Chicago Criticism

What is Living and What is Dead in Chicago Criticism
Author(s): Michael Sprinker

Source: boundary 2, Vol. 13, No. 2/3, On Humanism and the University II: The Institutions
of Humanism (Winter - Spring, 1985), pp. 189-212
Published by: Duke University Press
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What Is Living and What Is Dead in Chicago Criticism
Michael Sprinker
There seems to be a general feeling abroad among historians

and critics of professionalized literary study that the history of this
discipline began yesterday-or at most the day before. Frank Lentric-
chia's widely admired After the New Criticism places the watershed mo-
ment in American literary theory during the mid-1950s with the putative
break-up of New Critical hegemony and the emergence of a variety of
competing theoretical discourses that openly attacked (while covertly
reproducing)
Culler's the techniques
collection of essays, of
TheAnglo-American formalism.
Pursuit of Signs, concludes Jonathan
with the
following call for a "revolution" in the study of literature in the American
graduate program:
the work of theorists often seems to imply that a

chosen discipline-philosophy, psychoanalysis,
linguistics-has the power and authority to account
for literature. I am claiming, on the contrary, that
literature can illuminate and situate the problems ad-
dressed by these disciplines by offering a perspective
that consists primarily of awareness of rhetorical struc-
tures and forces, awareness of textuality.
What emerges through this reading of literary
189
and nonliterary texts is literary theory. By posing
through this kind of reading the problem of the re-
lationship between the concrete and exemplary
dramas of literature and the more abstract claims of
philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse, we can
both give literary theory its appropriate place in the
discipline of literary studies and offer courses that em-
body the central concerns of humanistic education.
Such courses might also help to make graduate study
in English the exciting activity that it ought to be.2
The passage recalls a famous moment in the history of literary criticism

and theory in the United States: the fourth part of Rend Wellek's and
Austin Warren's influential Theory of Literature (1947), in which the case
for the "intrinsic study of literature" was decisively put. Nor can one
fail to be reminded also of the battles waged immediately after the First
World War in Cambridge University by I. A. Richards and his colleagues
to dislodge philology and literary history from their position of privilege
in the English faculty and to replace these disciplines with adequate
theoretical principles that would serve as the basis for the practical
criticism of literary texts. But one ought also to be reminded of a famous
essay by R. S. Crane first published in 1935, "History versus Criticism
in the University Study of Literature." The importance of this essay
derives not only from its forecast of Culler's project (not to mention
that of Wellek and Warren), but also from its focal position within the
movement toward theoretical poetics and away from historical scholar-
ship that (as Lentricchia correctly observes) has dominated Anglo-
American literary study for the past half century. Here are Crane's sum-
mary recommendations for the necessary changes to be made in the
professional study of literature circa 1935:
The remedy I propose is nothing less than a thorough-

going revision, in our departments of literature, of the
policy which has dominated them-or most of them-
during the past generation. Ample provision should
still be made, especially on the graduate level, for
courses and seminars in literary history and the history
of ideas. But there should be fewer of these, at least
of lecture courses, even on the graduate level, than are
now given.... For the parts of our present program
thus displaced I would substitute, and this at all levels
from the college through the Ph.D., studies of two
distinct though closely related sorts. The first of these
would comprise systematic work in the theory, gener-
ally of all the fine arts, and specifically of the art of
literature; it would be of great advantage if this work
could be organized and conducted, not by particular
departments of literature separately, but by the divi-
sion of the humanities as a whole.... But the end of
190
theory, for criticism, is application; and so the second
of our two groups of studies would consist of exer-
cises in the reading and literary explication of literary
texts.... The essential thing is that they (the expli-
cations) should not be allowed to degenerate into
linguistic or historical investigations or into mere oc-
casions for the parading of personal tastes, but should
be kept constantly directed toward their proper
objective-the text itself considered as a production
of art to be read appreciatively for its own sake in the
light of relevant knowledge and of the principles of its
kind.3
Crane's "principles of its kind" designate the same entity as Culler's

