Journal Article

The Discipline of Feeling: The New Critics and the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy

Aubry, Timothy

2015

Overview

While Ransom worried that the expansion of scientific forms of thought within the twentieth century would entail a corresponding marginalization of literature, he also recognized that criticism would need to appropriate scientific protocols in order to achieve academic legitimacy. “Criticism,” he maintains, “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons – which means that its proper seat is in the universities” (The World’s Body 329). Thus during the 1920s and 1930s, Ransom and his fellow New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and W.K. Wimsatt, devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism. In particular, Wimsatt’s famous admonition against the “intentional” and the “affective” fallacies attempted to sequester the feelings and thoughts of the author and the reader from the act of criticism, in order, like any scientific practice, to isolate the object under investigation from all extraneous phenomena and to reduce the influence of the investigator’s own bias.

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
• Subject: Academic disciplines / Academic standards / Aesthetics / Allusion / American literature / Biographies / Criticism / Emotions / Hegemony / Ideology / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literature / Logic / Poetry / Ransom, John Crowe (1888-1974) / Readers / Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893-1979) / Science / Warren, Robert Penn (1905-1989)