On the subject of practical criticism

Cambridge Quarterly

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 294-327

  Brown, Alan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61949143002     PISSN: 0008199X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/28.4.293     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester 1988). See pp. 1-5 for an account of the practical criticism project.
2. Isobel Armstrong,'Textual Harassment: The Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?', Textual Practice, 3/3 (Winter 1995) p. 402.
3. Tony Davies, 'Common Sense and Critical Practice', in Peter Widdowson (ed.), Re-Reading English (London 1982) p. 34.
4. Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London 1988). Hunter charts the emergence of 'English' education in direct opposition to 'Arnoldian' and 'left' culturalist accounts of the subject's institutional history.
5. See e.g. Ivor Armstrong Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 2nd edn. (London 1960) p. 25: 'the critic is as closely occupied with the health of the mind as the doctor with the health of the body. In a different way, it is true, and with a wider and subtler definition of health. . .'.
6. The logical bind of Leavisian subjectivism, its relation to a necessary theoretical 'silence', is nicely caught in Francis Mulhern, The Moment of 'Scrutiny' (London 1981) p. 157: 'This silence was itself logically necessary - defined by certain theoretical assumptions whose peculiar characteristic was that they were debarred, on pain of self-refutation, from announcing themselves.'
7. John Peck and Martin Coyle, How to Study: Practical Criticism (Basingstoke 1995) p. xi. This volume is part of the Macmillan How to Study series, and is subtitled The Complete Guide to Writing an Analysis of a Poem, Novel and Play. Subsequent quotations are referenced in the text.
8. John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (Oxford 1996) p. xiii.
9. See e.g. Sue Hackman and Barbara Marshall, Re-Reading Literature: New Critical Approaches to the Study of English (London 1990) passim. Re-Reading Literature is divided into sections which deal successively with the literary establishment; race and class; gender and women's writing; the construction of subjectivity; language and reference; the writing process; textual structure; constructing realism; self-referential texts; popular fiction; mediations ofmeaning; rhetoric and politics; social values. The authors state their aim in a note 'To the Teacher', prior to the numbered text of the volume: 'We have tried to bridge the leap from the traditions of practical criticism into modern theory in away which will make sense in the classroom.'
10. Peck and Coyle, How to Study, p. 6.
11. Frank Raymond Leavis, The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of Thought (London 1975) p. 19: 'This is not the book I have been reproached with having promised a quarter of a century ago, and never having produced. "Judgement and Analysis" was the heading I put over some of the intended contents when they were printed in Scrutiny. I had coined the phrase as a substitute for "Practical Criticism".'
12. Margaret Mathieson, Teaching Practical Criticism: An Introduction (London 1985). Arguably the best available survey of the practical criticism examination; Mathieson provides detailed analysis and proposals aimed at improving the regimen.
13. See Robert Protherough, Teaching Literature for Examinations (Milton Keynes 1986) pp. 34-5, for a discussion of problems in the practical criticism examination.
14. See also Malcolm Peet and David Robinson, The Critical Examination (Oxford 1977) pp. x-xii.
15. Peet and Robinson, The Critical Examination, p. xii.
16. Mathieson, Teaching Practical Criticism, p. 23.
17. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
18. Jan Todd, 'Sixth Form Literature and Literary Theory', cited in Mathieson, Teaching Practical Criticism, p. 25.
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford 1968) p. 179: 'what we do in our language game always rests on a tacit presupposition'.
20. Roger Knight, 'Practical Criticism Examined', English in Education, 17/3 (Autumn 1983), attacks the 1978 Cambridge Examiners' Report on the practical criticism paper in some detail.
21. See Hunter, Culture and Government, pp. 188-90, for a discussion of 'technique' in the Romantic aesthetic.
22. Hunter also cites the following passage from Margaret Hourd, The Education of the Poetic Spirit (London 1949) p. 128: 'The teacher's integrity stands to the child's creativeness in much the same relation as the form of a work of art stands to the meanings within it.'
23. Richards describes his twinning of literary theory and the biological sciences in the early writings as follows: 'I just translated Shelley into Sherrington'. See John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (London 1989) p. 179.
24. Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford 1980) p. 185: 'The fundamental principles [of logic] would be, for example, the law of identity, namely, that A is A and A is not not-A. From such principles, all the truths of reason, including those of mathematics, would be derivable.'
25. See Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London 1973) pp. 242-9, for an account of the development of 'double bind' theories in relation to the theory of logical typing. Bateson offers the following account of the'double bind' in action: 'A primary negative injunction . . . A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and . . . enforced by punishments . . . A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field' (p. 178).
26. See also Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, (London 1972) pp. 117-24, for a discussion of the 'double bind' theory in relation to logic and to the treatment of schizophrenia.
27. See also R. D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (London 1970) p. 180.
28. Jacques Derrida grafts the theory and polysemies of the 'double bind' in a number of his major works. See e.g. The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Macleod (Chicago 1987) pp. 129, 162, 340, 377
29. and Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London 1981) pp. 173-285: 'The Double Session'.
30. E. H. Coombes, Literature and Criticism (London 1953) p. 101.
31. Ivor Armstrong Richards, Practical Criticism (London 1929) p. 320.
32. H. L. B. Moody, Literary Appreciation: A Practical Guide to the Understanding and Enjoyment of Literature in English (London 1968) p. 4.
33. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London 1989) pp. 7-8.
34. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, The Practical Criticism of Poetry: A Textbook (London 1965) pp. 23-4.
35. Richards, Practical Criticism, p. 349.
36. See e.g. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford 1983) p. 9: 'When I use the words "literary" and "literature" from here on in the book, I place them under an invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that these terms will not really do but that we have no better ones at the moment.'
37. Gerald Hammond, 'Don's Delight', Guardian Higher Education, 22 Sept. 1998, p. v.
38. Steven Clark, '"The Price of Everything": Research in the Context of Recent Pedagogic Initiatives', CCUE News, 9 (June 1998) p. 8.