A History of Literary Criticism

A Century of Literary Theory, from T.S. Eliot to Judith Butler

In honor of Pens and Poison’s first anniversary, I am republishing the essay that started it all—my history of literary criticism that went out to just 70 subscribers on June 20, 2024. Today, it will reach more than 5,000 inboxes. Thank you so much to everyone who made this happen, and enjoy the essay!

It is no secret that ideology has taken over the literary academy, but how did we get here? Today, I thought it might be informative to present a summary of literary criticism in the American academy and explain how these ideas came to define our current political climate. In short, here’s my take on how we started, how it went, and how we got here.

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We can date contemporary American academia back to the 19th century, with the emergence of “liberal arts” education in elite universities such as Harvard and Yale. Based on Protestant ideals, this sort of education emphasized critical thinking and was structured around a centralized European canon. Early conservative thinkers such as literary critic Irving Babbitt believed that education should be instrumental in the development of moral character. Along with Paul Elmer More, he developed the New Humanist school of pedagogical thought, which attempted to discredit naturalist, romantic, and utilitarian thinkers. Babbitt derived his views from the tradition of classical liberalism and had a heavy influence on my personal literary idol, T.S. Eliot. Eliot is often credited as the forerunner of modern literary criticism, and he founded the school of thought that we know today as New Criticism. You might not have heard of New Criticism by its formal name, but you’ve definitely encountered it if you went through any sort of American high school—its primary methodology is the idea of “close reading” and sticking to the content of a literary text to infer its meaning.

New Criticism established itself as the dominant ideology of the literary academy in the early 20th century. The premise was straightforward: you pick up a novel or a poem, look at the words the author uses, consider the connotations of those words, and draw conclusions. In a similar vein, the Russian Formalists were busy creating a system of textual analysis that would focus on a work’s structural or linguistic elements. Critic Roman Jakobson, for instance, believed that a text’s distinctive features were instrumental in revealing its fundamental meaning. As Russian Formalism seeped into the American academy, it gained immense popularity and was practiced alongside New Criticism (although these two schools of thought developed entirely independently of one another). These two methods might have remained dominant had the study of literature been organized around a broader scope of texts instead of a primary canon—yet the problem here was that if you keep close-reading the same set of materials, you eventually run out of new things to say.

Let’s briefly revisit our friend Irving Babbitt. While Babbitt pushed a model of education that primarily limited itself to the individual—i.e., the effect that a given text, idea, model, document, etc. would have on an individual’s moral development—his main adversaries, a group of philosophers belonging to a school of thought called Pragmatism, pushed the idea that these same modes of learning could not be self-contained and must instead have some bearing on the circumstances around us. The big names in Pragmatism that are relevant to us are Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce and James set about defining the concept of “practical consequences,” according to which any object might be defined by its external repercussions. This line of thought eventually allowed the Pragmatists to blur the dictates of objective truth and claim that everyone’s truths were predicated on their surrounding realities. In schools, this translated to the philosophy of John Dewey, who believed that education should be a social instead of an individualist function.

While the Pragmatists didn’t explicitly dabble in literary theory, their heavy involvement in education began to appeal to Babbitt’s other opponents, whom we might characterize as the Progressives. Progressives, backed by Woodrow Wilson at the time, adapted pragmatist philosophy by introducing the idea of government intervention in education as a function of greater social good. By the 1930s, Babbitt’s classical liberalism was on the way out.

Meanwhile, in the literary academy, New Criticism had evolved into a project espoused by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. With their publication in 1947 of the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley challenged the concept of authorial intent and proclaimed that a reader’s response to a given text should be independent of its author’s original intention. This revolutionary idea—that it didn’t matter what the author meant—gained immediate traction in the academy and became the cornerstone of many schools of contemporary literary thought. This method of analysis eventually gave birth to the Reader-Response school of literary criticism, which is often associated with Yeshiva University professor Stanley Fish. Fish’s writing focuses on subjective reader experience and why the meaning of a given text should depend almost entirely on a reader’s individual interpretation.

Let’s backpedal one more time before this all starts to make sense. We’re in France in 1916. A posthumous publication of a series of lectures given by one Ferdinand de Saussure effectively creates the field of modern linguistics and redefines the way that we think of words. Saussurean linguistics, as outlined in his Course in General Linguistics, is predicated on the concept of the “sign,” a double entity that is composed of a “signifier” and its “signified.” If we picture a horse, for example, the physical horse standing before us is the “signified” and the word “horse” is the “signifier” that we use to denote the idea of a horse. If I had said “cat” instead, you’d be picturing a cat. The fact that I used the word “horse,” however, is, according to Saussure, completely arbitrary—that is, there is no particular reason why a horse is a “horse” and not a “kompumpum.” (I made that up, please don’t attempt to Google it.) The sign is not only arbitrary but also differential—its value is determined by the nature of the signs around it. You knew I was talking about a physical horse because I told you to picture a horse, but if I had told you to picture two little kids horsing around, you’d have a completely different image in your mind despite the fact that I’d just used the same word. The idea here is that we know what words mean based on context, and no words can attain their proper meaning when considered in a vacuum.

