Literary Theorizing from Aristotle to Leavis

LITERARY THEORIZING
FROM ARISTOTLE TO
LEAVIS
FROM PETER BARRY’S
BEGINNING THEORY
BY VENNILA RAMANATHAN
Copyright © 2020 careertochoose.com Vennila Ramanathan,. All rights reserved

The Body Of Literary Theory
The origin of theory goes back to the Greek and Latin originals

The earliest work of theory was Aristotle’s Poetics
Aristotle offers famous definitions of tragedy
He insists that literature is about character
According to him, character is revealed through action
He identified the stages in the progress of a plot
He discovered how a drama affected the audience
Tragedy should stimulate the emotions of pity and fear
Sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist
Aristotle called the combination of these emotions as ‘Catharsis’

PHILIP SIDNEY
The prestigious name in English is Sir. Philip Sidney
He wrote Apology for poetry in 1580
He was attracted by Ovid’s(Latin) definition of Literature: “ Literature’s mission is to teach by delighting”
Sidney also quotes Horace: “ A Poem is a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight”
So Literature has to give pleasure
Sidney distinguishes Literature from other forms of writing based on these facts:
(a) Literature has to entertain
(b) Moral or didactic element is subordinate to it

Samuel Johnson
He wrote “Lives of the Poets” and “Preface to Shakespeare” in the 18th century
He offers a detailed commentary on the work of a single author
Prior to Johnson, the Bible was the only text subjected to such an intensive scrutiny

Romantic age
In the romantic age, we have the theoretical works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley.
The main text is Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads
The preface is the product of his discussions with Coleridge
It blends high literature and popular literature
It contains Literature Ballads constructed on the model popular oral Ballads
But Wordsworth was criticized for abandoning the conventions of verbal decorum
By this was meant the use of an elaborate system of rhyme and highly compressed form of grammar
But Coleridge and Wordsworth wanted to make their poetic language as much as like prose as possible

Coleridge
His Biographia Literaria addresses the ideas contained in Wordsworth’s Preface
He took a radically different view about the language of poetry after his friendship with
Wordsworth was broken.
He came to disagree with the view of poetry to be made simple in the language of prose
According to him, if poetry aims to teach by entertaining, it can be done through the language
in which it is written.
Language entertains by its fictive qualities and that is the source of the aesthetic effect

SHELLEY
Shelley: “ Poetry strips the veil of familiarity from the world…it purges from our inward sight the
film of familiarity…it compels us to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know”
A Defence of Poetry
Shelley’s idea correlates with
a)The twentieth century Russian critics’ idea of defamiliarization
b)T.S Eliot’s notion of impersonality in Tradition and the Individual Talent
c)Freudian notion of the mind as made up of conscious and unconscious elements
Shelley had recorded all these a 100 years ago:
“…the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant
wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures
are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure.”

JOHN KEATS
The idea of the unconscious lies implicit in the poetry of Keats
His letter to Baily in 1817
“the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent
working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine suddenness.”
Silent working of the mind (the unconscious)
The Spirit (the conscious)
Keats idea of Negative Capability also privileges the ‘Unconscious
Remember: “Keats did not write formal literary theory in the way
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley did, but he did reflect on poetry
in a sustained way…”

TWO DIFFERENT TRACKS IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH
CRITICISM
One Track Leads Through
Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold to T.S.Eliot and F.R. Leavis
(may be called the ‘practical criticism’ track)
The Other Track Lies Through
Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, George Eliot and Henry James
(This track is ‘ideas-led’ rather than ‘text-led)

MATTHEW ARNOLD
A Key canonical figure in the history of English literary criticism
He saw literature as a possible alternate for religion
Arnold’s intention: The critic would help the middle class, upon
whom the burden and responsibility of democracy largely fell, to
recognise “the best that has been thought and known in the world
Major Works:
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
The Study of Poetry
The goal of literary criticism is to attain pure, disinterested knowledge
Through his Touchstone method, he suggests using aspects of the literature of the past
as a means of assessing and measuring the literature of today

T.S.ELIOT
Eliot’s Contribution to the Canon of Received Critical Ideas
Dissociation of sensibility
Separating thought from feeling (no historical evidence to this except Eliot’s reference
to factors that brought about the English Civil War)
• The concept of sensibility can be found only in Metaphysical poetry that describes the
special qualities of the mind.
• The later poets did not unite their thoughts with their emotive experiences.
(Dissociation of sensibility)
Impersonality
• Poetry is not a pouring out of personal emotion and personal experience but a
transcending of the individual by a sense of tradition which speaks through and is
transmitted by the individual poet
• The best part of a poet’s work is that of the voice of his predecessors speaking
through himObjective Correlative
•The best way of expressing an emotion in art is to find some vehicle for it in gesture, action or concrete symbolism
•This idea is a little more than Plato’s distinction between mimesis (showing of something in the character’s own words or
actions)and diegesis(telling the audience about things they don’t see for themselves)

I.A.RICHARDS
The pioneer of Practical Criticism in the 1920s
Fostered a true judgement based on first hand opinion
We can see the connection between this and Arnold’s Touchstone
method
He made a close study of literature by isolating the text from
history and context

F.R.LEAVIS
He distrusted abstract thought and looked for a system of literary appreciation like
Arnold’s Touchstone
Like Arnold, he rejected any attempt to politicise either literature or criticism directly
He differs from Arnold : Arnold doesn’t question the excellence of Dante
Leavis sometimes attacked the reputations of major established figures
He was inspired by Johnson’s moralism and Arnold’s social vision and anti-theoretical
critical practice

WILLIAM EMPSON
The word ambiguity in Seven Types of Ambiguity can be translated as ‘verbal difficulty’
Empson unravels his examples by meticulous textual surgery
As we go from ambiguity one to the next ambiguity, Barry says, “we seem to be approaching
the frontiers of language…and we seem to end up in a void of linguistic indeterminacy”
This can be seen as an anticipation of post-structuralist views about the unreliability of
language as a medium
The placing of language within any context naturally tends to reduce ambiguity
Hence Empson drew back from the linguistic void by stressing the autobiographical context in
which literary contexts are grounded

GROWTH OF CRITICAL THEORY IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD
In the 1960s-two older approaches like
Marxism and Psychoanalytic criticism
became strong
In the 1960s-Two new approaches like Linguistic
and Feminist criticism were also mounting
vigorously against Liberal Humanism
In the 1970s-Controversial new critical
like Structuralism and Post-Structuralism emerged
In the 1980s- A turn to history and two new
forms of political/historical criticism emerged
New Historicism from the USA
Cultural Materialism from Britain
In the 1990s-Post-Colonialism rejected the idea of
of a universally applicable Marxist explanations
and emphasizes the otherness of post-imperial
nations and people
In the 1990s- Postmodernism stresses the
fragmented nature of contemporary experience
and Feminism dissolved into gender studies

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