"rhetorical structures and forces" and "textuality," and they would con-
stitute the focus of investigation in Wellek's and Warren's proposal for
the "intrinsic study of literature." Wellek and Warren, like Crane, also
defended the study of literary history, and not on significantly different
grounds from those proposed by Crane for the continued utility of this
discipline for literary study. And of course Crane's bipartite program
for theory and criticism duplicated the two poles of the famous Richard-
sian revolution in British literary criticism: principles of literary criticism
and practical criticism. It is probably not necessary to demonstrate in
detail to anyone trained for the study of English in a British or American
university during the past thirty years how thoroughly these concepts
dominate the ideology of the discipline.4
There are several reasons for resurrecting Crane's essay from
its comparative obscurity. First, it is necessary to emphasize that much
of the contemporary revisionary work being proclaimed under the aegis
of "theory" in literary criticism in the United States is neither particularly
new nor especially revolutionary. The argument for the priority of
poetics over various "extrinsic" methods has a long tradition in literary
study (as does the contrary argument); it could be said to be coeval
with the founding of the discipline itself. Second, while it might be
claimed with considerable justice that the Chicago program never really
caught on in the way that New Criticism did, that the hegemony of New
Critical close reading, both in pedagogy and in professional critical prac-
tice, cast into the shadows the formal poetics developed by Crane and
the Chicagoans, it would nevertheless be untrue to characterize
Chicago criticism as simply a dead issue. Poetic formalism continues
as a serious theoretical position within contemporary literary theory
(as, in their different ways, both Culler and Lentricchia attest-the latter
by the very vehemence with which he denounces it), and Crane's ver-
sion of formalism is by no means eccentric or (as his students have
often said) marginal. It may have taken the importation of French theory
in the 1960s to reassert the prominence of the formalist problematic
in American literary study, but it could certainly no longer be claimed that
theoretical poetics has simply been banished from the critical scene.
Finally, the history of literary study as a discipline is neither as familiar
nor as simple as many have tended to believe. One can, although it
191
has not been done all that often or by that many people, characterize
the discourse of literary criticism and its attendant pedagogy by describ-
ing its ideological function. This has been the project over a number
of years of Richard Ohmann. The picture he presents of the place of
literary study within the social formation of post-war America is surely
correct in broad outline. But one might legitimately differ from Ohmann
in saying that the discourse of criticism is more diverse and polyglot
than he allows. What remains to be explained, after describing the
general ideological position of literary study, is the apparent diversity
of critical practices (which can seem to someone like E. D. Hirsch mere
cacophony and confusion) permitted under the broadly ideological func-
tion of reproducing the relations of production, as well as the particular
shift form philology and literary history to text-centered formalism that
occurred during the second quarter of this century in England and the
United States. The project this investigation entails would be a history
of Anglo-American literary study. What follows is an attempt to tell one
small part of the complicated story of how literary study came to be
constituted in its present form. The part of that story told here is the
shift from "history" to "criticism" announced by Crane and the subse-
quent itinerary this conceptual change followed in the developoment
of the so-called Chicago School.
To begin with biography. Crane was born at the end of the nine-
teenth century and took degrees at Michigan and the University of Penn-
sylvania prior to the First World War. As he himself indicates in the essay
on history and criticism, the hegemony of philology and literary history
within literary study in the Anglo-Saxon world during this period was
virtually unchallenged. Crane himself was to become, during the 1920s,
among the foremost historical scholars in this country, specializing in
the eighteenth century, for which period he almost single-handedly com-
piled and annotated the annual bibliography in Philological Quarterly
from 1926-1932.
Crane's professional career began at Northwestern. He taught
there from 1911 through 1924, moving then to the University of Chicago,
where he stayed until his death in 1967 at the age of eighty-one. Two
other notable aspects of his career are relevant to the concerns of the
present paper. He was, from 1930-1952, editor of Modern Philology. The
importance of Crane's editorial and bibliographical work, and the ways
in which he used them to alter the emphases of literary study should
not be underestimated. As studies by Francis Mulhern and John Fekete
have shown, the journalistic organs of numerous twentieth-century
critical movements have been crucial to the maintenance of cohesion
among the members of the group, as well as to the ability of these
groups to influence a wide spectrum of critical discourse.5 Secondly,
at the very moment of writing his essay on history and criticism, Crane
was assuming the chairmanship of the English department at Chicago,
a position he would hold for the next twelve years. As chairman, Crane
was, in the words of Wellek and Warren (words not completely accurate,
as Crane would later remark, but not far off the mark either), to have
"boldly reoriented" the graduate program at Chicago "from the
historical to the critical."6 Crane thus sought to redirect the study of
192
literature not only through polemical interventions against the establish-
ed discourse of scholars (the central documents for which are certain-
ly Critics and Criticism [1952] and The Languages of Criticism and the
Structure of Poetry [1953]), but also by changing the syllabus of the
graduate program at one of the major institutions for training scholars
and (under Crane's direction) critics. All this may seem obvious enough,
but it is necessary to be reminded that the practice of criticism depends
not only on the structure of critical discourse and its commonplaces,
but also on two major institutions in which the practice is elaborated
and sustained: the professional journal and the curriculum of study for
apprentices. These material and institutional conditions for the pro-
duction of discourse are quite as significant as the thematic structure
of the discourse itself-although it can be said as well that the themes
of a discourse are often closely related to the institutional structures
within which it is produced. The full scope of this problem cannot be
considered here. It will be treated only in passing.
One other fact related to Crane's own position within the Uni-
versity of Chicago and the profession of humane letters as a whole
should be noted. It has long been accepted that one of the principal
moving forces in the formation of the Chicago School was Richard
McKeon, who came from Columbia to Chicago in 1934 under the spon-
sorship of Robert Hutchins. McKeon's essays soon began to appear
in Modern Philology, along with those of his student Elder Olson.7 In
addition, McKeon was, in 1935, to assume the position of head of the
humanities division at Chicago. Certainly it cannot have been fortuitous
for Crane's 1935 essay to suggest that "it would be of great advantage
if this work [in the theory of the fine arts] could be organized and con-
ducted, not by particular departments of literature separately, but by
the division of the humanities as a whole." The centrality of literary study
to this program is apparent. The power sought by Crane and his col-
leagues (and subsequently their students) was methodological and
ideological supremacy over the entire humanities curriculum.8 Chicago
criticism can in this way be compared to other critical enterprises more
or less contemporary with it (Leavis and the Scrutiny group, the fugitive
agrarians, Trilling and the group around Partisan Review, the social
criticism of T. S. Eliot), in light of their common aim to establish the
claims of the humanities (or, more narrowly, the discipline of literature)
against the growing cultural prestige of positivist science and its
presumed consequence: modern industrial society.
Conventional wisdom concerning the ensuing thirty years in the
history of literary criticism holds that Crane's designs achieved at most
partial fulfillment. What came to be known as Chicago criticism exerted
only limited influence on the practice of literary interpretation beyond
the precincts of the University of Chicago. Its dissemination was con-
fined largely (though not exclusively-one thinks immediately of Ralph
Rader) to the teaching and writing of Chicago-trained students, posted
to various frontiers of higher education armed with the gospel accord-
ing to Aristotle. But not unlike the position of literary theorists in many
literature departments today, while every self-respecting department had
to have one, there was little indication that mass conversions were in
193
the offing. Brooks, Wimsatt, Ransom, and the rest survived the
polemical attacks of Crane and Olson, and New Criticism became the
pedagogical and critical orthodoxy to replace literary history and
philology in the discipline of literature. Whether this shift from history
to criticism, which Crane himself had recommended in 1935 (albeit en-
visioning a rather different sort of criticism), constituted an epochal
change in the practice of literary study is doubtful.9 Both New Criticism
and the project proposed by Crane would ultimately conserve much
more of the disciplinary apparatus than they would alter, despite shift-
ing its focus noticeably from extrinsic to intrinsic features determinant
of the structure (and therefore the understanding) of literary texts. Symp-
tomatic of Crane's underlying commitment to scholarship and existing
modes of critical practice is the fact that some fifteen years after his
call for a shift from history to criticism, Crane himself was engaged
in formulating the methodological principles of the very enterprise he
had so ruthlessly devalued: literary history;0
The widely sounded call today for theory, of which Culler's
remarks cited earlier can be taken as representative, should, with the
example of Crane before us, be regarded with some suspicion. It may
be that literary study is finally on the verge of severing its ties to its
historicist and aesthetic past, but this cannot be taken for granted. The
interest of Crane's project, in my view, lies in its attempt to revolutionize
literary study by founding it on poetics, as well as in the failure of that
attempt. Crane, even more than the New Critics, deserves closer at-
tention in the present conjuncture precisely because his own theoretical
aims more closely parallel those of current advocates of literary theory.
Moreover, the way in which Crane swerved from the theoretical impli-
cations of his own project proves a signal example, not only of the by
now familiar pattern of blindness and insight in critical discourse, but
also of the potential for the theory of literature to be recuperated within
an evaluative structure of ethical and aesthetic judgment that, strictly
speaking, has no place within formal poetics. Appearances to the con-
trary notwithstanding, Chicago criticism is on the way to triumphing
after all, long after it had more or less officially been declared dead,
although less among its legitimate progeny than in the work of a group
of usurpers. As in any family romance, the will of the father here does
not completely dominate the heritage of the family name. We proceed,
then, to consider the Cranean program in detail.
To approach the matter in the terms Crane proposed, two
moments or features are prominent in this program: history and theory
(or criticism). In a discrimination appropriated from McKeon's reading
of Aristotle, Crane identifies the differences between a method and its
subject matter. But Crane also contends that method can only be
elaborated in light of the subject matter to which it applies, and that
the constitution of a subject matter emerges out of historical investi-
gation (as exemplified by Aristotle in the first five chapters of the
Poetics):
The basis of the whole work [of theory], indeed, is
194
historical, inasmuch as its definitions, being simply
inductions of the universal traits exhibited by particular
works, must rest upon a wide acquaintance with what
poets have done; we could never know, for example,
what the peculiar "power" of tragedy is without direct
experience of poems in which this "power" is mani-
festly present.... [T]he history of poetry, for Aristotle,
is an essential means to the selection of those ends
in poetry which give him the basis of his judgments
of value. The ends are facts in the sense that they are
reflected in the practice of poets when poetry... has
attained a stage of development in which the forms,
or some of them, "natural" to it exist in their fully dif-
ferentiated state, even though they may be capable of
further particular development2.
Two things should seem remarkable in this passage, which e

