, from itsservice to the state. It was obvious to both men that poets wielded great power over others.Unlike many modern critics who have tried to show that poetry is more than a pastime,Aristotle had to offer reassurance that it was not socially explosive.

Aristotle's practical contribution to criticism, as opposed to his ethical defense of literature,lies in his inductive treatment of the elements and kinds of poetry. Poetic modes are identifiedaccording to their means of imitation, the actions they imitate, the manner of imitation, andits effects. These distinctions assist the critic in judging each mode according to its properends instead of regarding beauty as a fixed entity. The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceivedthem, are best served by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction,thought, spectacle, and song. Thanks to Aristotle's insight into universal aspects of audiencepsychology, many of his dicta have proved to be adaptable to genres developed long after histime.

Later Greek and Roman criticism offers no parallel to Aristotle's originality. Much ancientcriticism, such as that of Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian in Rome, was absorbed in technical


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rules of exegesis and advice to aspiring rhetoricians. Horace's verse epistle The Art of Poetryis an urbane amplification of Aristotle's emphasis on the decorum or internal propriety ofeach genre, now including lyric, pastoral, satire, elegy, and epigram, as well as Aristotle'sepic, tragedy, and comedy. This work was later to be prized by Neoclassicists of the 17thcentury not only for its rules but also for its humour, common sense, and appeal to educated

taste. On the Sublime, by the Roman-Greek known as Longinus, was to become influentialin the 18th century but for a contrary reason: when decorum began to lose its swayencouragement could be found in Longinus for arousing elevated and ecstatic feeling in thereader. Horace and Longinus developed, respectively, the rhetorical and the affective sides ofAristotle's thought, but Longinus effectively reversed the Aristotelian concern with regulationof the passions.

Medieval period

In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient criticaltexts and from an antipagan distrust of the literary imagination. Such Church Fathers asTertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the Platonic argument againstpoetry. But both the ancient gods and the surviving classics reasserted their fascination,entering medieval culture in theologically allegorized form. Encyclopaedists and textualcommentators explained the supposed Christian content of pre-Christian works and the OldTestament. Although there was no lack of rhetoricians to dictate the correct use of literaryfigures, no attempt was made to derive critical principles from emergent genres such as thefabliau and the chivalric romance. Criticism was in fact inhibited by the very coherence of thetheologically explained universe. When nature is conceived as endlessly and purposefullysymbolic of revealed truth, specifically literary problems of form and meaning are bound tobe neglected. Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to

have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scripturalexegesis.

The Renaissance

Renaissance criticism grew directly from the recovery of classic texts and notably fromGiorgio Valla's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Latin in 1498. By 1549 the Poetics hadbeen rendered into Italian as well. From this period until the later part of the 18th centuryAristotle was once again the most imposing presence behind literary theory. Critics looked toancient poems and plays for insight into the permanent laws of art. The most influential ofRenaissance critics was probably Lodovico Castelvetro, whose 1570 commentary on

Aristotle's Poetics encouraged the writing of tightly structured plays by extending andcodifying Aristotle's idea of the dramatic unities. It is difficult today to appreciate that thisobeisance to antique models had a liberating effect; one must recall that imitation of theancients entailed rejecting scriptural allegory and asserting the individual author's ambition tocreate works that would be unashamedly great and beautiful. Classicism, individualism, andnational pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century Frenchwriters known as the Pliadenotably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellayweresimultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

The ideas of the Italian and French Renaissance were transmitted to England by RogerAscham, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, and others. Gascoigne's Certayne notes ofInstruction (1575), the first English manual of versification, had a considerable effect onpoetic practice in the Elizabethan Age. Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595) vigorously argued


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the poet's superiority to the philosopher and the historian on the grounds that his imaginationis chained neither to lifeless abstractions nor to dull actualities. The poet doth not only showthe way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it.

While still honouring the traditional conception of poetry's role as bestowing pleasure andinstruction, Sidney's essay presages the Romantic claim that the poetic mind is a law unto

itself.

Neoclassicism and its decline

The Renaissance in general could be regarded as a neoclassical period, in that ancient workswere considered the surest models for modern greatness. Neoclassicism, however, usuallyconnotes narrower attitudes that are at once literary and social: a worldly-wise tempering ofenthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of propriety and balance.Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by theseHoratian norms. French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strictorthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre, as if todisregard them were to lapse into barbarity. The poet was not to imagine that his geniusexempted him from the established laws of craftsmanship.

Neoclassicism had a lesser impact in England, partly because English Puritanism had keptalive some of the original Christian hostility to secular art, partly because English authorswere on the whole closer to plebeian taste than were the court-oriented French, and partlybecause of the difficult example of Shakespeare, who magnificently broke all of the rules.Not even the relatively severe classicist Ben Jonson could bring himself to denyShakespeare's greatness, and the theme of Shakespearean genius triumphing over formalimperfections is echoed by major British critics from John Dryden and Alexander Pope

through Samuel Johnson. The science of Newton and the psychology of Locke also workedsubtle changes on neoclassical themes. Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) is a Horatiancompendium of maxims, but Pope feels obliged to defend the poetic rules as Nature

methodiz'da portent of quite different literary inferences from Nature. Dr. Johnson, too,though he respected precedent, was above all a champion of moral sentiment andmediocrity, the appeal to generally shared traits. His preference for forthright sincerity left

him impatient with such intricate conventions as those of the pastoral elegy.

The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly surprising; literary theory had developed very littleduring two centuries of artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century's importantnew genre, the novel, drew most of its readers from a bourgeoisie that had little use for

aristocratic dicta. A Longinian cult of feeling gradually made headway, in variousEuropean countries, against Neoclassical canons of proportion and moderation. Emphasisshifted from concern for meeting fixed criteria to the subjective state of the reader and then ofthe author himself. The spirit ofnationalism entered criticism as a concern for the origins andgrowth of one's own native literature and as an esteem for such non-Aristotelian factors asthe spirit of the age. Historical consciousness produced by turns theories of literary

progress and primitivistic theories affirming, as one critic put it, that barbarous times are

the most favourable to the poetic spirit. The new recognition of strangeness and strongfeeling as literary virtues yielded various fashions of taste for misty sublimity, graveyardsentiments, medievalism, Norse epics (and forgeries), Oriental tales, and the verse ofplowboys. Perhaps the most eminent foes of Neoclassicism before the 19th century were

Denis Diderot in France and, in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, Johann von Herder, JohannWolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.


