His ideas generally centre around the same questions tackled by many critics: what is poetry and how does one evaluate it? Theories Wimsatt contributed several theories to the critical landscape, particularly through his major work, The Verbal Icon (of which some of the ideas are discussed below). Indeed, Wimsatt is concerned with ensuring a level of legitimacy in English studies and he sets about doing so by favouring a scientific approach to criticism-even, for example, decrying affective theory as “less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative - that of a soul adventuring among masterpieces” ( Verbal Icon 29). “The only reservation the theorist need have about such critical impressionism or expressionism,” says Wimsatt, “is that, after all, it does not carry on very far in our cogitation about the nature and value of literatureit is not a very mature form of cognitive discourse” ( Hateful Contraries xvi).
In Hateful Contraries, Wimsatt refers to a “New Amateurism,” an “anti-criticism” emerging in works such as ’s “Credo,” which appeared in the.
Much of his theory, however, appears to stem from an ambivalence towards ', and relativism” (Leitch et al. He allows, for example, for what he calls the “literary sense” of meaning, saying that “no two different words or different phrases ever mean fully the same” (Verbal Icon xii). Wimsatt does allow for a certain degree of variation in the analysis of poetry and does not necessarily contend that there is only one possible reading for any given poem. He outlines and advocates (particularly in his two influential essays written with, “” and “”) an “objective criticism” in which the critic essentially disregards the intentions of the poet and the effect of the poem on the audience as the sole (or even the major) factors in analyzing and evaluating a poem (Davis and Schleifer 43).
I would like to pay Father Ong the compliment of saying that I think that his essay 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn' is the only sensible response that has ever been written to that essay of ours.' As a staunch critic, Wimsatt believed in the authority of the poem: any analysis of a poem must centre on the text itself (Leitch et al.
0 kommentar(er)