tablished a normative position for Chicago poetics. First, despite
Crane's notorious contempt for all forms of Hegelian totalization,12 o
cannot but observe the Hegelian notion of the necessity for theory t
emerge in history, a notion here asserted under the aegis of Aristotl
The founding gesture is eminently Hegelian insofar as it asserts
articulation of history with, rather than its separation from, theory
Secondly, the passage rigorously limits the conception of history
the history of poetry and thus founds a strict poetics (as opposed
rhetoric, metaphysics, or perhaps politics, all of which are possi
methods under which poems could also be theorized as an object
inquiry).3
Greek titleAgain, this is certainly
of which-Peri Aristotle's
Poietikes-might claim in thebePoetics,
legitimately transla
"Concerning Productive Science"'14
Crane's appropriation of Aristotle's poetic method proposes
inductive poetics, a science of poetry in which the formal features of
poems are theorized in light of their contribution to the production
poetic wholes. The end or final cause of poetry for Crane is the p
duction of individual poems for their own sake:
The criticism of poetry... is, on this view, primarily

an inquiry into the specific characters and powers, and
the necessary constituent elements, of possible kinds
of poetic wholes, leading to an appreciation, in in-
dividual works, of how well their writers have ac-
complished the particular sorts of poetic tasks which
the natures of the wholes they have attempted to con-
struct imposed on them. (CC, p. 13)
Chicago poetics was from the outset a formalism-as indeed any strict
poetics must be. Like other formalist schools of literary criticism and
science, its methodological first principle was to designate the field
195
of critical investigation as the intrinsic features of its objects of study
(here, literary texts).
At the same time, there are two different versions of formalism
that can be generated from this first principle. Both were produced under
the aegis of the Chicago school. The two can be differentiated by refer-
ring to Fredric Jameson's contrast between Russian Formalism and
what he explicitly calls neo-Aristotelianism:
For Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians, everything in

the work of art exists for some ultimate purpose, which
is the characteristic emotion or peculiar pleasure of
the work itself as an object consumed. For the Formal-
ist everything in the work exists in order to permit the
work to come into being in the first place. The ad-
vantage of this approach is that whereas ultimately the
Aristotelian analyses end up outside the work (in
psychology and the extra-literary problems of the con-
ventionality of emotion), for Shklovsky such emotions
as pity and fear are themselves to be considered con-
stituent parts or elements of the work in the first
place.
Crane often contended that Chicago poetics was a project of the latter
sort, but his own critical practice (for example, in the famous essay on
"The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones"), as well as certain
of his programmatic statements, belies this contention.
The crucial split within Chicago criticism, a split that set Olson
and McKeon off from Crane and later Sheldon Sacks and Wayne Booth,
Crane's students, came over the interpretation of a single clause from
Aristotle's definition of tragedy in the sixth chapter of the Poetics-
the clause in which Aristotle identifies the telos of tragedy in the
"achieving through pity and fear a catharsis of such affections." Crane's
interpretation of this clause became canonical for the neo-Aristotelian
branch of Chicago criticism:
The pleasurable catharsis-the setting of the soul into

its normal state of rest after painful disturbance-will
come about if the action is properly complete, with its
incidents following one another, not by chance or by
the arbitrary manipulation of the poet, but in an in-
herently probable or necessary order. Hence, assum-
ing such a construction in well-made tragedies,
Aristotle concentrates on the question of what kind
of plot will most successfully arouse the emotions of
pity and fear, and these being respectively what we feel
when such a misfortune threatens one who is like
ourselves in being neither wholly just and knowing nor
wholly villainous. (LC, pp. 71-72; my emphasis)
196
Crane's swerve from Aristotle consisted in locating catharsis, not in
the functional integration of the elements of the tragedy itself, but in
the experience of the audience. Wimsatt's famous charge against
Chicago criticism of "latent affectivism" is warrantable on a reading
of Crane, and a fortiori of Booth and Sacks.6 Despite his attempt to
discriminate between rhetoric and poetics, Crane rhetoricizes the
Poetics by construing the end of tragedy to be its affective power on
an audience; he thereby authorizes the research program of the next
generation of Chicago critics (Booth, Sacks, Rader), characterized, in
David Richter's words, by a "persistent emphasis upon purpose, inferred
intention, the work's final cause."'17
The difference between a strictly formalist analysis of plot and
Crane's rhetorical conception of the power of a plot to affect an audience
is evident in "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones." The essay
opens with an exemplary critique of neo-classical poetics (based on
the research of fellow Chicagoan Bernard Weinberg) for having imposed
rhetorical and ethical constraints upon Aristotle's poetic method. Crane
then reasserts what he believes to be the essential concept of plot in
Aristotle as it applies to novels and proposes that "plots will differ in
structure according as one or another of the three causal ingredients
[action, character, thought] is employed as the synthesizing principle."
He then establishes a typology of three possible kinds of plot on this
basis: plots of action (exemplified in Oedipus Rex, and The Brothers
Karamazov), plots of character (The Portrait of a Lady), and plots of
thought (Marius the Epicurean). Crane contends that Tom Jones is a
plot of action (CC, pp. 620-21).
Despite this assertion, Crane's analysis of the plot of Tom Jones,
which occupies most of the remainder of the essay, shows the novel
to be, according to Crane's own schema, a plot of character, which he
defines as follows: "the principle [synthesizing the events] is a com-
pleted process of change in the moral character of the protoganist,
precipitated or molded by action, and made manifest both in it and in
thought and feeling" (CC, p. 621). This understanding of the plot of Tom
Jones hinges on the estimate of the hero's character, in particular on
the moral growth evident in Tom Jones that produces the change from
bad to good fortune characteristic of the comic form of the novel's plot:
for the very same incidents proceeding from the affair

