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The Chicago School of Literary Criticism. Partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity, and a
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1. New Criticism New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. It developed from the teaching methods advocated by John Crowe Ransom who taught at Vanderbilt. Some of his students (all Southerners) like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesethetics that came to be known as the New Criticism.
In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a controversial essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy," Wimsatt and Beardley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. Stanley Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).
Brooks and Warren Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction became the standard pedagogical textbook in American high schools and colleges in the 1950s, 60's, and 70's.
This approach emphasized careful, exacting scrutiny of texts focusing on formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization and plot, and looking for forms of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension in the text in order to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation. Such an approach has been criticized as constituting a conservative attempt to isolate the text and to shield it from external, political concerns such as those of race, class, and gender.
2. The Chicago School of Literary Criticism Partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity, and a strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago school is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.
Ronald Salmon Crane (1886-1967) is considered the founder of the Chicago Aristotelians.
Other key figures in the Chicago School were W.R. Keast, Norman Maclean, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg. After this first generation, the most important critics to carry on the theory were Wayne C. Booth (who taught at the University of Chicago from 1947-1950 and again from 1962 until his death in 2005)
3. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) Basic premises:
All narrative is a form of rhetoric.
The distinction between showing and telling in fiction ? too simplistic.
Though he was influenced to some extent by New Criticism, in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Booth moves beyond this view. His theory is actually distinct from:
traditional biographical criticism;
New Criticism (arguing that one can only talk about what the text says);
later trends in literary criticism arguing for the eradication of the authorial presence.
Through a close reading of a selection of great novelists, Booth investigated the tricky relationship between a novels author and narrator.
Booth does not see the author as the only person involved in creating a work of fiction. Instead, he sees this creation as comprised of both author and reader with a narrator to guide the reader through the maze of the text. For Booth, the reader and the author cannot be separate because of the power both author and reader exert on the text and the power the text exerts on the author and reader. Booth argues that the author constructs an implied author and a narrator, both of whom connect to a specific reading community.
4. the intricate relationship of the so-called real author with his various official versions of himself ? implied author (the authors second self):
However impersonal he may try to be, his readers will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reaction to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our response to the work. (
) regardless of how sincere an author may try to be, his different works will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one's personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works. These differences are most evident when the second self is given an overt, speaking role in the story. (1983: 71)
The implied author chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices in:
Style (providing insight into the authors norms);
Tone (through which the author implies his judgment of the material presented);
Technique (the artistry of the author).
It is only by distinguishing between the author and his implied image that we can avoid pointless and unverifiable talk about such qualities as "sincerity" or "seriousness" in the author. (1983: 74-5)
5. Real author implied author narrator:
Finding the traditional classification of point of view into three of four kinds, variables only of the person and the degree of omniscience, Booth proposes a richer tabulation of the forms the authors voice can take (149):
Person: To say that a story is told in the first or the third person will tell us nothing of importance unless we become more precise and describe how the particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effects. [
] functional distinctions apply to both first- and third-person narration alike. (150)
Perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author. (151)
Undramatized narrators (that are not given personal characteristics): In so far as a novel does not refer directly to this [implied] author, there will be no distinction between him and the implied, undramatized narrator. (151)
Dramatized narrators: (
) even the most reticent narrator has been dramatized as soon as he refers to himself as I. The range of dramatized narrators is usually wide, from vivid narrator-characters, disguised narrator-characters telling the audience what it needs to know or seemingly acting out their roles to third-person centers of consciousness through whom authors have filtered their narratives. Hence the further distinction between mere observers and narrator-agents (who produce measurable effect on the course of events). (152-3)
6. All narrators and observers, whether first or third person, can relay their tales to us primarily as scene (
), primarily as summary (
) or, most commonly, as a combination of the two. [
] the contrast between scene and summary, between showing and telling, is likely to be of little use until we specify the kind of narrator who is providing the scene or the summary. (154-5)
Commentary: (1) merely ornamental, serving a rhetorical purpose, without being part of the dramatic structure; (2) integral to the dramatic structure. ?
self-conscious narrators, aware of themselves as writers (Such fiction shatters any illusion that the narrator is telling something that has actually happened by revealing to the reader that the narration is a work of fictional art, or by flaunting the discrepancies between its patent fictionality and the reality it seems to represent.) /versus/ narrators/observers who rarely if ever discuss their writing chores or who seem unaware that they are writing/thinking/speaking/reflecting a literary work.
Booth discusses five specific relationships between the narratorimplied authorreader in a text:
The narrator may be more/less distanced from the implied author. Distance here may be temporal, moral, or intellectual.
The narrator may be more/less distanced from the characters. The narrator differs temporally, morally (and emotionally), or intellectually from the characters and their norms.
The narrator may be more/less distanced from the reader and the readers norms. This distance may be physical, emotional, or moral.
The implied author may be more/less distanced from the reader. This distance is intellectual, moral, or aesthetic and a book that expects the reader to accept the values is not well received.
The implied author (carrying the reader with him) may be more/less distanced from other characters (on any axis of value).
For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator. (158)
7. A narrator (is) reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms), unreliable when he does not. It is true that most of the great reliable narrators indulge in large amounts of incidental irony, and they are thus unreliable in the sense of being potentially deceptive. But difficult irony is not sufficient to make a narrator unreliable. Nor is unreliability ordinarily a matter of lying (
). It is most often a matter of what James calls inconscience; the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him.
Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far and in what direction they depart from their author's norms; the older term tone, like the currently fashionable terms irony and distance, covers many effects that we should distinguish. (158-9)
The author also creates an implied/postulated reader whose values and background represent the ideal reader: The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement. (138)
Real author implied author narrator ----- narratee implied reader real reader