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Romanticism

Romanticism, an amorphous movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of the19th century, and somewhat later in France, Italy, and the United States, found spokesmen asdiverse as Goethe and August and Friedrich von Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Stal and Victor Hugo in France,Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the UnitedStates. Romantics tended to regard the writing of poetry as a transcendentally importantactivity, closely related to the creative perception of meaning in the world. The poet wascredited with the godlike power that Plato had feared in him; Transcendental philosophy was,indeed, a derivative of Plato's metaphysical Idealism. In the typical view of Percy ByssheShelley, poetry strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked andsleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its definition of poetry as thespontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regardedas the opening statement of English Romanticism. In England, however, only Coleridge in his

Biographia Literaria (1817) embraced the whole complex of Romantic doctrines emanatingfrom Germany; the British empiricist tradition was too firmly rooted to be totally washedaside by the new metaphysics. Most of those who were later called Romantics did share anemphasis on individual passion and inspiration, a taste for symbolism and historicalawareness, and a conception of art works as internally whole structures in which feelings aredialectically merged with their contraries. Romantic criticism coincided with the emergenceofaesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethicaldemands upon literature. The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition thatartistic creations are justified, not by their promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence

and intensity.The late 19th century

The Romantic movement had been spurred not only by German philosophy but also by theuniversalistic and utopian hopes that accompanied the French Revolution. Some of thosehopes were thwarted by political reaction, while others were blunted by industrial capitalismand the accession to power of the class that had demanded general liberty. Advocates of theliterary imagination now began to think of themselves as enemies or gadflies of the newlyentrenched bourgeoisie. In some hands the idea of creative freedom dwindled to a

bohemianism pitting art for its own sake against commerce and respectability. Aestheticism

characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England. Atan opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of socialtruth were developed by Vissarion Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and mile Zola inFrance, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola's program, however, was noless anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he wanted novels to document conditions soas to expose their injustice. Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in thecriticism ofMatthew Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and forthe unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class.

Toward the end of the 19th century, especially in Germany, England, and the United States,literary study became an academic discipline at the doctoral level. Philology, linguistics,folklore study, and the textual principles that had been devised for biblical criticism provided


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curricular guidelines, while academic taste mirrored the prevailing impressionistic concernfor the quality of the author's spirit. Several intellectual currents joined to make possible thewriting of systematic and ambitious literary histories. Primitivism and Medievalism hadawakened interest in neglected early texts; scientific Positivism encouraged a scrupulousregard for facts; and the German idea that each country's literature had sprung from a unique

national consciousness provided a conceptual framework. The French critic Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature (published in French, 186369) reflected the prevailingdeterminism of scientific thought; for him a work could be explained in terms of the race,milieu, and moment that produced it. For other critics of comparable stature, such as CharlesSainte-Beuve in France, Benedetto Croce in Italy, and George Saintsbury in England,historical learning only threw into relief the expressive uniqueness of each artistictemperament.

The 20th century

The ideal of objective research has continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarshipand criticism and has prompted work of unprecedented accuracy. Bibliographic procedureshave been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory haveplaced criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important contributions to literaryunderstanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, andpsychoanalysis. Impressionistic method has given way to systematic inquiry from whichgratuitous assumptions are, if possible, excluded. Yet demands for a more ethicallycommitted criticism have repeatedly been made, from the New Humanism of Paul ElmerMore and Irving Babbitt in the United States in the 1920s, through the moralizing criticism ofthe Cambridge don F.R. Leavis and of the American poet Yvor Winters, to the most recentdemands for relevance.

No sharp line can be drawn between academic criticism and criticism produced by authorsand men of letters. Many of the latter are now associated with universities, and the main shiftof academic emphasis, from impressionism to formalism, originated outside the academy inthe writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Hulme, largely in London around 1910. Onlysubsequently did such academics as I.A. Richards and William Empson in England and JohnCrowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks in the United States adapt the New Criticism to reform ofthe literary curriculumin the 1940s. New Criticism has been the methodologicalcounterpart to the strain of modernist literature characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox,and indifference or outright hostility to the democratic ethos. In certain respects thehegemony of New Criticism has been political as well as literary; and anti-Romantic

insistence on irony, convention, and aesthetic distance has been accompanied by scorn for allrevolutionary hopes. In Hulme conservatism and classicism were explicitly linked.Romanticism struck him as spilt religion, a dangerous exaggeration of human freedom. In

reality, however, New Criticism owed much to Romantic theory, especially to Coleridge'sidea of organic form, and some of its notable practitioners have been left of centre in theirsocial thought.

The totality of Western criticism in the 20th century defies summary except in terms of itsrestless multiplicity and factionalism. Schools of literary practice, such as Imagism, Futurism,Dadaism, and Surrealism, have found no want of defenders and explicators. Ideologicalgroupings, psychological dogmas, and philosophical trends have generated polemics andanalysis, and literary materials have been taken as primary data by sociologists andhistorians. Literary creators themselves have continued to write illuminating commentary on


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their own principles and aims. In poetry, Paul Valry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens; in thetheatre, George Bernard Shaw, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht; and in fiction, Marcel Proust,D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann have contributed to criticism in the act of justifying theirart.

Most of the issues debated in 20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, eventechnical, in nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of aliterary work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or only thewords themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author's avowed intention be trusted,or merely taken into account, or disregarded as irrelevant? How is conscious irony to bedistinguished from mere ambivalence, or allusiveness from allegory? Which among manyapproacheslinguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forthis bestadapted to making full sense of a text? Would a synthesis of all these methods yield a totaltheory of literature? Such questions presuppose that literature is valuable and that objectiveknowledge of its workings is a desirable end. These assumptions are, indeed, so deeplyburied in most critical discourse that they customarily remain hidden from critics themselves,

who imagine that they are merely solving problems of intrinsic interest.

The influence of science

What separates modern criticism from earlier work is its catholicity of scope and method, itsborrowing of procedures from the social scienes, and its unprecedented attention to detail. Asliterature's place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as humanisticeducation has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of professionals serving as oneanother's judges, criticism has evolved into a complex discipline, increasingly refined in itsprocedures but often lacking a sense of contact with the general social will. Major modern

critics, to be sure, have not allowed their close reading to distract them from certainperennial questions about poetic truth, the nature of literary satisfaction, and literature's socialutility, but even these matters have sometimes been cast in value-free empirical terms.

