The other new crit
If I was to quote
"When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat's worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement." Yet the New Criticism is too good and too serious to be dismissed as advertisement. It deserves to be remembered, instead, as the scaffolding on which the monument of modernism was raised.
What discipline would I be talking about? Here's a painting
| You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; | 35 |
| 'They called me the hyacinth girl.' | |
| —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, | |
| Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not | |
| Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither | |
| Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, | 40 |
| Looking into the heart of light, the silence. | |
| Od' und leer das Meer. |
Labels: Art After Postmodernism
posted by K. @ 19:36
5 Comments:
Lots of resonance between visual and poetic modernism, and how it is discussed, it seems. Thanks for the link to the article.
"And it is here, in their ethical bearing, that the New Critics now appear to least advantage. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley write, in their seminal essay "The Intentional Fallacy," that "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." But to know if a machine works, you must first know what it is meant to do; and the New Critics too often bring to the poem a straitened definition of purpose."
The author's rhetorical objection here is obviously silly: if Wimsatt and Beardsley had simply written "typewriter" or "meat grinder", instead of the more generic "machine", then the trivial question of "what it is meant to do" would be quickly disposed of, and we'd then get back to their salient point straight away: the only question is Does It Work?... Does the typewriter work as a typewriter; the pudding as a pudding; the poem, a poem... "Straightened definition of purpose"? What else would the author have the purpose of a pudding to be, other than to be a good pudding?
Incidentally, Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" have been mentioned on Studiosavant previously here.
ummm, other uses for pudding - Hello!
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/261024/creative_uses_for_pudding.html
I'm disappointed, K.
That link wasn't nearly as pornographic as I'd hoped.
From the linked article:
The well-trained critic should be a professional with a set of tools at his disposal, able to take apart any text, no matter how difficult or avant-garde, and show how it worked. This was Ransom's demand in "Criticism, Inc.": "Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be taken seriously in hand by professionals."
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