Abrams - Critical Theories

7/30/2019 Abrams - Critical Theories

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/abrams-critical-theories 1/4

What follows are notes from “Types and Orientations of Critical Theories”, in Doing Thingswith Texts , by M.H. Abrams (W.W. Norton, 1989). Where Abrams speaks throughout of

‘poetry’, he uses the word as Aristotle does in his ‘Poetics’ as referring to all literature:

poetry, drama, and fiction. We can in most cases substitute the word ‘literature‘ wherever the

word ‘poetry‘ is used below. —etm

“There is no uniquely valid way to classify theories of poetry; that classification is best which best serves the purpose in hand.”

Four elements

• universe [mimetic]• audience [pragmatic]• poet [expressive]• poem [objective]

Most theories emphasize one of these four elements as being central to the writing,reading, or judgment of poetry; thus we have ‘four broad types of poetic theory,

which may be labeled mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and objective.’

Mimetic Theories [emphasize the ‘universe’]

• Name from mimesis , Greek for ‘imitation’.• From Plato, who wrote that poetry is mimesis. That is, poetry is a mirror that

reflects the world.

• Cf. Hamlet’s advice to the actors: “Suit the action to the word, the word to theaction, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end

both at the first, and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up tonature . . . .”

• However, Plato intended this definition of poetry as a criticism of it. In Plato’sphilosophy the world itself is illusory, an imitation of the perfect Forms thatconstitute reality; so poetry becomes an imitation of an imitation. And both inPlato and for centuries afterward it was not difficult to show that (at various

times) philosophy, or religion, or science could do a better job of describingreality than poetry does.

• Since the 19th century the mimetic view of poetry has been argued mainly by

proponents of realism in art.• Key idea: ‘the tendency to look to the nature of the given universe as the clue to

the nature of poetry’.• Key words: imitation, image, reflection, feigning, counterfeiting, copy,

representation.

Pragmatic Theories [emphasize the audience]• The poet deliberately uses mimesis to achieve certain effects in the reader.

M.H. Abrams, Theories of Literary Criticism: An Outline

Eric T. MacKnight • http://www.EricMacKnight.com /

http://www.ericmacknight.com/

http://www.ericmacknight.com/



• Horace: ‘Poets wish either to instruct or to please’.• Other purposes include moral improvement, emotion, and delight.• Samuel Johnson: ‘It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better’ [i.e., by

telling stories that result in the moral improvement of their readers].

• Pragmatic critics regard the poem as ‘a made object, the product of an art orcraft . . . deliberately designed to achieve foreknown ends’ [i.e., not

unconscious creations whose meaning or effects are wholly or partiallyunknown to their creators].

• Pragmatic critics allow mimesis to include fantasies and absurdities if theyachieve a desired effect such as delight in the reader.

Expressive Theories [emphasize the poet]

• ‘In the expressive orientation, the poet moves into the center of the scheme . . .‘.• Source: On the Sublime , by Longinus, which became known in the late 1600s.

Longinus defines sublimity ‘by its effect of ekstasis , or transport’, i.e., the poetand then the reader are ‘carried away’ by the poem. The most important sourceof this effect is the author’s “vehement and inspired passion”. “Sublimity is the

echo of a great soul”, said Longinus [not, as in the pragmatic view, a greatcraftsman].

• Longinus’s ideas had a huge influence on thinkers throughout the next century,and became associated with the view that lyric poetry (not narrative or epic

poetry) was the ‘most poetic’ form of language, whose essence was in emotion,not reason. This led to . . .

• Wordsworth, who made the ‘single most important pronouncement of theemotive theory of poetry’, wrote that poetry “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. In this view, ‘the source of the poem is no longer theexternal world [as in mimetic theories] but the poet himself; and . . . the subjectmatter of the poem [is] the poet’s “feelings” ‘. The word ‘spontaneous’ is

important, once again distinguishing expressive theories from the pragmaticview, in which the poet/craftsman deliberately aims at certain effects.

• John Keble ‘described the poetic process as a release, a “safety valve,” for pent-up feelings and desires’.

• John Stuart Mill: “Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” When poetry “is not itself the end, but a means to an end . . . then itceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence [i.e., persuasive speech].

• In mimetic theories, the dominant forms of poetry are narrative and dramatic[i.e., epic and tragedy], and the opposite of poetry is history. But in theRomantic expressive view, the primary form of poetry is the lyric, and itsopposite is science [i.e., the heart vs. the head, emotion vs. reason].

• J.S. Mill: ‘. . . Poetry embodies “itself in symbols which are the nearest possiblerepresentations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s

mind.” The mirror held up to nature becomes a mirror held up to the poet . . . .’

