Abstract
Theory was once called criticism or critical theory and sometimes still is. Theory comes from the Greek that means seeing, which is a kind of vision. Not all critics or theorists are visionary just as all poets are not prophetic. Having discussed William Blake and Northrop Frye in chapter 6, I wish to focus on Frye and those from younger generations, so that there is a different context from the study of Blake and Romanticism. This chapter concentrates on the shift from criticism to theory that occurs in the 1960s, especially with Jacques Derrida’s visit to Johns Hopkins in 1966 and his increasing presence in the United States henceforth. To focus the discussion, I am returning to the 1980s and Criticism in Society (1987), a collection by Imre Salusinszky, who wrote a thesis at Oxford on the “neoromantic imagination” in North American poetry and criticism after the Second World War, with special attention to Northrop Frye and Wallace Stevens, and who interviews a range of major theorists.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The work that this chapter focuses on most is Imre Salusinszky, ed. Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Methuen, 1987). Thanks to the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (of which I am the editor) for permission to include a revised version of this article: “The Book of Judges: Views among the Critics,” CRCL/RCLC 17 (1990): 112–19. For an earlier work, see Imre Salusinszky, “The Neo-Romantic Imagination in North American Criticism and Poetry since 1945: With Particular Reference to the Criticism of Northrop Frye, its Influence, and its Relation to the Work and Influence of Wallace Stevens” (D. Phil. thesis, Faculty of English, University of Oxford, 1982).
J. Huizinga, “Foreword,” Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949, repr. 1980), x, see ix. The translation is a synthesis of Huizinga’s German text, published in 1944 in Switzerland, and his own English translation completed before his death. The translator justifies this translation, which might not seem necessary, because of discrepancies and differences in style between Huizinga’s two versions. See the “Translator’s Note,” vii.
See, especially, Findley’s “Introduction” in Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, Introduction and Notes M. I. Findley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954; rev. ed. 1972), 26–27; Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962)
Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52)
James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–50);
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Berlin: S. Fischer 1924), translated version. The Magic Mountain. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969)
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).
Salusinszky, Criticism, esp. 155; for the relation between Derrida and feminism, see Gayatri Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in For Alma Mater: Theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship, ed. Paula Treichler, Cheris Kramarae and Beth Stafford (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
Salusinszky, Criticism, 139–40, see 68–69; see also Cixous’ notion of struggle in Hélène Cixous, with Catherine Clément, La Jeune née (Paris: Union Général d’Éditions, 1975).
Salusinszky, Criticism, 66; on ideology, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. 1–7, 145–50.
Salusinszky, Criticism, 78, 95; Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 214.
See Robert Young, “Introduction,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reading, ed. R. Young (London: Routledge, 1981), 1–28
William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 170–85
Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 11–13
for the relation of new historicism to deconstruction, see Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), esp. 58–59
and H. Aram Veeser, “Introduction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. A. Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), xii, xv–xvi.
Salusinszky, Criticism, 130, 172; Barbara Johnson, “Teaching Ignorance: L’École des Femmes,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 173.
J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 2; see 1 for the discussion above, here and below.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, repr. 1997), 26.
See, for instance, Jonathan Hart, Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
J Hillis Miller, The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 1.
See Jacques Derrida, “Télépathie,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987) and the English translation: “Telepathy,” trans. Nicholas Royle, in Pysche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007);
see Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and his The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), esp. 256–76
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1
and Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 418–19,
quoted in J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. The English translation of this book uses the same three terms I refer to here, which are in the original French.
See Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvreé (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2004), 11. Miller quotes in both languages.
The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press); John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols., 1953–62 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), vol. 9, 121.
Ian Watt, “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication,” Essays in Criticism 10 (3) (1960): 250–74
for Erasmus, I had in mind the Latin sentence “Your letter pleased me greatly” and the many variations he wrought. See Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum [On Copia of Words and Ideas].1512, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1963). Desiderius Erasmus, “Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style: De duplici copia verborum ac rerum Commentarii duo,” trans. and ed. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 2, ed. Craig R. Thompson, vol. 28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 302.
Copyright information
© 2013 Jonathan Hart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hart, J. (2013). Theory. In: From Shakespeare to Obama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47746-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37582-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)