Recourse to scientific authority and method, then, is the outstanding trait of 20th-centurycriticism. The sociology of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythologicalinvestigations of Sir James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl'sphenomenology, Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, and the psychologicalmodels proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung have all found their way into criticism.The result has been not simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespreadbelief that literature's governing principles can be located outside literature. Jungian

archetypal criticism, for example, regularly identifies literary power with the presence ofcertain themes that are alleged to inhabit the myths and beliefs of all cultures, whilepsychoanalytic exegetes interpret poems in exactly the manner that Freud interpreted dreams.Such procedures may encourage the critic, wisely or unwisely, to discount traditionalboundaries between genres, national literatures, and levels of culture; the critical enterprisebegins to seem continuous with a general study of man. The impetus toward universalism canbe discerned even in those critics who are most skeptical of it, the so-called historicalrelativists who attempt to reconstruct each epoch's outlook and to understand works as theyappeared to their first readers. Historical relativism does undermine cross-cultural notions ofbeauty, but it reduces the record of any given period to data from which inferences can besystematically drawn. Here, too, in other words, uniform methodology tends to replace the

intuitive connoisseurship that formerly typified the critic's sense of his role.


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Criticism and knowledge

The debate over poetic truth may illustrate how modern discussion is beholden toextraliterary knowledge. Critics have never ceased disputing whether literature depicts theworld correctly, incorrectly, or not at all, and the dispute has often had more to do with the

support or condemnation of specific authors than with ascertainable facts about mimesis.Today it may be almost impossible to take a stand regarding poetic truth without also comingto terms with positivism as a total epistemology. The spectacular achievements of physicalscience have (with logic questioned by some) downgraded intuition and placed a premium onconcrete, testable statements very different from those found in poems. Some of the mostinfluential modern critics, notably I.A. Richards in his early works, have accepted this valueorder and have confined themselves to behavioristic study of how literature stimulates thereader's feelings. A work of literature, for them, is no longer something that captures anexternal or internal reality, but is merely a locus for psychological operations; it can only be

judged as eliciting or failing to elicit a desired response.

Other critics, however, have renewed the Shelleyan and Coleridgean contention that literaryexperience involves a complex and profound form of knowing. In order to do so they havehad to challenge Positivism in general. Such a challenge cannot be convincingly mountedwithin the province of criticism itself and must depend rather on the authority of antipositivistepistemologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, and Michael Polanyi. If it isnow respectable to maintain, with Wallace Stevens and others, that the world is knownthrough imaginative apprehensions of the sort that poetry celebrates and employs, this isattributable to developments far outside the normal competence of critics.

The pervasive influence of science is most apparent in modern criticism's passion for total

explanation of the texts it brings under its microscope. Even formalist schools, which take forgranted an author's freedom to shape his work according to the demands of art, treatindividual lines of verse with a dogged minuteness that was previously unknown, hopingthereby to demonstrate the organic coherence of the poem. The spirit of explanation is alsoapparent in those schools that argue from the circumstances surrounding a work's origin tothe work itself, leaving an implication that the former have caused the latter. The determinismis rarely as explicit or relentless as it was in Taine's scheme of race, milieu, and moment, butthis may reflect the fact that causality in general is now handled with more sophisticationthan in Taine's day.

Whether criticism will continue to aim at empirical exactitude or will turn in some new

direction cannot be readily predicted, for the empiricist ideal and its sanctuary, the university,are not themselves secure from attack. The history of criticism is one of oscillation betweenperiods of relative advance, when the imaginative freedom of great writers prompts critics toextend their former conceptions, and periods when stringent moral and formal prescriptionsare laid upon literature. In times of social upheaval criticism may more or less deliberatelyabandon the ideal of disinterested knowledge and be mobilized for a practical end.Revolutionary movements provide obvious instances of such redirection, whether or not theyidentify their pragmatic goals with the cause of science. It should be evident that the future ofcriticism depends on factors that lie outside criticism itself as a rationally evolving discipline.When a whole society shifts its attitudes toward pleasure, unorthodox behaviour, or themeaning of existence, criticism must follow along.


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As Matthew Arnold foresaw, the waning of religious certainty has encouraged critics toinvest their faith in literature, taking it as the one remaining source of value and order. Thisdevelopment has stimulated critical activity, yet, paradoxically, it may also be responsible inpart for a growing impatience with criticism. What Arnold could not have anticipated is thatthe faith of some moderns would be apocalyptic and Dionysian rather than a sober and

attenuated derivative of Victorian Christianity. Thought in the 20th century has yielded astrong undercurrent of anarchism which celebrates libidinous energy and self-expression atthe expense of all social constraint, including that of literary form. In the critical writings ofD.H. Lawrence, for example, fiction is cherished as an instrument of unconscious revelationand liberation. A widespread insistence upon prophetic and ecstatic power in literature seemsat present to be undermining the complex, irony-minded formalism that has dominatedmodern discourse. As literary scholarship has acquired an ever-larger arsenal of weapons forattacking problems of meaning, it has met with increasing resentment from people who wishto be nourished by whatever is elemental and mysterious in literary experience.

An awareness of critical history suggests that the development is not altogether new, for

criticism stands now approximately where it did in the later 18th century, when the Longinianspirit of expressiveness contested the sway of Boileau and Pope. To the extent that moderntextual analysis has become what Hulme predicted, a classical revival, it may not be

welcomed by those who want a direct and intense rapport with literature. What is resistednow is not Neoclassical decorum but impersonal methodology, which is thought to deadencommitment. Such resistance may prove beneficial if it reminds critics that rationalizedprocedures are indeed no substitute for engagement. Excellent work continues to be written,not because a definitive method or synthesis of methods has been found, but on the contrarybecause the best critics still understand that criticism is an exercise of private sympathy,discrimination, and moral and cultural reflection.

Frederick C. Crews


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Additional Reading

A useful compilation of essential texts on literary criticism is Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and GordonMcKenzie (eds.), Criticism, rev. ed. (1958). The best survey of critical history is William K. Wimsatt, Jr.,

and Cleanth Brooks,Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957); G.M.A. Grube, The Greek and RomanCritics (1965); Joel E. Spingarn,A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 5th ed. (1925,paperback edition 1963); Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1946, reprinted 1961); and ReneWellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 17501950, 4 vol. (195565), are more specializedhistorical studies. Important theoretical statements are M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp(1953); Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd rev. ed. (1966); Northrop Frye,Anatomyof Criticism (1957); and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). William Empson, Seven Typesof Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1956, reprinted 1963); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946; Eng. trans. 1953);and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950), are representative examples of moderncriticism, combining theory with analysis of a wide variety of texts. See also Douwe W. Fokkemaand Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism,

Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (1978).

