The Critical Enterprise

English Studies in Higher Education

Raymond Cowell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138317581
• eBook ISBN: 9780429847752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Originally published in 1975, The Critical Enterprise looks at how the expansion and diversification of English Studies was shaping and was shaped by the Higher Education curriculum. The book looks at how students of sixth forms, colleges, polytechnics and universities alike found an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary studies and how this opened new ways of studying new subjects. The book defines the unique academic elements which make English Studies a unique academic experience as well as an essential ingredient of most interdisciplinary courses.

Part One

SIMPLE PRINCIPLES

Chapter 1

THE EXPERIENCE OF ENGLISH STUDIES

The Word and the World

English Studies, the critical enterprise, is concerned not only with a very wide range of knowledge, values and attitudes but also with a distinctive kind of experience. In this first chapter that experience will be looked at analytically and defined under certain categories but at the outset it can be described in the broadest terms as essentially an experience of collaboration – between teacher and students, between disciplines and, in a very important sense, between writer and reader. This collaboration is not a simple matter of pooling opinions and facts, but tends to be altogether more turbulent and critical: there are no definitive answers, not even any opinions which another look at the text may not alter. As well as being a discipline in its own right, English Studies has an innate tendency to branch out into other disciplines and this interdisciplinary impetus is one of the kinds of collaboration which can be developed within changing curricula of Higher Education. The very name ‘English Studies’, rather than simply ‘English’, reflects the widening perspectives of the discipline.

To simplify for a moment, one might define the discipline as the exploration of the relations between ‘the word’ and ‘the world’, between verbal style and life-style. The discipline’s inbuilt safeguard against the potential vagueness of such wide-ranging explorations is to proceed by focusing initially on a particular stretch of language, only then widening the scope of its enquiry into related disciplines. The view of English Studies presented in this book places literature at its centre, but of course the study of non-literary language is also of increasing importance. There is, anyway, no hard and fast distinction between literary and non-literary language for, unlike other art forms, literature has no special artistic medium; it uses the common currency of ordinary life, the words of ‘men speaking to men’, and though it can heighten ordinary language great literature’s roots are always deep in the soil of the vernacular. It is this simple fact about the discipline of English Studies and its raw material, language, which makes it distinctive from other disciplines: art and life, imagination and reality, jostle with each other, producing the creative tensions which draw student and teacher together in the critical enterprise. The very word ‘style’, for example, is constantly used about ways of living as well as about ways of writing and the search for connections between the various kinds of style that flourish in a particular period is one of the exciting tasks to which English Studies can contribute in collaboration with other disciplines.

Since its obscure beginnings in the 1850s, English Studies as an academic discipline has had a chequered history, in which one frequently comes across bitter rearguard efforts by its advocates to prevent its absorption into some other discipline: History, Classics, Philology, Linguistics, Sociology and others.¹ Such efforts are still necessary, but they need no longer be bitter now that the discipline is established as both popular and ‘respectable’ and one argument of this book is that the time is ripe to explore more vigorously the distinctive role of English Studies in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Of course, the suggestion that English Studies can best flourish as a recognised and distinctive part of the interdisciplinary curriculum is not a new one – John Churton Collins argued the case in the Study of Literature (1891) – but it needs to be restated today if the discipline is to escape the antithetical fates of absorption into, or remoteness from, other disciplines. Today the discipline is as embattled in controversy as ever, but a great deal of such controversy is arid and unnecessary; there has been too much rhetoric and not enough reflection about English Studies in recent years.

It was no accident that English Studies as a strenuous and distinctive discipline emerged at the same time as a new attitude to language. The influential ideas of philosophers and linguists like Wittgenstein, Saussure, and many others have made this a century preoccupied almost to the point of obsession with the role of language in communication and psychological development. Fundamentally, they destroyed the fallacy that language is merely the expression of previously conceived ideas or emotions by showing that language is integral to thinking and feeling, in individuals and societies alike; that our linguistic resources are inextricably linked with most of our human faculties; that, as Wittgenstein put it, the limits of our language are the limits of our world. This intellectual revolution had radical implications for the emergent discipline of English Studies. It gave the discipline a vital concern with the analysis and appreciation of the complex relations between particular verbal effects and the experience described by a piece of writing. The somewhat vapid tradition of ‘belletrism’ within which critical analysis was little more than the arbitrary selection of striking phrases from a work was dismissed by the critics of the 20s and 30s. Such critics as Eliot, Richards, Empson and Leavis were prepared to talk about the meaning of a work of literature only as they found it embodied in words: ‘Practical Criticism’ was born (or re-born) and for its early advocates the only reality was ‘the words on the page’. The belletrists, and philologists and historians of literature were, for the time being at least, on the defensive. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) typifies the ingenious intensity of this new form of criticism. Of course, behind this revolution in criticism was the modern revolution in literature, and Ezra Pound declared with relish the paradox that technique was the best test of man’s sincerity; technique could be analysed, sincerity was imponderable.

