Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

New Criticism's classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance

Properties2
tagsja-picks, deepthinking, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 86

2 min read

New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance

Evidence

The cumulative weight of this cultural configuration has been such that when ‘New Criticism’ appeared on the horizon – with its fetishistic notions of the utter autonomy of each single literary work, and its post-Romantic idea of ‘Literature’ as a special kind of language which yields a special kind of knowledge – its practice of reified reading proved altogether hegemonic in American literary studies for a quarter-century or more, and it proved extremely useful as a pedagogical tool in the American classroom precisely because it required of the student little knowledge of anything not strictly ‘literary’ – no history which was not predominantly literary history, no science of the social, no philosophy – except the procedures and precepts of literary formalism, which, too, it could not entirely accept in full objectivist rigour thanks to its prior commitment to squeezing a particular ideological meaning out of each literary text. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that an interpretive method became dominant precisely because its pedagogy demands no real-world knowledge — and that this ‘autonomy’ masks the ideology of its Southern slaveholding-class founders — is a dense, multi-layered argument worth sitting with.
  • XREF: Connects to the addendum article on trees-as-infrastructure’s critique of how form conceals function; both examine how an aesthetic/pedagogical form encodes a material history it denies. — connects to: New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism; New Criticism’s hegemony tracked the Cold War and McCarthyism’s rise and fall
✉️

Backlinks