Source:

"literary criticism." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica 2009 Student andHome Edition. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica, 2009.


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Literary CriticismI INTRODUCTION

Literary Criticism, discussion of literature, including description, analysis, interpretation,and evaluation of literary works. Like literature, criticism is hard to define. One of the criticstasks is to challenge definitions of literature and criticism that seem too general, too narrow,or unworkable for any other reason. Whatever it is, literary criticism deals with differentdimensions of literature as a collection of texts through which authors evoke more or lessfictitious worlds for the imagination ofreaders.

We can look at any work of literature by paying special attention to one of several aspects: itslanguage and structure; its intended purpose; the information and worldview it conveys; or itseffect on an audience. Most good critics steer clear of exclusive interest in a single element.

In studying a texts formal characteristics, for example, critics usually recognize thevariability of performances of dramatic works and the variability of readers mentalinterpretations of texts. In studying an authors purpose, critics acknowledge that forces

beyond a writers conscious intentions can affect what the writer actually communicates. In

studying what a literary work is about, critics often explore the complex relationship betweentruth and fiction in various types of storytelling. In studying literatures impact on its

audience, critics have been increasingly aware of how cultural expectations shape experience.

Because works of literature can be studied long after their first publication, awareness ofhistorical and theoretical context contributes to our understanding, appreciation, and

enjoyment of them. Historical research relates a work to the life and times of its author.Attention to the nature, functions, and categories of literature provides a theoreticalframework joining a past text to the experience of present readers. The tradition of literarycriticism surveyed here combines observations by creative writers, philosophers, and, morerecently, trained specialists in literary, historical, and cultural studies.

II CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

The Western traditions earliest extended instance of literary criticism occurs in The Frogs

(405 BC), a comedy by Athenian playwright Aristophanes that pokes fun at the contrastingstyles of Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides. In the play the two dead masters ofGreek tragedy compete for supremacy in Hades (the underworld), debating a fundamentaldilemma of all subsequent criticism: Is the writers first commitment to uphold and promote

morality or to represent reality? Is the task of drama and other forms of literature primarily toimprove or primarily to inform the audience?

Greek philosopher Plato found virtually all creative writers deficient on both counts in hisdialogue The Republic (about 380 BC). Plato felt that stories about misbehaving gods anddeath-fearing heroes were apt to steer immature people toward frivolous and unpatriotic

conduct. Besides, he argued, poetry tended to arouse the emotions rather than promote suchvirtues as temperance and endurance. But even at their moral best, Plato viewed writerslike


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painters and sculptorsas mere imitators of actual human beings, who are themselves veryimperfect copiesor imitations of the eternal idea of Human Being in the divine mind.

Greek philosopher Aristotle produced a strong philosophical defense against such criticism.His Poetics (about 330 BC) presents artistic representation (mimesis) not as mere copying butas creative re-presentation with universal significance. For example, the epic poet and theplaywright evoke human beings in action without having to report actual events. Because thepoetic approach to human action is more philosophical in nature than a purely historicalapproach, literature can show the most probable action of a person of a specific type, ratherthan what an actual person said or did on a particular occasion. Even the portrayal of greatsuffering and death may thus give pleasure to an audiencethe pleasure of learningsomething essential about reality.

Aristotle justified the poetic arousal of passions by borrowing the concept of catharsis(purification through purging) from contemporary medicine. He suggested that tragedy curesus of the harmful effects of excessive pity, fear, and similar emotions by first inducing suchemotions in us, and then pleasurably purging them in the controlled therapeutic setting oftheatrical experience. The precise meaning of Aristotles concept of catharsis has beendebated for many centuries, but most critics of literature and of other arts, such as opera andcinema, find useful his isolation and analysis of six interacting aspects of performed drama:plot, character, thought or theme, diction, music, and spectacle.

Roman poet Horace offered practical advice in Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, about 20 BC),a witty letter written in verse to two aspiring authors. His most influential suggestion was tocombine the useful (utile) and the sweet (dulce) so as to satisfy a varied audience. Somereaders seek benefit, others seek pleasure, he explained, but both kinds of readers willpurchase writings that instruct and delight at the same time.

A weightier treatment of poetry appears in a 1st-century AD treatise, On the Sublime, longattributed to a 3rd-century philosopher named Longinus. The unknown author of this Greektext cites passages from Greek poets Homer and Sapphoas well as from orators, historians,philosophers, and the first chapter of Genesisto prove the superiority of discourse that doesnot merely persuade or gratify its audience but also transports it into a state of enthusiasticecstasy. The author analyzes the rhetorical devices needed to achieve sublime effects butinsists that ultimately, sublimity is the echo of a great soul.

III MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

In medieval Europe, where Latin served as the common language of educated people, muchscholarly interest focused on Roman authors and their Greek models. To reconcile non-Christian writings with the official doctrine of the Christian church, critics interpreted themallegorically. Greek and Roman divinities, for example, might be viewed as personificationsof certain virtues and vices. Scholars applied similar interpretive methods to Hebrewscriptures to show, for instance, how the biblical story of Jonah surviving in the belly of a big

fish foreshadowed the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even the parables andmetaphors of the Christian Gospels were felt to require allegorical, moral, and spiritual


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interpretation to achieve a deeper understanding of their meaning. By the 14th century, Italianwriters Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio suggested that works of nonreligiousliterature could likewise reward multiple readings beyond the literal level.

Italian translators and commentators of the late 15th and 16th centuries were in the forefrontof the Renaissance rediscovery of Aristotles Poetics, aided by the commentaries on Aristotlewritten by Averros, a 12th-century Arab scholar living in Spain. Ever since the Renaissance,critics influenced by Aristotle focus on artistic representation rather than on an authors

rhetorical and persuasive skills. But the view that persuasion is a major goal of literature,based on the writings of Roman statesman Cicero and Roman educator Quintilian aboutoratory, helped to shape literary studies well into the 18th century. Even today some criticsview all poetry, fiction, and drama as more or less concealed forms of rhetoric that aredesigned to please or move readers and theatergoers, chiefly as a means of teaching orotherwise persuading them.

English poet Sir Philip Sidney defended the poetic imagination against attacks from EnglishPuritans in his Defence of Poesie (written 1583; published 1595). Unlike historians or

philosophers, argued Sidney, a poet affirms nothing and therefore never lies, because a poets

works are not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written. Far from imitatingimperfect nature, the poet creates an ideal world of the imagination where virtuous heroesinvite admiring readers to imitate them. According to Sidney, philosophers outshine poetswhen it comes to abstract teaching, but the power to move (or, in todays language, tomotivate) makes the poet ultimately superior because, for teaching to be effective, we needfirst to be moved with desire to know and then to be moved to do that which we know.

