Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview - Igcollege.org

Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded
that the proper concern of literary criticism is
not with the external circumstances or the
effects of a work, but with a detailed
consideration of the work itself.” 4 T. S. Eliot’s
‘theory of impersonality’, which is considered
to be his greatest contribution to the field of
poetry and criticism, marks the beginning of
the new or practical criticism. He emphasises
the autonomy of the work of art in his famous
essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”. In
Eliot’s words,
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression
of personality, but an escape from
personality.... 5
In another famous phrase from his
essay on “Hamlet” (1919), he describes the
work of art as an ‘objective correlative’ for the
experience which may have engendered it-- an
impersonal re-creation which is the
autonomous object of attention. In other
words, it is “the only way of expressing
emotion through a set of objects, a chain of
events, a situation as a formula.” 6 The other
names associated with this approach are Ezra
Pound, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and
F.R. Leavis.
A poem or a piece of writing, in
Richards’s view, stands all by itself. His
approach to literature is based on the
experiments, he did in Cambridge. He used to
give an unsigned poem to the undergraduate
students and invite their uninhibited and
unconditioned responses. Thus, the focus of
his approach is on recording of what happened
to a reader while reading poetry. A poem is,
no doubt, a response of the poet to an object or
situation. It throws light on his/her state of
mind. However, the poem also has its
inclusive or ironical structure, which is
realised by analysing language, imagery, and
rhythm.
The extension of Richards’s work is
noticed in William Empson, especially in his
books-- Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and
The Structure of Complex Words. His
emphasis in the analysis of poetry is on its
ambiguity. According to him, it is due to
ambiguity that there are several reactions to
the same piece. As the stress is on the
ambiguous language, Empson concentrates his
attention on the diction and imagery. In his
analysis of a poem, Empson has tried to look
for double or contradictory meanings. The best
example of it is his interpretation of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 83.
However, there is a slight difference
in Empson’s method and that of Richards.
Richards’s approach is empirical. And for this
experimental method, the reader’s response is
the foundation. But Empson is not interested
in the reader’s psychology but in the context
in which the word occurs. Connotations, for
him, are more important than denotations. So,
he thinks that the reader, while he is reading a
poem, has to pay attention to the context rather
than to the lexical meaning. In short, both,
Richards and Empson pay attention to the
reader’s response in terms of meaning, but
from different angles. For Richards, in the
interpretation of a poem, the psychology of the
reader is important and for Empson, the
connotation of the diction is important.
F.R. Leavis, through his journal
Scrutiny (1932-53), made remarkable
contribution to the practical/applied criticism.
One of the columns of this journal consisted of
his interpretation of the passages from English
literature. This experimental analysis of
innumerable passages brought the practical
criticism to a great degree of refinement.
Criticism, in Leavis’s view, should not be
regarded as a method of neutral literary or
rhetorical analysis. It must enable the reader to
distinguish between a vital and a slovenly
piece of literature. A successful poem, for
him, is one, in which there is an integration of
imagery, movement, and attitudes into a single
complex whole. Through his analysis, the
reader has to give his estimate of whether a
writer has cast his thought in the concrete, felt
terms or has merely left it as an abstraction. In
his analysis of some of the passages from
Macbeth, in his work The Living Principle, he
brings to the reader’s notice the efficacy of the
practical criticism not only as a method of
literary analysis, but as a tool of judgement.
However, Leavis’s approach to
literature is not that of a rhetorical critic. For
him, literature is a powerful weapon for
effecting a moral change in society. So, being
84 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1