The excitement of much of the literary criticism of the 20s and 30s arose from a sense that it had now moved to the centre of the intellectual scene. It was probably I. A. Richards who did most at this crucial time to provide a ‘justification’ of literature and literary criticism – in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)-by explaining the human significance of literature in terms of its ordering of conflicting impulses within the individual, and the foundation of Scrutiny in 1933 provided a powerful instrument for the expression and dissemination of new views on literature and criticism. In this period, criticism regained much of the speculative vigour and seriousness which it had displayed in the period between 1800 and 1890. The new sense of the formative and transforming power of language provided by Wittgenstein and others was allied to a sense of the social importance of literature, its power as a counterbalance to the dangers of mass culture,² and criticism took on a combative and astringent tone. In 1915, Robert Frost had defined literature as ‘words that have become deeds’³ and many critics saw their function in terms of the constant transformation of words into deeds, believing that literature could generate attitudes hostile to the baleful crudities of mass culture. There is a clear continuity between these early views and those expressed in a more recent classic of critical philosophy. What is Literature? (1948) by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre attacks those who see literature as an isolated artistic activity, the ‘pure stylists’, asserting that to love language is to hate those who abuse it, including many who are politically eminent:

It is the serious error of pure stylists to think that the word is a gentle breeze which plays lightly over the surface of things, grazing them without altering them, and that the speaker is a pure witness who sums up with a word his harmless contemplation. To speak is to act; anything which one names is already no longer quite the same; it has lost its innocence.⁴

No serious reader, certainly no student of literature, can divorce his experience of reading from the rest of his life, merely witnessing impartially an aesthetic accomplishment. To read well, to enter into a dialectical relationship with particular verbal expressions of experience, is to be drawn into ever-widening relationships. Such a classic of modern criticism as Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) makes explicit the natural impulse of verbal criticism towards social and political criticism. The tone of the essay is apparent in this passage:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.⁵

Although Orwell does give examples of dishonest political language, the essay inevitably leaves many questions open. The analysis of the distinctive rhetoric of politics on a historical basis, for example, could be a fascinating study and, as I see it, English Studies would make a very important contribution to such an interdisciplinary study. It is true that certain critics have developed the seminal hints found throughout Orwell’s essays but the bold speculative spirit of Orwell’s approach to literary and non-literary language does not yet figure prominently enough in the academic teaching of English Studies.⁶

In a sense, therefore, the philosophical coherence and critical method which the 20s and 30s gave the discipline of English Studies has not yet been fully developed because too few critics have been willing to explore the relations between verbal criticism and other kinds of criticism. As I shall try to show in the next chapter, some of the best nineteenth-century critics provide an example of the kind of speculative boldness which now needs to be added to the achievements of post-Empsonian verbal analysis. To take the case of Wordsworth’s poetry as an example, the critical revolution of this century has released Wordsworthian criticism from the sentimental excesses of those who found in him merely a retreat from the harsh realities of the ‘iron age’ of the late nineteenth century. His poetry is now appreciated as poetry, as highly sophisticated even when apparently very simple. But I know of no critic who has combined a sharp awareness of his poetic qualities with a realisation of Wordsworth’s crucial place in a changing culture – the social and cultural implications of Lyrical Ballads have scarcely been touched upon, in spite of the clear guidelines laid down by the poet himself in the 1800 ‘Preface’. Within Wordsworth’s work in both poetry and prose there is a considered and radical criticism of contemporary society which, when understood, reveals new facets of his poetry and establishes him as one of the founders of the tradition of nineteenth-century literary social criticism.

