A History of LiteraryCriticismFrom Plato to the Present

M. A. R. Habib

A History of Literary Criticism

For Yasmeen

A History of LiteraryCriticismFrom Plato to the Present

M. A. R. Habib

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© 2005 by M. A. R. Habib

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First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2005

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Habib, Rafey.A history of literary criticism: from Plato to the present / M. A. R. Habib.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper)1. Criticism—History. I. Title.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viiiAbbreviations of Frequently Cited Works ix

Introduction 1

Part I Ancient Greek Criticism 7Classical Literary Criticism: Intellectual and Political Backgrounds 9

1 Plato (428–ca. 347 bc) 19

2 Aristotle (384–322 bc) 41

Part II The Traditions of Rhetoric 63

3 Greek Rhetoric 65Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle

4 The Hellenistic Period and Roman Rhetoric 80Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian

Part III Greek and Latin Criticism During the Roman Empire 103

5 Horace (65–8 bc) 105

6 Longinus (First Century ad) 118

7 Neo-Platonism 129Plotinus, Macrobius, Boethius

Part IV The Medieval Era 149

8 The Early Middle Ages 151St. Augustine

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9 The Later Middle Ages 166Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey deVinsauf, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), St. Thomas Aquinas

10 Transitions: Medieval Humanism 215Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan

Part V The Early Modern Period to the Enlightenment 227

11 The Early Modern Period 229Giambattista Giraldi, Lodovico Castelvetro, Giacopo Mazzoni,Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney,George Gascoigne, George Puttenham

12 Neoclassical Literary Criticism 273Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden, Alexander Pope,Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson

13 The Enlightenment 311John Locke, Joseph Addison, Giambattista Vico, David Hume,Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft

Part VI The Earlier Nineteenth Century and Romanticism 347

Introduction to the Modern Period 349

14 The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics 357

15 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) 382

16 Romanticism (I): Germany and France 408Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Germaine de Staël

17 Romanticism (II): England and America 428William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson,Edgar Allan Poe

Part VII The Later Nineteenth Century 467

18 Realism and Naturalism 469George Eliot, Émile Zola, William Dean Howells, Henry James

19 Symbolism and Aestheticism 489Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde

20 The Heterological Thinkers 502Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,Matthew Arnold

21 Marxism 527Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, György Lukács, Terry Eagleton

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Part VIII The Twentieth Century 555The Twentieth Century: Backgrounds and Perspectives 557

22 Psychoanalytic Criticism 571Freud and Lacan

23 Formalisms 602Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson,John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, T. S. Eliot

24 Structuralism 631Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes

25 Deconstruction 649Jacques Derrida

26 Feminist Criticism 667Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Michèle Barrett,Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous

27 Reader-Response and Reception Theory 708Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser,Stanley Fish

28 Postcolonial Criticism 737Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha,Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

29 New Historicism 760Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault

Epilogue 772Selective Bibliography 777Index 791

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Iwould like to express my deepest gratitude to the following people for theiradvice, their suggestions, their encouragement, and inspiration: Michael Payne,Chris Fitter, Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Andrew McNeillie, Kimberly Adams,

Mughni Tabassum, William Lutz, Geoffrey Sill, Robert Ryan, Monica Dantonio, SandraSokowski, Mary Ellen Bray, Tommy Wright, Jenny Hunt, Emma Bennett, MariamPatel, Julie Still, Karen Wilson, and Ernest Hilbert. I would like to thank Tim Laquintanofor his invaluable assistance with the bibliography. I owe an inexpressible debt to mymother Siddiqua Shabnam; to my children Hishaam and Hasan, who live within thisbook; and to my wife Yasmeen, incomparable, to whom I dedicate it.

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ABBREVIATIONS OFFREQUENTLYCITED WORKS

CCP The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1992).

CHLC The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press); V.I: Volume I: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy(1997); V.III: Volume III: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (1999);V.IV: Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and ClaudeRawson (1997); V.V: Volume V: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (2000).