at Upton which have so far been turned by Fortune
against Tom have also had consequences which
Fortune, bent upon doing nothing by halves, may yet
exploit in his favor.
The most important of these in the long run is
the moral change produced by his recent experience
in Tom himself... (CC, p. 629; my emphasis)
Why, it may be asked, this patent contradiction between Crane's claim

that Tom Jones is a plot of action and his own analysis of that plot?
The cause derives from Crane's extension, without textual
warrant from the Poetics, of the concept of plot to include the affective
197
power of a plot on an audience. Crane writes:
For a plot, in the enlarged sense here given to the term,

is not merely a particular synthesis of particular
materials of character, thought, and action, but such
a synthesis endowed necessarily, because it imitates
in words a sequence of human activities, with a power
to affect our opinions and emotions in a certain way.
We are bound, as we read or listen, to form certain ex-
pectations about what is coming and to feel more or
less determinate desires relatively to our expec-
tations.... This is a necessary condition of our
pleasure in plots... the power of which depends
almost exclusively on the pleasure we take in inferring
progressively, from complex or ambiguous signs, the
true state of affairs.8 (CC, p. 621)
Nor is this affective power dependent purely on the formal qualities

of the action (complexity, ambiguity), but derives also from the ethical
features manifested in the characters and judged by the audience:
What distinguishes all the more developed forms of

imitative literature, however, is that, though they pre-
suppose this instinctive pleasure in learning, they go
beyond it and give us plots of which the effects derive
in a much more immediate way from the particular
ethical qualities manifested in their agents' actions
and thoughts vis-&-vis the human situations in which
they are engaged. When this is the case, we cannot
help becoming, in a greater or less degree, emotion-
ally involved.... (CC, p. 621; my emphasis)
The "pervasively comic form" (CC, p. 632) of Tom Jones is determined

in large measure by "the general estimate we are induced to form, by
signs in the work, of the moral character and deserts of the hero, as
a result of which we tend, more or less ardently, to wish for him either
good or bad fortune in the end" (CC, p. 632). In the Poetics, the form
of a plot is the shape of its action; in Crane's revision (and in the work
of his students and imitators), the form of a plot is an affection experi-
enced by the audience. The structure of an action is thus determined,
on a Cranean view, by the necessity of consistently evoking certain re-
sponses in an audience. This turns reading, and a fortiori criticism, into
an intersubjective relation in which the reader, when he is sufficiently
attentive to the features of the text, comes to identify his own emo-
tional states with those of the characters portrayed in the plot. Crane's
model of reading is ethical, as are the rhetorical principles upon which
the power of the plot to persuade the audience depends. As will become
explicit later on, Crane's concept of plot entails a concept of the sub-
ject. More precisely, the subject of reading and criticism is the hidden
198
center of Crane's concept of plot, the foundation of the formal unity
of the text.
Crane also deviates from a strictly poetic concept of plot in
another way. Since, on Crane's account, the point of a plot is to build
up by incremental means an emotional condition in an audience, the
structure of a plot is less a synthesis of disparate actions than an ac-
cumulation or progression of actions tending toward an anticipated
telos. Crane claims that the distinctive mark of the comic plot of Tom
Jones is its minimizing of pity and fear in the audience, an effect
achieved primarily in two ways: "The first is our perception, which in
each case grows stronger as the novel proceeds, that the persons whose
actions threaten serious consequences for the hero and heroine are
all persons for whom, though in varying degrees, we are bound to feel
a certain contempt.... A second ground of security lies in the nature
of the probabilities for future action that are made evident progressively
as the novel unfolds.., what steadily cumulates in this way, in spite
of the gradual worsening of Tom's situation, is an opinion that, since
nothing irreparable has so far happened to him, nothing ever will" (CC,
pp. 634-35). So powerful is the expectation of Tom's ultimate good
fortune, and so pervasive in the formal construction of the novel, Crane
contends that the "characteristic pattern emerges, even before the start
of the complication proper, in the episode of Tom's relations with Molly
and Sophia in Book IV and the first part of Book V.. ." (CC, p. 636). In
Crane's presentation of comic plot, the telos is implicit in the initial
incidents and character, and there cannot be, in Tom Jones at least,
any genuine reversals of fortune. Crane's conviction about the teleo-
logical force of the comic plot is so strong that anything which might
violate the formal unity of the plot or suggest the characters are not
entirely and always consistent in their actions (for instance, Tom's ac-
ceptance of the fifty pounds from Lady Bellaston, or the excessive inter-
ventions into the narrative by Fielding's narrator) is counted a fault in
construction--these features are effectively declared hors-texte.
One could say, then, that history (a prominent word in the title
of Fielding's novel, but one that plays no significant role in Crane's
analysis) enters Chicago criticism as an ethical and poetic concept:
history is an object of knowledge only insofar as it can be said to have
a plot (and a comic one at that-Hegel's "cunning of reason" compares
favorably with Crane's view of the plot of Tom Jones, in particular with
his naive citation of Fielding's remark that Fortune "does nothing by
halves"). History is ethical to the extent that the entities which make
it up are stable and predictable, though capable of development and
growth (like the character of Tom Jones): their fundamental tendencies
remain unaltered through time. It is therefore possible for Crane to assert
that the plot of Tom Jones as conceived by Fielding in 1749, remains
the same for all who encounter it, like Crane, in 1949. The consequences
of this view are far from trivial.
Some of these consequences can be observed by comparing
Crane's claims for the power of Aristotle's method with the more re-
stricted claims made by Elder Olson. Olson's essay, "The Poetic Method
of Aristotle: Its Powers and Limitations," outlines three limitations of
199
Aristotelian poetic method. First, the method considers only a small
number of art forms: those available to Aristotle during the period in
which he lived-comedy, tragedy, and epic. This limitation is non-
essential, since the method could easily be extended to encompass
the analysis of poetic forms not practiced in Greek culture up to the
period of Aristotle's writing. Secondly, Aristotle's method does not pro-
pose an exhaustive theory of art or a general aesthetics, which would
include a psychology of audience, social and political functions, et
cetera. The poetic method could of course be supplemented by inquiries
into the function of art in other sciences, as, for example, Aristotle
himself did in discussing the uses of art in the Politics, but these in-
quires are, strictly speaking, not a part of poetics. Finally, the poetic
method of Aristotle is limited by his general method in philosophy, what
McKeon has called the "problematic method" or "method of inquiry."
Aristotle's philosophy is rigorously anthropocentric, and thus it would
be open to criticism from the standpoint of, for instance, philosophical
or historical materialism.9
This final limitation is perhaps most apparent in Aristotle's con-
ception of the relationship between history and science:
For history by [Aristotle's] problematic method is simp-