What seems to have happened is that the subtlety and precision of ‘Practical Criticism’ techniques has proved so exciting that many critics have lost sight of the fact that literature is more than a series of verbal structures. Such descriptions of literature as ‘pseudo-statements’ (Richards), ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot), Verbal contraption’ (Auden), though valuable in establishing the difference between literature and life, have been misinterpreted by many critics to justify a kind of aesthetic criticism which views poetry as a ‘verbal icon’ or ‘well-wrought urn’, something remotely enshrined above the currents of its age or the emotions of its readers. Such views have found particularly arid expression in the now-orthodox contempt for the so-called ‘Intentional Fallacy’⁷, for the assumption that the writer’s intentions are necessarily realised in the poem. One sees, of course, that intention and achievement will not always coincide, and that, once completed, the artifact is in an important sense independent of the artist and his original intentions, but to erect this impenetrable barrier between the writer’s intention and his work’s meaning is to deny many of the truths embodied in the oldest metaphor of literary creation, that of parent and child. Perhaps Valéry has put these modern views in their most acceptable and thought-provoking form: ‘A poet’s function... is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others’.⁸ This kind of preoccupation with literature as communication rather than as overflowing emotion should at least mean that modern criticism takes an interest in the relation between ‘the medium’ and ‘the message’ but with one or two exceptions (notably Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams) this has not been the case. It should be possible to reconcile a view of literature as an intricate piece of verbal architecture with some awareness of its relation to contemporary life and manners; to relate this verbal architecture to real architecture, for example.

The effect, though certainly not the intention, of this century’s critical revolution has been to de-humanise literature. Criticism has too often become esoteric or fussily analytic, denying by implication what is manifestly true of many common readers’ experiences of literature, that it helps them to understand themselves and the world better, that it reveals truths to them. In fact, the ‘common reader’ figures very prominently in most eighteenth-century and much nineteenth-century criticism, but only rarely in modern criticism. Perhaps the impoverishment of some modern criticism springs ultimately from this unawareness of literature as a common, ordinary experience. Criticism need not be parasitic, but equally it can never be autonomous. Its relation to its subject-matter needs constantly to be reviewed if these extremes are to be avoided and Richard Poirier puts one tenable view in The Performing Self: ‘English Studies cannot be the body of English literature but it can be at one with its spirit: of struggling, of wrestling with words and meaning’.⁹ This one sentence goes a long way towards defining ‘the experience of English Studies’ but like any worthwhile critical remark it asks for scrutiny and extension. Therefore, at this point it might be useful to consider one of the central questions of literary criticism, one which many poets and critics have struggled and wrestled with, the nature and validity of literary truth. It is a question which takes us into that middle ground between art and life mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; here the similarities and differences between English Studies as an educational discipline and literature and language as an essential part of many people’s lives may be clarified.

In his 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth writes directly and lucidly about the nature of poetic truth, saying of poetry that ‘its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative, not standing upon external testimony but carried alive into the heart by passion’.¹⁰ There are important disclaimers as well as assertions here; poetry, he says, is not concerned with ‘individual and local’ truth, it is not committed to what we might now call ‘documentary realism’. Its truth is to be judged, he suggests, not by external standards of accuracy or verisimilitude but by its intensity, its ability to burn its way into our consciousness. In his very different style, Keats said much the same thing in a letter of 1817:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.¹¹

The Platonic phraseology gives this a different ring from Wordsworth’s views, but Keats’s phrase Vhether it existed before or not’ makes essentially the same point as Wordsworth’s ‘not standing upon external testimony’, and both are asserting that there are at least two kinds of Truth: one which is scientifically verifiable, the other a matter of intensity, intuition and conviction. In an age when Bentham and the Utilitarians were trying to quantify and codify every aspect of human life, including happiness and poetry, such assertions were clearly necessary, and they are even more urgently necessary today. There is an apocryphal story of a Victorian lady who took Tennyson to task for inaccuracy in his lines: ‘Every moment dies a man,/Every moment one is born’, suggesting an alteration to: ‘Every moment dies a man,/Every moment 1.0625 is born’. The spirit parodied here is still a threat to literature’s existence today, when any truth which cannot be ‘empirically verified’ tends to be viewed with suspicion. An acceptance of different kinds of truth, and different methods for recognising the true and exposing the spurious, is an essential basis for interdisciplinary curricula, and conversely the greatest threat to such curricula is the monistic urge to make everything conform to a set of universal criteria and methods. The critic examining the structure and imagery of King Lear, for example, should never forget that the play’s essential truth is capable of moving the ordinary man to tears and wonder.

An obvious illustration of the nature of literary truth can be found in the variety of intelligent, honest and plausible responses to any work of literature either in one age or, more strikingly, across a wider span of time.¹² The case of Wordsworth’s critical reputation in the last century and this has already been referred to, and even a more recent major poet such as Yeats has been accorded a series of fluctuating evaluations and diverse interpretations in the eighty years since he began to make a name for himself. However, the most notorious controversy in modern criticism is undoubtedly that which has centred on Milton. For the eig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Simple Principles
• Part Two: Complete Embodiments and Miscellaneous Forms
• Conclusion
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Index