Curtius Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

GI Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J.Arthur (1970; rpt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982).

HWP Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allenand Unwin, 1974).

LWC Literature and Western Civilization: The Classical World, ed. David Daichesand Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1972).

MLC Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. O. B.Hardison, Jr. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974).

MLTC Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The CommentaryTradition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott, and David Wallace (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1988).

PF Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso,1985).

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INTRODUCTION

In our world it has become more important than ever that we learn to read criti-cally. The events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath have shown us – witha new urgency – the dangers of misunderstanding and inadequate education. It

has become more important than ever that we understand the various voices cryingfrom afar in other languages; and it is just as urgent that we understand the bewilder-ing multitude of voices in our own culture. In order to make sense of our own present,we need to understand our own past. We need to look critically at the variousdocuments, cultural, political, and religious, which furnish our identity, which tell uswho we are, who we should be, and what we might become. As a black Americanscholar has recently said, “the challenge of mutual understanding among the world’smultifarious cultures will be the single greatest task that we face, after the failure of theworld to feed itself.”1

It has become indisputably clear that the study of the humanities in general is nolonger a luxury but a necessity, vital to our very survival as an enlightened civilization.We cannot form an articulate vision of our own moral, educational, and politicalvalues without some knowledge of where those values come from, the struggles inwhich they were forged, and the historical contexts which generated those struggles. Tostudy the Bible, Plato, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or Roman Law, to study Jewish orAfrican-American history, to examine the Qur’an and the long history of the Westernworld’s fraught engagement with Islam, is to study the sources of the conflicts andcultural tendencies which inform our present world. We cannot be good citizens –either of a particular country or of the world – by succumbing to the endless forcesoperating worldwide that encourage us to remain ignorant, to follow blindly, whetherin the form of blind nationalism, blind religiosity, or blind chauvinism in all itsmanifold guises. One of the keys to counteracting those forces which would keep us indarkness lies in education, and in particular in the process which forms the core ofeducation: the individual and institutional practice of reading, of close, careful, crit-ical reading. Such reading entails a great deal more than merely close attention to thewords on the page, or the text as it immediately confronts us. We need to knowwhy a text was written, for whom it was written, what religious or moral or political

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purposes motivated it, as well as its historical and cultural circumstances. Then,indeed, we can move on to the issues of its style, its language, its structure, and itsdeployment of rhetorical and literary techniques.

All disciplines in the humanities (and arguably those in the sciences) call for suchclose, critical, and comprehensive reading. There is one discipline which is defined byits insistence on such strategies: this is the discipline of literary criticism, as operatingthrough both practice and theory. At the most basic level, we might say that thepractice of literary criticism is applied to various given texts. The theory is devotedto examining the principles behind such practice. We might say that theory is asystematic explanation of practice or a situation of practice in broader framework;theory brings to light the motives behind our practice; it shows us the connection ofpractice to ideology, power structures, our own unconscious, our political and reli-gious attitudes, our economic structures; above all, theory shows us that practice isnot something natural but is a specific historical construct. Hence, to look over thehistory of literary criticism, a journey we are about to undertake in this book, is notonly to revisit some of the profoundest sources of our identity but also to renew ourconnections with some of the deepest resources of our present and future sustenance.

Methodology of this Book

The methodology of this book rests on five basic principles. One of the central diffi-culties encountered by readers of modern literary criticism and theory derives from thefact that the latter often employs concepts and terminology that are rooted in philo-sophy and other disciplines. In addressing this difficulty, the first principle and pur-pose of this book is to provide not just an isolated history of literary criticism, but tolocate this history within the context of the main currents of Western thought. Thismeans, for example, not just examining what Plato and Kant say about poetry oraesthetics but situating their aesthetic views within the framework of their philosoph-ical systems. Without those systems, we can have merely a haphazard understandingof their views on literature and art; moreover, those systems themselves are still with usin many guises, and they still inform the ways in which we think about the world.