ly the material data relevant to the solution of a pro-
blem found in some science.... Ultimately, therefore,
no essential difference exists between history and
science, for when the facts are assembled in their
relevance to the problem and their interrelations are
established the problem is solved and science is at-
tained. History is therefore the potentiality of which
science is the actuality.20
The statement accords with the well-known assertion in the Poetics

that poetry is more philosophical than history, because the latter deals
only with the particular while the former concerns the universal. On
a strictly Aristotelian view, history could never be the object of a science,
but could only constitute the raw material out of which some science
constructed its principles. The relationship between history and science
is equivalent to that between the incidents and the plot in a tragedy
History can become the object of a science only by ceasing to be history
in the strict sense: history can always be conceived as if it were a poem.
In the transformation from the particular to the universal (from history
to poem), history is rendered anthropocentric: the product of human
action and will, an intentional structure with a determinate telos. This
conception of history is not unknown to Marxism, but Olson was shrewd
in his recognition that Aristotle's anthropocentrism conflicts with more
rigorous forms of materialism. The subject must be deferred until a
further consideration of Crane makes explicit the concept of history
that underwrites his entire project.
The methodological limits of Aristotelian poetics, conceded by
Olson, are unknown to Crane. Crane's ultimate project, "the narrative
history of forms" (IH, 2: 82), is not only enabled in itself by this swerve
200
from Aristotle, but it is also empowered to assume priority in a general
historical explanation of human culture as a whole:
The principles of method, it is true, are the internal

causes of poems, viewed as artistic products, in
analytical separation from the activities that produced
them, but it requires only a relatively easy shift in
causal perspective to combine "poetic" propositions
about particular poems with philological, biographical,
or historical propositions about their materials and the
conditions and circumstances of their making. We can-
not infer the "poetic" nature or value of any artistic
whole from the antecedents in the poet's life or in con-
temporary or earlier culture; but, having determined
critically what the poem is in itself, we can then
replace it in its setting of events and other writings
and eventually develop a history of poetry in terms of
the interaction of artistic and extra-artistic causes of
change. (CC, p. 22)
Crane effectively reverses the vector of causality familiar in certain in-

stances of vulgar Marxism (the only Marxism with which Crane was ac-
quainted), declaring that, for literary history, the material conditions of
production are epiphenomena of the determining structure of the literary
object itself. The attraction of this hypostasization of the priority of the
literary object for literary intellectuals should be obvious. It places them
at the center of cultural production, armed with the knowledge and the
theory necessary to interpret the meaning of human culture more
rigorously and authoritatively than is posible in other disciplines. Thus
Crane on the social sciences: "And as for the social sciences, the best
of them are at least partly humanistic already, and they are bound, I think,
to become more so in the future" (IH, 1: 15). Poetics has shifted
its position in Crane's discourse from a relatively autonomous discipline
to the foundational discourse for all human inquiry. Why this regression
from strict formalism?
Crane's program for Chicago poetics, despite its important differ-
ences from those instances of critical monism against which Crane
polemicized (e.g., Leavisite aesthetic criticism and Anglo-American New
Criticism), shares with those discourses a common problematic: the
status of the human subject. For Leavis and for the "Coleridgean"
poetics of New Criticism, the importance of poetry to culture, and
ultimately of culture as a whole to the maintenance of social stability,
depended upon the power of poetry to produce or cultivate subjects.
Crane's poetics, while it discriminates among a variety of disciplines
and possible methods in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities,
conserves the foundational power of the subject for inquiry. The conse-
quence of this conservation of what might be called the centered sub-
ject of bourgeois aesthetics and political theory are considerable. They
necessitate, in Leavis and the New Criticism, just that aesthetic totali-
zation of history and society attacked by Crane as monism.21 In Crane's
201
discourse, the subject remains similarly foundational, not only for poetic
inquiry but for the production of knowledge as a whole. It would perhaps
be misleading simply to attribute to Crane a straightforwardly Hegelian
project of aesthetic totalization. But it would not be incorrect to say
that the cultural projects of the New Critics, of Leavis, or of Babbitt's
New Humanism share with Crane's poetics (and with Aristotle) a con-
ception of the human subject as free, creative, and relatively uncon-
ditioned by history or by the material conditions of a given social
formation. This conception of the subject establishes for Crane the
foundations of the humanities as distinct from the natural and social
sciences:
But what are the aspects of human experience

that distinguish men most completely, now and in the
past, from the animals? ... [T]hey are those human
achievements, like Newtonian or modern physics, the
American Constitution, or Shakespearean tragedy, to
which we agree in attributing that kind of un-
precedented excellence that calls forth wonder as well
as admiration.
These, wherever we find them, are the distinc-
tive objects of the humanities: and the aim of the
humanities is precisely such an understanding, ap-
preciation, and use of them as will most completely
preserve their character as human achievements that
cannot be completely resolved into either natural pro-
cesses common to men and animals or into impersonal
forces affecting all the members of a given society.22
(IH, 1: 8)
The humanities become, on this view, the repository of resistance to

