Name / Eman Ahmed Mohammed Ibrahim

Year / fourth year

Department/ Department of Education

( English Division)

Subject Research

" Literary criticism "

Literary criticism
- literary criticism / the reasoned consideration
of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term,
to any argumentation about literature, whether
or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s
cautions against the risky consequences of poetic
inspiration in general in his Republic are thus
often taken as the earliest important example of
literary criticism.

- Criticism in this narrow sense can be

distinguished 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 in
academic studies, “criticism” is often considered
to be separate from “scholarship.”
Functions

1/ One of criticism’s principal functions is to

express the shifts in sensibility that make such
revaluations possible. The minimal condition for
such a new appraisal is, of course, that the
original text survive.

2/ The literary critic is sometimes cast in the

role of scholarly detective, unearthing,
authenticating, and editing unknown
manuscripts.

3/ Thus, even rarefied scholarly skills may be put

to criticism’s most elementary use, the bringing
of literary works to a public’s attention.
The Literary World
- The variety of criticism’s functions is reflected in
the range of publications in which it appears.
Criticism in the daily press rarely displays
sustained acts of analysis and may sometimes do
little more than summarize a publisher’s claims
for a book’s interest. Weekly and biweekly
magazines serve to introduce new books but are
often more discriminating in their judgments, and
some of these magazines, such as The (London)
Times Literary Supplement and The New York
Review of Books, are far from indulgent toward
popular works.

- Misguided or malicious critics can discourage an

author who has been feeling his way toward a
new mode that offends received taste. Pedantic
critics can obstruct a serious engagement with
literature by deflecting attention toward
inessential matters.

_ 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 for its
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 more exacting than
the public’s . A critic is socially useful to the
extent that society wants, and receives, a fuller
understanding of literature than it could have
achieved without him. In filling this appetite, the
critic whets it further, helping to create a public
that cares about artistic quality. Without sensing
the presence of such a public, an author may
either prostitute his talent or squander it in
sterile acts of defiance.
Historical development
Antiquity
_ Although almost all of the criticism ever written
dates from the 20th century, questions first
posed 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 argument made
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 of transcendent ideas
and poetry as a mere copy of the copy.
- In his Poetics—still the most respected of all
discussions of literature—Aristotle countered
Plato’s indictment by stressing what is normal
and useful about literary art. The tragic poet is
not so much divinely inspired as he is motivated
by a universal human need to imitate, and what
he imitates is not something like a bed (Plato’s
example) but a noble action.
Medieval period
- In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered
from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical
texts and from an antipagan distrust of the
literary imagination. Such Church Fathers as
Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in
churchly guise, the Platonic argument against
poetry. But both the ancient gods and the
surviving classics reasserted their fascination,
entering medieval culture in theologically
allegorized form.
The Renaissance
- Renaissance criticism grew directly from the
recovery of classic texts and notably from Giorgio
Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin
in 1498. By 1549 the Poetics had been rendered
into Italian as well. From this period until the later
part of the 18th century Aristotle was once again
the most imposing presence behind literary
theory. Critics looked to ancient poems and plays
for insight into the permanent laws of art.

- It is difficult today to appreciate that this

obeisance to antique models had a liberating
effect; one must recall that imitation of the
ancients entailed rejecting scriptural allegory and
asserting the individual author’s ambition to
create works that would be unashamedly great
and beautiful. Classicism, individualism, and
national pride joined forces against literary
asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French
writers known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de
Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were
simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and
advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.
Neoclassicism and its decline
The Renaissance in general could be regarded as
a neoclassical period, in that ancient works were
considered the surest models for modern
greatness. Neoclassicism, however, usually
connotes narrower attitudes that are at once
literary and social: a worldly-wise tempering of
enthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a
gentlemanly sense of propriety and balance.

- Neoclassicism had a lesser impact in England,

partly because English Puritanism had kept alive
some of the original Christian hostility to secular
art, partly because English authors were on the
whole closer to plebeian taste than were the
court-oriented French, and partly because of the
difficult example of Shakespeare, who
magnificently broke all of the rules.

- The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly

surprising; literary theory had developed very
little during two centuries of artistic, political, and
scientific ferment.
Romanticism
- Romanticism, an amorphous movement that
began in Germany and England at the turn of the
19th century.

_ Romantics tended to regard the writing of

poetry as a transcendentally important activity,
closely related to the creative perception of
meaning in the world.

- Most of those who were later called Romantics

did share an emphasis on individual passion and
inspiration, a taste for symbolism and historical
awareness, and a conception of art works as
internally whole structures in which feelings are
dialectically merged with their contraries.
The late 19th century
The Romantic movement had been spurred not
only by German philosophy but also by the
universalistic and utopian hopes that
accompanied the French Revolution. Some of
those hopes were thwarted by political reaction,
while others were blunted by industrial capitalism
and the accession to power of the class that had
demanded general liberty. Advocates of the
literary imagination now began to think of
themselves as enemies or gadflies of the newly
entrenched bourgeoisie.
The 20th century
The ideal of objective research has continued to
guide Anglo-American literary scholarship and
criticism and has prompted work of
unprecedented accuracy. Bibliographic
procedures have been revolutionized; historical
scholars, biographers, and historians of theory
have placed criticism on a sounder basis of
factuality. Important contributions to literary
understanding have meanwhile been drawn from
anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and
psychoanalysis.