IV THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

The climate of criticism changed with the arrival on the literary scene of such giants asMiguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Pedro Caldern in Spain; William Shakespeare, BenJonson, and John Milton in England; and Pierre Corneille, Jean Baptiste Racine, and Molirein France. Most of these writers specialized or excelled in drama, and consequently the so-called battle of the ancients and modernsthe critical comparison of Greek and Romanauthors with more recent oneswas fought chiefly in that arena.

In hisEssay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), English poet and playwright John Dryden presentedthe conflicting claims of the two sides as a debate among four friends, only one of whomfavors the ancient over the modern theater. One modernist prefers the dignified decorum of

French drama to the confusing tumult of actions and emotions on the English stage. By

contrast, Drydens spokesman prefers the lifelike drama of English theater to French tragedy,

which he considers beautiful but lifeless. All agree, however, that a play ought to be a justand lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humors, and the changes offortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.

An Essay on Criticism (1711), by English poet Alexander Pope, put together in verse both

ancient and modern opinions. Pope considered nature, including human nature, to beuniversal, and he saw no contradiction between the modern writers task of addressing a


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contemporary audience and the insistence by traditional critics that certain rules derived fromthe practice of the ancients be followed: Those rules of old discovered, not devised, / Are

nature still, but nature methodized.

English writer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his 1765 edition of Shakespeares plays,observed that nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general

nature. Accordingly, he praised Shakespeare for creating universal characters who act and

speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.Yet Johnson could not help objecting to what he saw as the playwrights lack of obvious

moral purpose and gross jests. In an earlier essay, On Fiction (1750), Johnson cautionedagainst the unselective realism of popular novels written chiefly for the young, the ignorant,

and the idle. In his view, such people are easily tempted to imitate the novelists portrayal of

those parts of nature which are discolored by passion, or deformed by wickedness.Mindful of the impact of literature on the minds of all readers, Johnson demanded that vice, ifit must be shown, should appear disgusting, and that virtue should not be represented in anextreme form because people would never emulate what they cannot believeimplausiblyvirtuous heroes or heroines, for example.

In her pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), English writer MaryWollstonecraft addressed the specific situation of women readers. She denounced shallownovelists, who she felt knew little about human nature and wrote stale tales in an overly

sentimental style. Since most women of her day received little education, Wollstonecraftfeared that reading such novels would further hinder womens neglected minds in the

right use of reason.

In the third quarter of the 18th century, French philosopher, novelist, and outspokenautobiographer Jean Jacques Rousseau offered an alternative to the faith in universal humanreason propounded by Pope, Johnson, and other writers. Opponents of excessive rationalismfound in Rousseau an advocate of their own growing interest in the expression of emotion,individual freedom, and personal experience. But most 19th-century concepts of literatureand criticism were to owe an even greater debt to a number of Germans who concluded orbegan their intellectual careers between 1770 and 1800: philosophers Immanuel Kant,Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and writer-critics Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, andthe brothers August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel. All of these thinkersinfluenced an important 19th-century movement known as romanticism, which emphasizedfeeling, individual experience, and the divinity of nature.


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V THE 19TH CENTURY

Ruskin on the Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin was the leading Victorian critic of art and literature. His Modern Painters (first volume

published in 1843) began as a defense of the English painter Joseph M. W. Turner. Ruskins

discourse extended to five volumes and led him to consider issues such as the need for and the

nature of truth in art. In this famous excerpt from the third volume, Ruskin moves away from

discussing truth and realism in art to consider the same problems in literature. He uses the term

pathetic to refer to the emotion pathos, with which a writer invests objects, and classifies with

remarkable clarity what he views as successful types of false appearances that communicate

poetic truths.

FromModern Painters

By John Ruskin

From Of the Pathetic Fallacy

Now therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out of our way, we may go on at

our ease to examine the point in questionnamely, the difference between the ordinary,

proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as

being entirely unconnected with any real power of character in the object, and only imputed to

it by us. For instance The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould Naked and

shivering, with his cup of gold.

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its

yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads

that it is anything else than a plain crocus?

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always

found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But

here is something pleasurable in written poetry, which is nevertheless untrue. And what ismore, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that

we like it all the more for being so.

It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds.

Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of willful fancy, which involves no real

expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the

feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall

have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error,

that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton

Locke They rowed her in across the rolling foam The cruel, crawling foam.


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The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these

characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent

feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external

things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical

description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, becausepassionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets

do not often admit this kind of falsenessthat it is only the second order of poets who much

delight in it.

Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the hank of Acheron as dead leaves flutter

from a bough, he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,

passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own

clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with

the other. But when Coleridge speaks of The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as

often as dance it can,

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a life in it, and will,

which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment,

and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the

morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses,

Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and

has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of their departure. They

cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first

which appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and

terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet, addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:

Elpenor! how camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou come faster on foot than I

in my black ship? Which Pope renders thus: O, say, what angry power Elpenor led To glide in

shades, and wander with the dead? How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined, Outfly

the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?

I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the

haziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits are so painful now when they have

been pleasant to us in the other instances?

For a very simple reason They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of

the wrong passiona passion which never could possibly have spoken themagonised curiosity.

Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter: and the very last thing his mind could do at the

moment would be to pause, or suggest in an wise what was not a fact. The delay in the firstthree lines, and conceit in the last jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful discord in

music. No poet of true imaginative power would possibly have written the passage.

Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of

fallacy. Coleridges fallacy has no discord in it, but Popes has set our teeth on edge.

Source: Ruskin, John. Of the Pathetic Fallacy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.Microsoft Encarta 2008. 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


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English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave memorableexpression to the romantic mindset developed by their German predecessors andcontemporaries. The romantics believed in the primacy of feeling, love, pleasure, andimagination over reason; in the spiritual superiority of natures organic forms over

mechanical ingenuity; and in the ability of art to restore a lost harmony between theindividual and nature, between society and nature, and between the individual and society. Inrevised versions of the preface to his and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworthdeclared that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and that the

poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure.The pleasure derived from the writing and reading of poetry were to Wordsworth a lovingacknowledgment of the beauty of the universe and an indication that the human mind wasthe mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. The critical writings of

Coleridge in turn stressed the parallel between cosmic creativity and the poets godlike

creative imagination.