the intellectual hegemony of the natural sciences (especially biology
and the behavioral sciences) and sociology. They protect the human
subject from being absorbed into the instrumentalist discourses of
these disciplines. The humanities are empowered to compete against
the sciences by establishing rigorous methods of investigation and
demonstration specific to their own objects of study-based on an
Aristotelian poetics-at the same time that their very purpose is to
undermine the authority of instrumentalist conceptions of man which
the sciences were effectively elaborating. Chicago formalism, having
regressed to an ethics, capably defends and preserves the literary tradi-
tion, scholarly discipline, and the institution of the university itself as
the principal model for maintaining the historical continuity of culture.23
This, one might say, is the very basis of the discursive practice
of modern humanism from Babbitt down to W. J. Bate. Its principal locus
is the academy, where the cultural values embodied in the monuments
of (predominantly Western) human achievement are preserved by im-
parting them to a privileged segment of the nation's young, some of
whom will carry the flame themselves in later life as university teachers
and scholars, literary editors, and creative writers. The furor surround-
202
ing Harvard's Core Curriculum can be seen as a continuation of the
debate that Crane's 1935 essay sparked (not inaugurated-Columbia
College had, after all, been teaching its humanities course to
undergraduates for some time; recall that McKeon came to Chicago
fresh from just this experience). The ideological and political stakes
in this debate are quite high, as the Bennett regime's policies at the
National Endowment for the Humanities have made clear, and as Leavis,
Babbitt, and the Chicagoans themselves always claimed. The academic
struggle over what constitutes the humanities as a distinct set of
disciplines is transparently a political struggle over what kind of sub-
jects (or persons, if one prefers) will be formed by the education trans-
mitted to the young. Chicago formalism attempted to preserve the
literary and cultural heritage that has been hegemonic in the academy
since the last century, while making the principles of literary study more
rigorous by grounding the discipline in theoretical poetics. Crane's
quarrel with the New Critics was over method, not over the purpose
of literary and humanistic education. Both sides saw literature as an
essential weapon in the fight to preserve the autonomy of the subject
from the threat posed by modern science and industrial society
(Ransom) and the newly emergent concepts of man in the social and
behavioral sciences (Crane). The theoretical trajectory produced by this
privileging of poetry and poetics can be criticized in two ways.
First, and most obvious, one can situate the poetic method of
Aristotle historically. This is how Marx understood Aristotelian philo-
sophy as a whole: it was the product of an artisanal mode of production
in which "an agent, imitating a given pattern, forms a certain material
in order to create an object which then has some determinate use, such
as a cooking pot, an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry, or a spear."24
The determining influence of this mode of production on poetics is illus-
trated perfectly by a passage in Crane's essay on literary history, in which
he criticizes the methodological assumptions of extrinsic causal
historians like Taine and Cazamian. For Crane, the production of literary
works is like building a fire: the successful performance of the action
is primarily the result of the skill of the builder: "It is as if [for authors
of this type of history], seeking to explain the fact that I sometimes
make good fires in my fireplace and sometimes poor ones, I should take
into account only the shape and the size of the chimney and the
economic origins of the logs" (IH, 2: 96). On a historical materialist ac-
count, the causes Crane finds at best secondary, at worst irrelevant,
are precisely those (the material and economic) that are determinate
in the last instance. In the case of poems, novels, and plays, the con-
sequences of this view would focus literary criticism on what Terry
Eagleton has called the literary mode of production. In certain historical
societies, certain literary forms have been dominant, e.g., the three-
volume novel in Victorian England. The formal limitations upon the pro-
duction of poetic wholes are in part the result of those very economic
and material factors (in the case instanced, expansion of the reading
public, establishment of circulating libraries, availability of cheap paper,
emergence of mass circulation newspapers and other mass audience
periodical forms) cavalierly dismissed by Crane as marginal to the
203
analysis of the formal properties of poetic wholes. This is not to say
that Dickens's novels are identical to Thackeray's or George Eliot's
because all lived and wrote in approximately the same historical situ-
ation, but it proposes that the formal structure of the three-volume Vic-
torian novel, with its multiple plots, its suspenseful chapter endings,
its relatively leisurely pace by our contemporary standard-none of
these features emerged simply from problems intrinsic to the novel as
a literary form. The material conditions for the production of literary
texts in mid-nineteenth-century England were decisive in determining
the formal properties of these texts.25
The second criticism of Chicago formalism as it was established
by Crane is related to the first. Instead of situating Aristotelian method
historically, one could propose an alternative to the historical method
Crane (and arguably Aristotle) utilized. To designate this method (Crane's
and Aristotle's) by the name of "historicism" is not to dismiss it, but
is rather to locate it within the field of contemporary discourse in order
to examine its powers and limitations.
The Aristotelian formulation of the relationship between history
and science posits the theoretical priority of science to history: "History
is the potentiality of which science is the actuality." The genetic schema,
taken over from the fourth and fifth chapters of the Poetics, grounds
Crane's historical project in a certain method, makes it a science, and
thus equips the discipline of literary study with the power to compete
against other sciences and their methods. This conception of a poetic
science of history is precisely what Althusser has designated as
"historicism," which he characterizes thus:
every science of a historical object... applies to a

given, present, historical object, an object that has
evolved as a result of past history. Hence every oper-
ation of knowledge, starting from the present and ap-
plied to an evolved object, is merely the projection of
the present onto the past of that object.... But this
present has a name: it is the present of absolute
knowledge, in which consciousness and science are
one and the same, in which science exists in the im-
mediate form of consciousness, and truth can be read
openly in the phenomena, if not directly, at least with
little difficulty, since the abstractions on which the
whole historico-social science under consideration
depends are really present in the real empirical ex-
istence of the phenomena.26
The point of this theoretial demarche, as is clear from Crane's ess