Abrams: Theories of Literary Criticism

of 4



• Expressive criticism led to an interest in the author’s biography and (later)psychology: to understand the poem, one must psychoanalyze the author andknow all the secrets of his biography. Edmund Wilson: “the real elements . . . of

any work of fiction, are the elements of the author’s personality . . . .”

Objective Theories [poem as object] [emphasize the poem]

• Based on Aristotle’s idea of a tragedy as ‘subject to internal requirements . . .which determine the selection, treatment, and ordering of the parts into anartistic whole.

• Emphasizes the perspective of the reader or audience perceiving the poem ‘as a

given object’.• Two versions, which often are intermixed:

• ‘Heterocosmic model’: ‘each work constitutes a unique, coherent, andautonomous world’.

• ‘Contemplation model’ (which became ‘art for art’s sake’): ‘each work is aself-sufficient object that is contemplated disinterestedly for its own sake.[The word ‘disinterestedly’ is important because it distinguishes this view

from the mimetic and pragmatic ideas of poetry having a purpose or aim.]• Addison: ‘Poetry “makes new worlds of its own, shows us persons who are not

to be found in being”.’• Alexander Baumgarten: ‘ “The poet is like a maker or creator. So the poem

ought to be like a world”; hence each poetic world . . . manifests a “poetic”truth that is not of correspondence to the real world but of internal coherence.’

• Breitinger: ‘the poetic imagination finds its originals “not in the actual world, but in some other possible world-structure. . . . “ ‘

• The contemplation model derives from Plato, who in the Symposium asserts‘that the highest good of life consists in the “contemplation of beautyabsolute” . . . as seen “with the eye of the mind”.’

• Moritz: “the beautiful object . . . is completed . . . in its own self . . . and affords mepleasure for its own sake”.

• Mid-19th century: in France, l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake].• Poe: ‘the “poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this

poem written solely for the poem’s sake” and offering a “pure” pleasure “fromthe contemplation of the Beautiful”. ‘

• Flaubert: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present

everywhere and visible nowhere.”• A.C. Bradley: ‘Poetry and reality “are parallel developments which nowhere

meet . . . they are analogues”. ‘• ‘The objective conception of poetry-as-such . . . became the dominant mode of

thinking for many . . . critics [and] authors in the half-century or so beginningin the 1920s.

• “Russian Formalists”• French Structuralists


of 4



• ‘Structuralism . . . regards a work [as] a self-determining structure of inter-relations constituted by a play of specifically literary conventions and“codes.” ‘

• The New Criticism [ca. 1940 -->]

• ‘A poem thus becomes its own world—a distinctive universe of discourse . . . and the integrity and boundaries of this world, or poetic

“object,” are carefully guarded by prohibitions against the “personalheresy” [concern with the author’s biography and psychology], “theheresy of paraphrase” [the idea that a poem has a ‘meaning’ that can bere-stated in other words], . . . the “intentional fallacy” [the idea that we

can know the author’s intentions, and that they are important], and the“affective fallacy” (reference to the responses of the reader). The sole endof a poem is the poem itself as a self-sufficient “structure of meanings.”The New Critics developed . . . the detailed “explication,” or “close

reading,” of individual poems as a totality of “logical structure” and“local texture” . . . or an equilibrium of multiple “tensions” . . . or an“organic unity” of ironies, ambiguities, paradoxes, and image-patterns.’

• W.K. Wimsatt: “Neither the qualities of the author’s mind nor the effects of apoem upon a reader’s mind should be confused with the moral qualityexpressed by the poem itself.”

-----------------------

Thus two of these theoretical approaches—the mimetic and pragmatic—seeliterature as having a purpose. The critic’s job, in this case, is to identify the purposeand judge whether the aim of the poem has been achieved.

The other two approaches—the expressive and objective—see literature as

something to be appreciated, contemplated, and observed. The critic’s job is toexamine it carefully and judge it not with reference to the ‘real world’ or to its effectson the reader or audience, but strictly on its own terms, as established by the poemitself.

Note also that most students naturally gravitate toward expressive criticism (becauseof the pervasive influence of Romanticism in our culture) while the objective

approach to analyzing literature (e.g., commentaries in IB English A1) haspredominated—not without competition—in the 20th century.

Finally: please don’t think that you can profitably use these terms—which except for

‘mimetic’ are not widely understood as Abrams defines them—in your writing. Usethe ideas to think about the works you read, but leave the terminology alone.


of 4

Abrams - Critical Theories

Documents

Transcript of Abrams - Critical Theories