InA Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840), English poet Percy Bysshe Shelleyelaborated on similar romantic themes. Shelley also suggested that the utilitarian science andtechnology of his time enhanced the inequality of mankind and that poetry should continue

to serve as an antidote to the principle of the self, of which money is the visibleincarnation. Throughout the Defence, Shelley speaks of poetry in a very broad sense asvisionary discourse.

By contrast, two mid-century American poet-critics addressed what they considered to beunique features of poetry. In his essay The Poet (written 1842-1843), Ralph WaldoEmerson argued that the poet uses symbols more appropriately than the religious mystic does,because the poet recognizes the multiple meanings of symbols and the ability of language toreflect a continuously changing world, whereas the mystic nails symbols to a specific

meaning. In a lecture on The Poetic Principle (1848), Edgar Allan Poe expressly

distinguished pure intellect from taste and moral sense. In Poes view, poets need to tonedown in proper subjection to beauty all incitements of passion,precepts of duty, and

lessons of truth so that the resulting work may be sensitively judged by our faculty of taste.

In A Short Essay on Critics(1840), American author and editor Margaret Fuller describedthree kinds of literary criticism: subjective indulgence in the critics own feelings about atext, apprehensive entry into the authors world, and comprehensive judging of a work bothby its own law and according to universal principles. These categories anticipate thedistinctions made by English poet-critic Matthew Arnold between three kinds of criticalestimations of the value of a literary work: the personal, the historical, and the real. In hisessay on The Study of Poetry (1880), Arnold assigned great cultural significance to theunbiased critics real estimates because, in an increasingly nonreligious time, mankind

will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustainus. Yet he believed that critics themselves would have to transcend the narrowness of their

own society to perform their role of spiritual guidance. Only by exploring a variety of culturaltraditions could they learn and teach the best that has been known and thought in the

world, Arnold cautioned in his essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time(1865).


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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arnolds broadly humanistic views found manydisciples. Some of Arnolds younger contemporaries, however, demanded that writersbecome more intensely involved with the particular problems of their society. French writermile Zola, for example, advocated writing true-to-life works of so-called naturalistic fictionthat would reflect the ills of contemporary society with scientific precision, a view Zolaadvanced in his essay Le roman exprimental (1880; translated as The Experimental

Novel, 1893). At the other extreme, English writer Oscar Wilde favored highly personal

literary styles and a critical stance acknowledging that life imitates art far more than artimitates life, as he wrote in The Decay of Lying (1889). The case for subjective art and

criticism was presented most succinctly by French novelist Anatole France in the preface tohis La vie littraire(1888-1893; translated as On Life and Letters, 1910-1924): The goodcritic tells the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. There is no more an objectivecriticism than an objective art.

VI 20TH-CENTURY APPROACHES

Marrying High-Tech and the Humanities

Computer technology may seem an unlikely research tool for a literature professor hoping to

better understand William Shakespeares plays or for an artist creating a painting. Increasingly,

however, computers and software are becoming essential tools for literary criticism, academic

publishing, music composition, and sometimes even for the creation of fine art. In this article from

the May 1999 Encarta Yearbook, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Dirda explores the cutting

edge of this unlikely combination of computer-based technology and disciplines such as art,

literature, and music.

Marrying High-Tech and the Humanities

By Michael Dirda

The dancer jumps and bends and pirouettes across the stage. Instead of being watched by an

audience, however, she is monitored by a computer, which inputs data from her every move.In an experiment by Joseph Paradiso, principal research scientist and director of the responsive

environments group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in

Cambridge, a dancer's shoes are fitted with sensors that measure pressure points, bend, tilt,

height off the stage, kicks, stomps, and spin. This information is then transmitted via a radio

link to a computer programmed to change the data into images or sounds. In this way the

dancer could simultaneously create a musical composition and a visual light show as she

performed, perhaps to be combined as part of a multimedia piece.

A flight of fancy or a glimpse of the future? Computers and digital technology are rapidly

expanding to influence every aspect of human activity at the end of the 20th century. The

ageless urge of the human species to produce works of art is no exception to this. Technology is


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becoming so important in so many categories of the arts that we seem to be in the midst of a

new Renaissance.

The examples of this flowering are everywhere. Powerful new computers are allowing more and

more data to be created and stored digitally, that is, in the binary code that makes up the basic

language of computers. Artists manipulate images to generate complex digital collages and

exhibit their digital and nondigital art on the World Wide Web. Novelists create branchingnarratives called hypertext fiction, stories that are explored as much as read. Literary scholars

exchange ideas through online discussion groups and use computers to discover the author of

an unsigned poem hundreds of years old. Composers employ synthesizers and computers to

generate sounds never heard before, while librarians and museum curators digitize entire

collections of art and literature to be accessed online from anywhere in the world. As these

activities become more and more the standard rather than the exception, technology and art

will be further paired and enmeshed.

Crunching Texts

Computers have aided in the study of humanities for almost as long as the machines have

existed. Decades ago, when the technology consisted solely of massive, number-crunching

mainframe computers, the chief liberal arts applications were in compiling statistical indexes of

works of literature. In 1964, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) held a

conference on computers and the humanities where, according to a 1985 article in the journal

Science, most of the conferees were using computers to compile concordances, which are

alphabetical indices used in literary research.

Mainframe computers helped greatly in the highly laborious task, which dates back to the

Renaissance, of cataloging each reference of a particular word in a particular work.

Concordances help scholars scrutinize important texts for patterns and meaning. Other

humanities applications for computers in this early era of technology included compiling

dictionaries, especially for foreign or antiquated languages, and cataloging library collections.

Such types of computer usage in the humanities may seem limited at first, but they have

produced some interesting results in the last few years and promise to continue to do so. As

computer use and access have grown, so has the number of digitized texts of classic literary

works.

The computer-based study of literary texts has established its own niche in academia. Donald

Foster, an English professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, is one of the leaders

in textual scholarship. In the late 1980s Foster created SHAXICON, a database that tracks all

the rare words used by English playwright William Shakespeare. Each of these words appears

in any individual Shakespeare play no more than 12 times. The words can then be cross-referenced with some 2,000 other poetic texts, allowing experienced researchers to explore

when they were written, who wrote them, how the author was influenced by the works of other

writers, and how the texts changed as they were reproduced over the centuries.