on "The Idea of the Humanities," is to preserve the priority of the hum
subject over discourse and over the events of history. As Althusser pert
nently observes: "History then becomes the transformation of human
nature, which remains the real subject of the history which transform
it.''27
The Althusserian projection of a non-Hegelian historical science
204
denies the priority of the empirical subject over history and asserts the
priority of what Crane called the "impersonal forces affecting all the
members of a given society." Althusser's concept of the mode of pro-
duction, what he calls a "complex structured whole," distinguishes
Marxism from the historicism of Crane. Althusser restructures the
base/superstructure model in classical Marxism and thereby avoids
precisely those features Crane associated with Marxist criticism t
court. Within a given structure, or mode of production, the vario
practices (juridical, political, religious, philosophical, cultural) are
relatively autonomous, not simply mechanical functions or
epiphenomena of a determining base. For Althusser, all the various
"levels" or "instances" within a social formation can be seen to be both
determined and determining.
Crane's own project for an autonomous science of poetics with
a method peculiar to its subject matter can be most effectively real-
ized under the aegis of an Althusserian/Marxist science of history. For
on Althusser's view, cultural practice, of which the production of poetry
is one example, would be relatively autonomous in relation to other
practices. Crane's critique of "metaphysical" theories of poetry coin-
cides, to this extent, with Althusser's critique of the tendencies toward
Hegelian totalization and historicism in the Marxist tradition. Crane and
Althusser diverge, however, in the ways in which they theorize the ob-
ject of interrogation: in this case poems. Althusserian historical science
stipulates that the texts of culture are conjunctures in which the various
practices within a given social formation are articulated. In describing
the structure of a work of art or a collective practice of a particular art
form (Attic tragedy, for example), neither the intentionality of the author
nor the principles characteristic of the genre, that is, no purely intrinsic
formal analysis, will provide privileged explanatory principles for ana-
lyzing the work or works. Crane's poetics, although it allows for the ac-
commodation of changes in poetic practice and is to that extent
historical, is nevertheless insufficiently materialist insofar as it
hypostatizes the relationship of poetry and culture to other social
practices. In my view, this is due to Crane's conservation of the sub-
ject, the poet as maker of artifical things, and to his situating of this
free, creative, and relatively unconditioned subject at the source of
inquiry.
Despite the ostensibly revolutionary project announced by Crane
in 1935 to transform the practice of literary study, the theoretical foun-
dations in aesthetic historicism, which have formed the basis of literary
criticism at least since Arnold and Pater, remained largely in force in
the work of Crane and his students. Situated historically, Crane's pro-
gram can be understood as a principled resistance to the economic
and political forces that were transforming universities, more and more
rapidly after the Second World War, into structures for the maintenance
and extension of corporate power.2 Crane's defense of the humanities
and his attempt to ground them in a rigorous method can be judged
politically as a point of resistance to the logic of a certain form of
capitalism, albeit a regressive resistance in which the nostalgia for an
archaic, artisanal mode of production projects a purely ideological
205
image of the past in its relationship to the present.29 This is the living
legacy of Chicago criticism that continues to dominate the theory and
practice of professionalized literary study. It would be a serious error
in historical thinking, and would also run counter to the drift of my argu-
ment, to recommend the simple reinstatement of Crane's program for
contemporary critical practice. Nonetheless, some features of Chicago
formalism that remain alive within contemporary critical discourse could
be mobilized in a quite different theoretical framework against the still
powerful discourse of aesthetic historicism.
Crane's project for a science of poetics, in opposition to the
metaphysics of poetry he discerned in the "Coleridgean" critical
practices of the thirties and forties, remains the most powerful feature
of his program. His error was to make the intentional structure of the
individual poem the basis of literary history. He did not finally break
the bond between poetics and history, but effectively conceptualized
history as if it were a poem with a plot (a not unfamiliar strategy from
Vico down to Sartre). In other words, Crane did not in the end make
poetics relatively autonomous as a discipline, but rather made it a foun-
dational discourse for historical inquiry. The problem for poetics, in my
view, would be to become a relatively autonomous discipline within the
global science of history.
Poetic objects, on this account, are complex structured wholes,
like modes of production in Althusser's conception of historical science.
This entails that their specificity as objects is determined by the mode
of articulation among the various features comprising the object. Some
of these are material (for instance, the phonetic features of language
or the means of production and dissemination of texts), but many are
semantic or discursive (like genre, theme, and point of view). Historical
materialism claims that some and perhaps all of these featues are
traversed by history, that the structure of a text is no more permanent
than that of a mode of production. This is to say that poetic things must
be constantly re-produced, not only in the sense that they must per-
sist as material artifacts, but also that their interpretation and compre-
hension, their effectivity as texts, depend upon the continual
reproduction of skills necessary to interpret and comprehend them. Just
as a mode of production requires the continual reproduction of the re-
lations of production in order to persist, so poetic texts require that
subjects be trained in the necessary techniques (syntactic,
phonological, and semantic) required for reading. The capacity to utilize
such techniques is reproduced in the pedagogical and scholarly appa-
ratus through which poetic texts are primarily disseminated. This appa-
ratus has a history and, as became obvious during the 1960s in a number
of places in the West and in some of the socialist countries as well,
the educational apparatus itself is never far removed from the political
struggles over control of the state as a whole. In other words, historical
materialism claims the following: 1) poetic texts persist as things (in
part) because they are reproduced in the interpretive labor of readers;
2) readers acquire the necessary skills to interpret texts by means of
institutional apparatuses; 3) these apparatuses have histories which
are part of the broader history of social formations but which are not
206
unilaterally determined by or coincident with, for example, the pro-
gessive expansion of the forces of production. This is to say that the
historical "time" of literature (and, a fortiori, of the apparatuses for
disseminating literary texts) can have a distinct rhythm of its own, that
it is a relatively autonomous instance in the structure of a social for-
mation.
One can therefore say, contrary to Crane's positing of the uni-
fied and historically invariant subject who reads poetic texts, that the
subject is just what must be continually produced. The subject is
historical and contingent. This after all is what Crane's own project for
altering the bases of literary study implicitly recognized in its aim to
produce a particular kind of subject to read and comprehend texts. My
claim is that the implicit materialism of Crane's project can be mobilized
by reorienting the theoretical concepts of poetics within the global
science of history. This theoretical reorientation can even find a use
for what has been too quickly and too often thought of as the most
idealist of contemporary critical languages: deconstruction. Paul de
Man's judgment on traditional literary history may therefore be less ob-
jectionable than it at first sounds:
To become good literary historians, we must remember

that what we usually call literary history has little or
nothing to do with literature and that what we call
literary interpretation-provided only it is good
interpretation-is in fact literary history. If we extend
this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that
the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical
facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade
in the guise of wars and revolutions.30
To uncover the materialist kernel within the idealist shell in this passage
would be among the first tasks of an authentically scientific criticism,
a project that remains at best a wished for achievement nearly half a
century after R. S. Crane proposed it as the most pressing need for the
discipline of literary study.
SUNY at Stony Brook
NOTES
1 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).
2 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 226.
3 R. S. Crane, "History versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature,"

English Journal, 24 (1935); rpt. in Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other
Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967),
2: 22-23 (hereafter cited as IH). My emphasis.
4 Consider, for example, the opening sentences of Paul de Man's Allegories of

Reading: "Allegories of Reading started out as a historical study and ended up
207
as a theory of reading.... This shift [from "historical reflection" to "the pro-
blematics of reading"], which is typical of my generation, is of more interest in
its results than its causes" ([New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979], p. ix). The spirit
of this passage coincides with de Man's earlier pronouncement (quoted in the
final paragraph of the present paper) on the relation of literary history to literary
interpretation. The generality of the trend asserted here is, with certain qualifica-
tions, undeniable.
5 Francis Mulhern, The Moment of 'Scrutiny' (London: New Left Books, 1979), and
John Fekete, The Critical Twilight (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
6 Quoted by Crane himself in "Criticism as Inquiry; or, the Perils of the 'High Priori'
Road," in IH, 2: 27.
7 Several of the contributions to Critics and Criticism first appeared in Modern

