Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

There is no reason to assume that the basic principles of New
Critical pedagogy were not formulated in a context highly
sympathetic to elitist notions of High Culture. The version of
formalism espoused by the New Critics never assumed that the
readers of literature should be other than very well educated…
(168)
Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn, which contains the gist of New Critical thought
reasserts that the language of poetry in particular, and literature in general, is intrinsically
difficult: “some of [modern] poetry is admittedly difficult—a great deal of it is bound to
appear to the difficult to the reader of conventional reading habits” (67). This is easily
verifiable if one considers that indeed, The Waste Land illustrates a most complex use of
language and poetic diction. Considering literature as intrinsically difficult not only aims
at marking a distinction between literature and popular culture as Brooks points out by
comparing Donne’s “The Canonization” with Tin Pan Alley’s “Let the Rest of the World
go By” (“Understanding” 137). It creates at the same time a clear separation between
mass culture and the culture of the school by making “literary works more difficult to
consume outside of the school” (Guillory Cultural Capital 174), which further privileges
the school as the exclusive context for the distribution and consumption of canonical
works. However, as Guillory aptly argues, “we may fairly describe the effect of New
Critical pedagogy as ‘paradoxical,’ since its most strenuous effort to impose a divorce
between literary culture and mass culture produced in the end a curious kind of
rapprochement” (174); a rapprochement which would subsequently lead to increasing
tensions in the various polarities and corresponding ideologies contiguous to canon-
formation discourses.
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