In late 1995 Foster's work attracted widespread notice when he claimed that Shakespeare was

the anonymous author of an obscure 578-line poem,A Funeral Elegy (1612). Although experts

had made similar claims for other works in the past, Foster gained the backing of a number of

prominent scholars because of his computer-based approach. If Foster's claim holds up to long-

term judgment, the poem will be one of the few additions to the Shakespearean canon in the

last 100 years.

Foster's work gained further public acclaim and validation when he was asked to help identifythe anonymous author of the best-selling political novel Primary Colors (1996). After using his


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computer program to compare the stylistic traits of various writers with those in the novel,

Foster tabbed journalist Joe Klein as the author. Soon after, Klein admitted that he was the

author. Foster was also employed as an expert in the case of the notorious Unabomber, a

terrorist who published an anonymous manifesto in several major newspapers in 1995.

Foster is just one scholar who has noted the coming of the digital age and what it means for

traditional fields such as literature. For traditional learning and humanistic scholarship to bepreserved, it, too, must be digitized, he wrote in a scholarly paper. The future success of

literary scholarship depends on our ability to integrate those electronic texts with our ongoing

work as scholars and teachers, and to exploit fully the advantages offered by the new medium.

Foster noted that people can now study Shakespeare via Internet Shakespeare Editions, using

the computer to compare alternate wordings in different versions and to consult editorial

footnotes, literary criticism, stage history, explanatory graphics, video clips, theater reviews, and

archival records. Novelist and literary journalist Gregory Feeley noted that the simplest (and

least radical) way in which computer technology is affecting textual scholarship is in making

various texts available, and permitting scholars to jump back and forth between them for easy

comparisons.Scholars can also take advantage of computer technology in publishing their work. Princeton

University history professor Robert Darnton has written of a future in which works of

scholarship are presented digitally in a pyramid-like layering. One might start, he suggests, at

the top with a concise account of a subject, then proceed to detailed documentation and

evidence, continue with a level of questions and discussion points for classroom use, and end

with a place for reports and commentary from readers.

The Power of the Web

Using computers for high-level research such as textual scholarship became feasible as more

and more literary works were digitized during the 1980s. But an important piece of the puzzle

was missing: a way to easily distribute these texts and other digital data. As the 1985 Science

article noted, There is always the possibility that students will be able to download both text

and programs directly into the memories of their microcomputers, but it is difficult to imagine

national centers able to distribute files to millions of students around the country.

This unlikely concept became a reality in the early 1990s with the development of the World

Wide Web. In 1989 British computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee designed the Web for the

European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) so that scientists working in various locations

could share research and collaborate on projects. But the idea of sharing information soon

spread far beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Humanities scholars and students were quick

to realize the potential of this technology.Suddenly, a professor in India could post his latest paper about Irish writer James Joyce to be

analyzed by other Joyce scholars around the world, and get quick feedback through e-mail

messages. The Web also allowed a student writing a paper in her dorm room in California to

access a rare original text on a computer in New York or Nigeria. Why bother actually going to

a bricks-and-mortar library? The World Wide Web has replaced the library, for many of our

students, as the obvious site for conducting original research, Foster noted.

Virtual Libraries

The rise of the Internet, the so-called Information Highway, has started to transform thatcornerstone of academic research, the library. Increasingly, libraries are becoming places to visit


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online rather than in person. The New York Public Library, for example , dispenses so much

information electronically to readers all over the world that it reports ten million hits on [visits

to] its computer system each month as opposed to 50,000 books dispensed in its reading

room, wrote Darnton in the New York Review of Books in March 1999.

The Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C., the unofficial national library of the

United States, has long been a leader in the use of digital technology. Chief among theseefforts is its drive to create a National Digital Library. Begun in the early 1990s, this vast,

ongoing project aims to put much of the LOC's collections of historic and archival documents

online. Some of these documents are too fragile to be handled by the public and were

previously unavailable, but now even a 7-year-old can peruse them on the Web.

About 1.7 million items had been put up on the Web site by April 1999, with a goal of 5

million by the time the library celebrates its 200th anniversary in April 2000. However, library

officials have a long way to go before reaching their ultimate goal of 80 million unique items

online.

Recently the LOC received grants to digitize its collections relating to American inventors

Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B. Morse. Library officials point with pride to the widespread use of its Web site, American Memory: Historical Collections for the National

Digital Library, from which one can view extensive photographs and documents about the

history of African Americans or a digitized collection of 2,100 early baseball cards from the

years 1887 to 1914. Users can also search the library's enormous holdings or access reading lists

for kids (Read All About It).

New Medium

More than just a revolutionary tool for indexing, analyzing, or transmitting content, digital

technologyis actually reshaping the creation of art and literature. Just as film emerged as the

dominant artistic medium of the 20th century, the digital domainwhether it is used for visual

art, music, literature or some other expressive genrewill be the primarymedium of the 21st,

wrote New York Times columnist Matthew Mirapaul in early 1999. More and more writers,

artists, and musicians are using computers and the Internet to enhance, animate, or completely

remake their art, with unconventional and remarkable results.

Publishing, a print-based business that to some people is beginning to represent the past, is

attempting to adapt to the new digital world. Marc Aronson, a senior children's book editor at

the publishing house Henry Holt and a longtime student of the impact of changing technology

on publishing, describes this impact as a kind of blurring or hybridization. The keynote of the

digital age is overlap, multiplicity, synergy. The digital does not replace print, it subsumes it,

Aronson said. Print becomes a form of the digital, just as the digital has a special place when itappears in print. Especially in books for young people, he notes, more authors and artists are

trying books with multiple storylines or told from various points of view.

One strain of this new type of nonlinear writing is popularly known as hypertext fiction. At its

simplest, hypertext fiction mimics the Choose Your Own Adventure books that became

popular in the early 1980s. In these books, readers directed the story by choosing which page to

turn to at key points based on what they wanted the character to do. In hypertext fiction, the

reader explores different branches of a story on a computer by clicking on hyperlinks in the

text. The result is a fragmented, slightly surreal narrative in which time is not linear and there

is no obvious conclusion.

Michael Joyce, like Foster a professor of English at Vassar, is a leading theoretician and authorof hypertext fiction. He wrote what is widely considered the first major work of hypertext


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fiction, afternoon, a story (1990). The piece consists of more than 500 different screens, or pages,

which are connected by more than 900 links. afternoon centers on a man who witnesses a

serious car accident that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and son, who may or may

not have survived. Joyce has also published Twilight, A Symphony (1996), about a man estranged

from his wife who is on the run with their infant son.