The reaction of many literary scholars against modern literary and cultural theory isoften underlain by a distrust of philosophy, of technical jargon, and a lack of familiar-ity with the great philosophical systems. I hope that this book goes some way towardmaking the works of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel a little lessdaunting. The truth is that without some grasp of their major ideas, we simply cannotbegin to understand thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. A great deal ofliterary theory presupposes familiarity with a broad range of philosophical ideas. Moreimportantly, the philosophical systems of these thinkers are crucial for any under-standing of modern Western thought. For example, we cannot begin to understand theworld that we have inherited without understanding liberalism as it was formulated byLocke, without understanding the main directions of Enlightenment thought such asrationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism, as well as the attempts of Kant and Hegel tosituate such trends within larger, more comprehensive accounts of the world. Again,

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we cannot understand who we are without recognizing the diverse reactions againstmainstream bourgeois thought, ranging from Romanticism through symbolism toMarxism, Freudianism, and existentialism. We need to recognize that today we arecomplex creatures who are the product of a long and complex historical developmentthat embraces all of these movements and dispositions. We bear, in our own mental-ities and our own broad outlooks toward the world, traces and vestiges of these oftenconflicting modes of thought. For example, we may live out our public lives on thebasis of largely bourgeois values such as the use of reason, the reliance on experienceand observation, and a commitment to competition, efficiency, practicality, and ofcourse profit-making. Yet each of us, usually in our private lives, is also familiar with aset of values deriving sometimes from feudal Christianity or Judaism or Islam (loyalty,devotion, faith) or from Romantic attitudes (an emphasis on imagination, creativity,emotion, and a sense of the mystery of the world), as well as from Marxism (a belief inequality of opportunity, an openness to various modes of reconceiving history, and aredefinition of bourgeois values such as freedom in a comprehensive sense that appliesto all people), not to mention certain radical ideas of the human psyche deriving fromFreud and other pioneers in the fields of psychoanalysis. The history of literary criti-cism is profoundly imbricated in the history of thought in a broad range of spheres,philosophical, religious, social, economic, and psychological. Part of the purpose ofthis book, then, is to place modern literary theory within a historically broader context,to view it from a perspective that might evince its connections and lines of origin,descent, and reaction.

Secondly, given that this book proceeds by way of close textual analysis, it is neces-sarily selective, focusing on the most important and influential texts of some ofthe most important figures. There are certainly a number of major figures omitted:readers may object that there is no detailed treatment of Paul de Man and otherdeconstructionists, or of many feminist writers, or of Fredric Jameson or certain pro-ponents of New Historicism. I must plead guilty to all of these omissions. My reason issimply that there is not enough room. The intent of this book is not to provideencyclopedic coverage, nor to offer a cursory treatment of all possible major figures.These valuable tasks have already been performed by several eminent authors. Thisbook aims to redress a deficiency that students have repeatedly voiced to me: the needfor a text that will guide them through the intricacies of many difficult literary-criticaland theoretical works, by focusing on close readings of them. To illustrate the point: aone- or two-page summary of Plato or Kant will not help the student in her reading ofthe Republic or the Critique of Judgment. This book aims, rather, to undertake closereadings of selected texts which represent or embody the principles of given literary-critical tendencies. What also appears to be needed is a clear but detailed account ofthe historical backgrounds of these texts. These two aims, then, have guided the presentwork which, I hope, might be used in conjunction with any of the excellent anthologiesof literary criticism and theory now available.

Thirdly, while no section of this book is, strictly speaking, self-contained, I amhopeful that each section is independently intelligible inasmuch as it is situated withinan intellectual and historical context. This strategy aims to answer a repeated practicalconcern that I have heard from students over the years: that their reading of onethinker always presupposes knowledge of other thinkers and the inevitable network of