- No sharp line can be drawn between academic

criticism and criticism produced by authors and
men of letters. Many of the latter are now
associated with universities, and the main shift of
academic emphasis, from impressionism to
formalism, originated outside the academy in the
writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Hulme,
largely in London around 1910.
The influence of science
What separates modern criticism from earlier
work is its catholicity of scope and method, its
borrowing of procedures from the social sciences,
and its unprecedented attention to detail. As
literature’s place in society has become more
problematic and peripheral, and as humanistic
education has grown into a virtual industry with a
large group of professionals serving as one
another’s judges, criticism has evolved into a
complex discipline, increasingly refined in its
procedures but often lacking a sense of contact
with the general social will.
Criticism and knowledge
The debate over poetic truth may illustrate how
modern discussion is beholden to extraliterary
knowledge. Critics have never ceased disputing
whether literature depicts the world 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.

- 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
for granted an author’s freedom to shape his
work according to the demands of art, treat
individual lines of verse with a dogged
minuteness that was previously unknown, hoping
thereby to demonstrate the “organic” coherence
of the poem.

- 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 Longinian
spirit of expressiveness contested the sway of
Boileau and Pope.
Introduction to Modernism and T.S. Eliot
Introduction
Literary criticism in England in the twentieth
century witnessed the rise of a range of critical
theories and practices due to the influence of
studies related to psychology, sociology,
anthropology and economics.
The Important Critics and Movements of
the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century continued to follow the
critical dictums of Mathew Arnold and Walter
Pater. A few university professors like George
Saintsbury, Edward Dowden, A.C.Bradley and
Oliver Elton collected facts and evaluated a
writer but did not participate in giving precise
points of view or propounding new theories or
principles.
Expressionism
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the Italian idealist
philosopher, historian and politician, had a
profound influence on art and criticism in
England. According to him, art is a form of
expression and criticism is the study of that
expression. The movement called Expressionism
arose out of this thought.
Dadaism
A nihilistic and anti-aesthetic movement in the
arts that flourished primarily in Zürich,
Switzerland; New York City; Berlin, Cologne, and
Hannover in Germany; and Paris in the early
twentieth century. The Dadaists rejected
traditional modes of artistic creation and worked
with collage, photomontage, and found-object
construction, rather than with the media of
painting and sculpture.
Surrealism
A movement in visual art and literature in Europe
between World Wars I and II, Surrealism grew out
of the earlier Dada movement that was anti-art
and resisted reason.
Psychology
Freud, Jung and Bergson influenced modern
psychology. Freud believed that the suppression
of the sex instinct results in frustration and
neurosis, and art is the expression of this
neurosis.
Archetypal Criticism
The term “archetype” was adopted and
popularised from the writings of the psychologist
Carl Jung. He formulated a theory of a “collective
unconscious”. He explains that human
experience is transferred to successive
generations and the primordial image patterns
and situations evoke similar feelings in both
reader and author.
The Symbolist Movement
This is an organized literary and artistic
movement that originated with a group of French
poets in the late nineteenth century. It spread to
painting and the theatre, and influenced the
European and American literatures of the
twentieth century.
Rise of New Criticism
New Criticism was the most influential school of
criticism in the first half of the twentieth century.
After the Second World War, New Criticism
became a prominent mode of literary criticism.
The Contribution of T.S.Eliot
Eliot emerged as one of the most prominent
literary figures in the twentieth century British
literature. His contribution to literature is of
immense significance because he contributed to
all the genres of literature.
Poetry
Collected Poems (1962) The Complete Poems and
Plays (1952) Four Quartets (1943) Burnt Norton
(1941) The Dry Salvages (1941) .
Prose
To Criticise the Critic (1965)
On Poetry and Poets (1957) Religious Drama:
Medieval and Modern (1954) The Three Voices of
Poetry (1954) Poetry and Drama (1951) .
Drama
Eliot wrote a series of verse dramas in a form of
blank verse sometimes called ‘heightened prose’.
The first, Sweeney Agonistes (1924), was not
performed until 1934.
Fiction
The only work of fiction by Eliot, published in two
parts in 1917 in The Little Review, is Eeldrop and
Appleplex .
Essays
• The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticis(1933)
• After Strange Gods (1934)
• Elizabethan Essays (1934)
• Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
Posthumous publications
• To Criticize the Critic (1965)
• The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition (1974)
• Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-
1917 (1996) .
The most important collections of Eliot's
manuscripts can be found at the Houghton
Library, Harvard University; the New York
Public Library; and the libraries of King’s
and Magdalene Colleges, Cambridge
University.
Critical Works
Eliot’s critical thoughts were first published in the
form of articles and essays in various periodicals
and journals. These have now been included in
several books namely
• The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,
1933
• The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939 .
Objective Correlative
The influential phrase “objective correlative” was
included by Eliot in his essay “Hamlet and His
Problem". According to him, the expression of
emotion in poetry should employ an appropriate
objective correlative. He says objective
correlative is “a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events, which shall be the formula” for
the poet’s emotion so that “when the external
facts are given the emotion is at once evoked.”
Unification of Sensibility and Dissociation
of Sensibility
Eliot employed the phrase “unification of
sensibility” in his essay “The English
Metaphysical Poets”. By unification of sensibility,
Eliot means “a fusion of thought and feeling”, “a
recreation of thoughts into feelings”, “a direct
sensuous apprehension of thought.” The
Metaphysical poets showed unification of
sensibility wherein there was the union of
thought and feeling.
T.S. Eliot as a critic ( BA Part3 Eng Hons 2017-
20)
Dr. Vishnulok Bihari Srivastava
Asso. Prof.
Deptt. Of English
Rohtas Mahila College
Sasaram, VKSU, Ara
T.S. Eliot is by far the most influential critic of our
time. Unlike contemporary English critics like I.A.
Richards, F.R. Levis and William Empson he has
not compiled independent books rather his ideas
are spread over in his astray essays.