Joyce defines hypertext fiction as stories that change each time you read them. He notes thatinteractive narrative does not necessarily mean multiple plot lines, but can also mean

exploring the multiple thematic lines or contours of a story.

Not surprisingly, hypertext has frequently come under attack from traditional critics. Perhaps

the most powerfully simple critique, however, comes from Charles Platt, a contributing editor

for Wired magazine and a prominent science-fiction writer and critic. Could it be, wonders

Platt, that storytelling really doesn't work very well if the user can interfere with it? People

really want the author, scriptwriter, or actors to do the heavy lifting of narrative, he argues. On

the other hand, Platt suspects that we have hardly begun to explore true interactive media and

that it will be utterly different from fiction as we know it today.

Roll Over, Beethoven

Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact

disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and

recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital

Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has

given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music.

The MIDI interface enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only

in expensive recording studios, Platt observed. It enables synthesis of sounds that have never

existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple soundtracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition program

and a $500 synthesizer, any musically literate person can writeand play!a string quartet in an

afternoon.

Serious music scholars and composers are also utilizing computers to forge new paths in music.

A prime example is David Cope, professor of music at the University of California at Santa

Cruz, who began developing a computer music program in the early 1980s. Cope originally

wanted a program that would help him overcome mental blocks when he composed. Through

years of tinkering, the software, called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), has become a

full-fledged compositional program. Cope supplies bits of musical information to EMI, which

has been designed to recognize a variety of styles and patterns, and the program then processes

this material to generate pieces of original music.

The result is disturbing, said composer Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of

the bookGdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid(1979). You can actually get pretty good

music.

Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod

Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music.

As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered

hyperinstruments: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create

sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a virtual baton, or moving their entire

body in a sensor chair.

Similar work on a virtual orchestra is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computermusic program at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore,


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Maryland. Wright uses conductors' batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data

about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into

instructions for a synthesizer to produce music.

In Machover's best-known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each

other and a group of hyperinstruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical

performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributedby people on the Web, and Machover's own music. Machover says he is motivated to give

people an active, directly participatory relationship with music.

More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground

museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through

a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various

multimedia rooms. Machover composed the music and designed many of the interactions for

these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads

shaped like diamonds. By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the

room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a

single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of thegroup.

Machover believes that music is in general poorly served in elementary schools and hopes to

change this. His inventions, including some intended specifically for children, are designed to

help bring music education and appreciation to a wider audience. Machover is convinced that

computer science will eventually become a permanent part of regular musical training.

Machover's projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating

devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible. Machover describes one

of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and

miniature speakers inside. We've recently figured out how to send digital information through

fabric or thread, he said. So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze andwhere you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to

high or low, or harmonize with other balls.

Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin

Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio's Performance Today, explains why: I think that a

reason a great moving piece of computer music hasn't been written yet is thatin this instance

the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human

connection, Goldsmith said. All that would change in an instant if a very accomplished

composera Steve Reich or John Corigliano or Henryk Greckiwere to write a great piece of

computer music, but so far that hasn't happened. Nobody has really stepped forward to make a

wide range of listeners say, Wow, what a terrific instrument that computer is for making

music!

But Is It Art?

The art world has also seen the impact of digital technology in varying degrees and methods. As

is often evident in their work, many artists constantly push the boundaries of art and the tools

and materials with which they work. New mediums are not burdened by the weight of history,

and they provide the artist with a fresh means of expression.

Digital art can be generally divided into two areas: art that is either made with or relies on

computers and can be printed out or is otherwise three-dimensional, and art that is completely

contained within the digital world. Early physical pieces were mostly printouts from computer


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graphics programs, but a November 1998 show at the School of Visual Arts in New York City

included elaborate interactive art.

One piece at this show, Office Plant #1 (1998), is a sort of mechanical flower that blooms or

wiltsand even groansin reaction to the contents of e-mail messages on an attached computer.

Other pieces have audio soundtracks, video displays, and moving parts. Another show, the

Boston Cyberarts Festival held in May 1999, included a wide variety of new technology art.One featured example was the work of French artist Christian Lavigne, who is a pioneer in the

field ofcybersculpture (virtual sculpture on the Web) and robosculpture (sculpture done with the

aid of computer-controlled machines).

One unique approach to computer art is the path taken by British artist Harold Cohen, who

became interested in computers and art as far back as the late 1960s. Cohen, a well-known

abstract painter in his own right, has spent more than two decades creating and refining a

robot artist he calls Aaron. Cohen has painstakingly programmed Aaron to draw and paint

with a mechanized arm, from basic shapes to, more recently, human forms. Cohen has had to

program the computer with data on proportion, depth, visual angles, color, and other

concepts. No two of Aaron's paintings are alike, and the results are impressive enough to causesome people to wonder who is actually creating the art, the human programmer or the

computer.

With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, much recent attention has

focused on online art. In December 1995 art critic and writer Robert Atkins wrote in the

magazine Art in America that the 1994-1995 art season would be known as the year the art

world went online. The first commercial art galleries opened on the Internet, and physical

installations such as Antonio Muntadas's The File Room (1994)a detailed look at the history of

censorshipalso went up on the Web. Other works soon followed that mixed Web-based

design with artistic statements. Artists began to see the Internet not just as a means for

publicity or distribution of art works but also as a medium of expression in itself.A little over three years later, Atkins described in the same publication the growing number of

original, interactive works that can only be experienced on the Net, rather than the digitized

images of paintings or photographs that characterize most gallery or museum [Web] sites. Many

online pieces now capitalize on the burgeoning capacity of the Web to deliver video and sound,

as well as text and graphics. Atkins points to one striking work, American Friederike Paetzold's

I-Section (1998), in which the visitor dissects a torso, removing organs to reveal multiple

layers of imagery and text.

By combining elements of hypertext fiction and computer music with visual media such as

photographs and video, digital artists are breaking down old artistic barriers and producing

works for all the senses. Science fiction and fantasy author Richard Grant sees this as the

ultimate goal. When I think of hypertextand computer-driven art forms in generalthese

days, I think of opera. Specifically, I think of [German composer] Richard Wagner, his idea of

the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work), a sort of Grand Unified Field Theory in which opera is

seen as the final summation of all previous art forms: music, literature, drama, painting,

sculpture (present in the construction of the sets), poetry, dance, public ritual, and sheer

spectacle (or what would now be called special effects). Increasingly, academic programssuch

as the Consortium for Research and Education in the Arts and Technology (C

Documents

6) Literary Criticism