This school of thought is called Structuralism, and, as you might guess, it had an enormous influence on the literary academy. Structuralism takes on a related meaning in anthropology, and while I’m not an anthropologist, let’s briefly discuss the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s travels to Brazil famously informed his contributions to the field of ethnography, and his relationship to literature is closely associated with his ensuing interest in the study of mythology. Borrowing from Saussure, Lévi-Strauss argued that the fundamental unit of structure in mythology—what he called the mytheme—could be explained using binary opposition theory. Just as the meaning of language came about by setting words in opposition to one another, myths had always been constructed by juxtaposing two opposing ideas. (Lévi-Strauss also drew heavily on the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.) In other words, according to Lévi-Strauss, mythology was there to reconcile and examine opposing concepts in life and to help us understand binaries such as good/evil, day/night, man/woman, etc.

Lévi-Strauss’s reinterpretation of structuralism was central in establishing the school of Post-Structuralism that surfaced in the 1960s and still informs literary and general humanistic study today. World War II had left previously established academic truths either in complete shambles or in danger of incipient subversion. Along came an Algerian Frenchman named Jacques Derrida. In 1966, Derrida published a lecture that he had presented at Johns Hopkins University called “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The essay drew heavily on Saussure and Lévi-Strauss but argued that Saussure and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism relied too heavily on the idea of a privileged “center.” In Derrida’s view, binary opposition in the West had always developed with a hierarchical dimension that necessarily privileged one side of the binary over the other. Good always trumped evil, day always trumped night, and man always trumped woman. The following year, Derrida adapted this view in his longer work Of Grammatology, where he set out to deconstruct the entire history of what he termed “Western Metaphysics.” Derrida’s central argument (as far as one exists amidst his opaque logic and gratuitous academic jargon) was that the Western tradition had always privileged one side of the binary over the other—specifically, speech over writing. Thus Derrida coined the term “logocentrism” to identify a system in which words constitute an objective, external reality and create immediate access to meaning. The term took on a heavily negative connotation as Derrida began to destroy the pillars of objective reality and create his school of Deconstruction (although he famously objected to this term when it was thrust upon his methodology). In Derrida’s view, the idea that the meaning of literature, or any other facet of external reality, was so readily accessible was flawed almost to the point of deplorability.

Following in Derrida’s footsteps, as well as in those of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the progenitors of Reader-Response theory, French critic Roland Barthes shifted literature’s burden of meaning entirely to the reader with the publication of his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, Barthes claimed that authorial intention and identity were entirely irrelevant to a reader’s interpretation of a given text. Two years later, fellow French postmodern scholar Michel Foucault reinforced Barthes’ ideas with the delivery of his lecture “What Is an Author,” where he argued that the concept of “author” was simply a societally constructed abstraction that had historically served to ascribe meaning to a given autonomous text. If you’re familiar with this fashionable concept of the social construct, you might not be surprised to learn that Foucault was one of its prime architects. Foucault’s four-volume History of Sexuality deals with the development of and attitudes towards sexuality in the West. With this work, he introduced the idea of sexual morality as culturally relative and put forth the claim that sexuality was ultimately a social construct.

The year is now 1976. By the time Foucault made his entrance onto the academic stage, the concept of objective truth was losing ground in the academy. The expansion of American higher education after World War II had resulted in a massive influx of PhD students and their concomitant dissertations. The lack of clear subject matter had encouraged many students to align themselves with the hazy theorizing of the French postmodernists. Feminist and gender theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, following in Foucault’s footsteps, set out to redefine our conception of gender. Gender and sexuality were suddenly central to the analysis of any literary text, and ethnicity followed suit with the entrance of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak’s Post-Colonialism, which examined the repercussions of white exploitation of colonized peoples in literature and anthropological study. Around this same time, Columbia and UCLA Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw began to advocate for the welfare of marginalized black voices and thereby helped to establish Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. The Neo-Marxism of Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, and Theodor Adorno helped inform the ensuing discourse on equity and soon became yet another staple of literary criticism. Out of Neo-Marxism came Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, which stripped literature of its “fixed” literary value and ascribed objective literary quality to the existing power structures of the time. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the ideological transformation of the academy was complete.

Whether you agree with the development of literary theory or not, I believe that those of us who wish to study literature should take a breather. Perhaps it is wiser for us all to stop trying to find hidden, abstruse themes where they don’t exist. Above all else, literature is an expression of human emotion and beauty, and before we begin to dissect it word by word, we should first consider that a book is a work of art, and like any work of art, is best appreciated with an ever-present aura of mystery and grandeur.

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