Introduction

Abstract

I first stumbled upon George Whalley’s ‘The Mariner and the Albatross’ more than twenty years ago. It certainly didn’t resemble a Brooks and Warren exercise in close textual analysis, and I doubt whether I could have said then why I found it memorable. Those graduate schooldays were too much taken up with an instinctive recoil from the ‘perverse, ingenious, desolate’ (p.43) gospel of Northrop Frye that held sway at the University of Western Ontario. There was no one to direct me to Professor Whalley’s wonderfully just and prophetic review of The Anatomy of Criticism, from which I borrow this judgement. Many years later, when I finally came to teach my first course in the history of literary criticism, I knew just enough to seek out his ‘On Translating Aristotle’s Poetics’. It served me well as goad and guide to a fresh understanding of long familiar passages I mistakenly assumed to be within my grasp. The critical rationale for this book is simply this: if these, the first three essays in the volume, have helped me find my way, then they and the balance of the selection, may do the same for a generation of students and teachers who, whether they realise it or not, desperately need an alternative to structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction.

‘I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.’ These words of Goethe, like a sincere ceterum censeo, may well stand at the head of my thoughts.…

(Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History)

(And talking is always a commitment to a world.)

(Ian Robinson, The Survival of English)

The danger of this darkness is easily belittled by our impoverished use of the word ‘thought’. This word is generally used as if it meant an activity necessary to scientists when they come up against a difficulty in their research, or some vague unease beyond calculation when we worry about our existence. Thought is steadfast attention to the whole. The darkness is fearful, because what is at stake is whether anything is good.

(George Grant, English-Speaking Justice)