Chapter 1 - Theory before 'theory' - liberal humanism

Development of English studies:

Ignore the confusing order in which this topic is presented in the textbook. Before the pointy UFO's (<^> <^> <^>) is in brief (pages 11 through 16) and after them is in detail (pages 21 through 35).

• In the beginning (first quarter of 19th century) the study of English was a Church monopoly. The two institutions, Cambridge and Oxford were separate and ran as monasteries, with ordained priests, Anglican communicant students etc, all the way until the 1820's
• A breakthrough happened in 1826 when a University College was founded for men and women of all religions or none at all - no biggie - that started offering English as a subject in 1828. (This was basically the study of English as a language, using literature only for examples)
• King's College is the beginning of Literature as we know it. F. D. Maurice, appointed Professor in 1840, laid down some of the principles of liberal humanism (he also believed that literature was a peculiar property of the middle class - ref. pg 13)
• Then Matthew Arnold and others started to treat the study of literature as a substitute for religion (again, ref. pg 13)

* ideological control

* Victorian mixture of class guilt about social inequalities, a genuine desire to improve things for everybody, a kind of missionary zeal to spread culture and enlightenment, and a self-interested desire to maintain social stability

* learning English will give people a stake in maintaining the political status quo without any redistribution of wealth

• I. A. Richards' method, Practical Criticism, made a decisive break between language and literature. By isolating the text from history and context, and simply analyzing the 'words on the page', a close study of literature was possible. It was no longer possible to offer a vague, flowery, metaphorical effusion and call it criticism. Richards wanted close attention to the precise details of the text.
• William Empson took his tutor's method of close verbal analysis too far, and identified seven different types of verbal difficulty in poetry - Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930 uses intelligence on poetry as seriously as if it were mathematics, according to:
• F. R. Leavis. F. R. Leavis' doctoral thesis was on the relationship between journalism and literature. Q. D. Roth, whom he met and married in 1929, wrote hers on popular fiction. #powercouple Together, they founded an important journal called Scrutiny, which extended the close reading method of Richards beyond poetry to novels and other material. 

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Aristotle

• Poetics (wiki article) (4th C) about the nature of literature itself (Poetics was the earliest work of theory)
• first critic with a reader-centered approach (his consideration of drama tried to describe how it affected the audience; catharsis, wherein the emotions of sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist are exercised, not exorcised, as the audience identifies with the central character)
• also, definitions of tragedy, identification of stages required in the progress of plot
• insists that literature is about character, character is revealed through action

Sir Philip Sidney

• Apology for Poetry (1850-ish)
• intent on expanding the implications of the ancient definition of literature formulated by Ovid (43BC to 17AD) and also Horace (65BC to 8BC) who had said that its mission is 'docere dolictendo' (to teach by delighting/entertaining), and that a poem is 'a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight', respectively.
• Sidney aimed to distinguish literature from other forms of writing, on the grounds that (ref. page 21) literature has as its primary aim the giving of pleasure to the reader, and any moral or didactic element is necessarily either subordinate to that, or at least, unlikely to succeed without it.

Samuel Johnson

• Lives of the Poets and Prefaces to Shakespeare (18th C)
• start of English tradition of practical criticism, since he is the first to offer detailed commentary on the work of a single author
• The extension of the practice of intensive scrutiny to works other than those thought to be the direct product of divine inspiration marks a significant moment of progress in the development of secular humanism

Romantic poets

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley

1. Wordsworth:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads was a collaboration of Wordsworth and Coleridge which blends high literature with popular literature. It contains literary ballads constructed on the model of the popular oral ballads of ordinary country people. It had hostile reception since it abandoned the conventions of verbal decorum, diction and structure

(I. A. Richards, pg 29 - Practical Criticism IS New Criticism)

TEN TENETS OF LIBERAL HUMANISM

(these are not absolute - they are merely explicitly stated assumptions of the traditional critics)

1. Attitude towards literature: good literature is of timeless significance. 'Not for an age, but for all time,' and' news which stays news'
2. Literary texts contain their own meanings within themselves. No context required - not socio-political, literary-historical or autobiographical. There is a primacy and self-sufficiency of the words on the page, an approach called 'on-sight close reading', that removes the text from all these contexts and presents it unseen for unaided explication by the trained mind.
3. Close verbal analysis of the text without prior ideological assumptions, political pre-conditions, or specific expectations of any kind, were necessary in order to 'see the object as in itself it really is'.
4. Human nature is unchanging - the same passions, emotions and situations are seen throughout human history, therefore continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation. Poetry, therefore, was ' what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed'
5. Individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique essence. This transcends our environmental influences, and though individuality can change and develop, it can't be transformed. The discipline as a whole believed in a transcendent subject - the individual (the subject) is antecedent to, or transcends, the forces of society, experience, and language.
6. 'We distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us,' that is, literature which too obviously wants to convert us or change our views.
7. Form and content in literature must be fused in an organic way, so that one grows inevitably from the other. Literary form should not be like a decoration which is applied externally to a completed structure.
8. Sincerity (comprising truth-to-experience, honesty towards the self, and the capacity for human empathy and compassion) is a quality which resides within the language of literature, and is expressed through the avoidance of cliche, use of first-hand individualistic description, understated expression of feeling, such that the truly sincere poet can transcend the sense of distance between language and material and can make the language seem to 'enact' what it depicts.
9. Mimesis is valued in literature (showing and demonstrating, rather than explaining or saying) - elevation of tactile enactment, of sensuous immediacy, of the concrete representation of thought. (However, there is also The Enactment Fallacy, which critiques the enactment idea)
10. A theoretical account of literary reading or literature in general isn't useful in criticism and, if attempted, will simply encumber critics with preconceived ideas which will get between them and the text.

There is a pervasive distrust of ideas within liberal humanism, due to the notion that all ideas are preconceived; an 'English empiricism', a determination to trust only what is made evident to the senses or experienced directly is apparent here.