Philology, including: Elder Olson, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and
Poetic Diction;' (May 1950); Olson, "The Argument of Longinus' On the Sublime,"
(February 1942); Crane, "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," (May 1948);
Richard McKeon, "Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,"
(August 1936); McKeon, "The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism," (November
1943-February 1944); McKeon, "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century:
The Renaissance of Rhetoric," (May 1946). It is instructive to compare the range
of topics considered in Modern Philology prior to Crane's editorship with the
essays that began to appear within three years of his taking over. For example,
the May 1930 issue, the final one edited by John Matthews Manly, the great
historical scholar and philologist, coeditor of the mammoth edition of the works
of Chaucer, included the following articles: "Spanische und franzosische Helden-
dichtung" by Karl Voretzsch; "Etimologias espainolas" by Ram6n Men6ndez Pidal;
"Etymologisches," by W. Meyer-LUbke (the teacher of Leo Spitzer); "Eine
spanische Volksromance," by Alfons Hilke; "The Use of the Conditional for the
Subjunctive in Castilian Popular Speech" by Aurelio M. Espinosa; "Text Emen-
dations to Chr6tien's Lancelot" by W. A. Nitze; and "On the Question of the Por-
tuguese Translation of Gower's Confessio Amantis" by Manly himself. The
overwhelming emphasis fell on philological and linguistic studies. Crane's first
visible changes in editorial policy shifted the primary focus of the journal from
philology to literary and intellectual history, with articles, like the following, which
would have received less attention in the 1920s: H. D. Austin, "Multiple Mean-
ings and Their Bearing on the Understanding of Dante's Metaphors" (November
1932); Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Monboddo and Rousseau" (February 1933); R. S. Crane,
"Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699-1745" (February-May
1934)-an essay cited by Crane in 1935 as a paradigm of the type of literary history
that could have only limited application and value to the interpretation of literary
texts. From 1936 on, essays on method began regularly to appear, including the
ones mentioned at the beginning of this note. This movement towards the
defense of theoretical poetics as a legitimate, indeed fundamental, activity for
literary scholars reached a watershed moment in February 1943, when Elder
Olson published, "Discussion: Recent Literary Criticism'" a review and critique
of Donald Stauffer, ed., The Intent of the Critic; Allen Tate, ed., The Language
of Poetry; and I. A. Richards, How to Read a Page. Not only were the methods
of Aristotle, Longinus, and other classical authors now to be part of the
theoretical ambit of Chicago poetics, but contemporary critical theory was also
to be examined with the same care-if not with the same piety. In subsequent
years, the familiar topic that would characterize so much of Chicago criticism
during the fifties and sixties surfaced in essays by Crane's students and by col-
leagues influenced by him, for example: Walter Blair and Clarence Faust, "Emer-
son's Literary Method," (November 1944); Moody E. Prior, "Character in Relation
to Action in Othello," (May 1947). W. R. Keast's assessment of Crane's impact
on the study of literature sums up the point: "[Crane's most important ac-
complishment as editor of Modern Philology was] the elevation of aesthetic
criticism to a place for equality with the traditional scholarly disciplines. The
success of the new program at Chicago stimulated widespread interest and im-
itation. When the history of the humanities in our day comes to be written, Mr.
208
Crane will deserve a prominent place for conceiving and executing a program
by which the higher study of literature can achieve progressive development in
all directions" ("Ronald S. Crane: Editor of Modern Philology, 1930-1952," Modern
Philology, 50 [August 1952], p. 4).
8 See also Crane's Introduction to Critics and Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1952), pp. 2-5 (hereafter cited as CC).
9 Although there are significant differences between the English and American
critical establishments, Raymond Williams's contention that only now is the "rul-
ing paradigm" of English--aesthetic historicism founded on the practice of ap-
preciative close reading and evaluation of the canon-reaching a moment of
crisis, can be considered as a correct assessment of the American situation as
well. Prior interventions within the field of literary study have tended in their
methods and in the subject matter they isolate for study to reproduce the ruling
paradigm rather than replace or revolutionize it. See "Marxism, Structuralism,
and Literary Analysis," New Left Review, No. 129 (September-October 1981), pp.
51-66, an essay occasioned by the row over the refusal by the Cambridge English
faculty to accept Colin McCabe into their number. See also Williams's farewell
lectures at Cambridge on the history of Cambridge English, printed as the fourth
part of his book, Writing in Society (London: Verso Editions, 1983), pp. 177-226.
10 The project was eventually published under the title, "Critical and Historical Prin-
ciples of Literary History," in IH, 2: 45-156. An economical means of showing the
continuity between Crane's "critical" phase and his earlier work as a historical
scholar is to quote from the reviews he published in Philological Quarterly for
the bibliography of English literature, 1669-1800. For example, there is the follow-
ing criticism of Ren6 Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en France: "The
only quarrel I have with this book is that its method is perhaps too exclusively
descriptive. It is not enough to be told what the theorists of literature thought
about such matters as the rules, the obligation to imitate nature, or the relations
between the imagination and the reason. We want to know why it was natural
for them to think as they did-why, in fact, they could hardly have thought other-
wise. In a word, we want an explanatory study of literary theory, in which the
doctrines of the critics are interpreted in the light of the basic assumptions and
points of view dominant in other fields of speculation at the time" (PQ, 7 [April
1928], p. 190). The object of investigation here, neo-classical literary theory, is
hypostasized in precisely the same way Crane would isolate texts and genres
later on. Neo-classical literary theory is "an artificial thing," just as a poem is
for Aristotle. In another instance, Crane attacked Harry Hayden Clark for gross-
ly distorting the place of Edward Young within intellectual history: "Two things
are obviously necessary before it is possible to define intelligently Young's place
in the history of ideas: a careful analysis of the various strains of thought and
sentiment that are combined in his work, and an interpretation of these by
references to the ruling presuppositions, points of view, and standards of value
of the period in which his ideas were formed.... [By using a series of concepts
derived from another era, that of Romanticism, Clark, like his teacher Babbitt]
impose[s] on those ideas of Young to which they seem to apply a coloring not
warranted by the context-[it is] to read into them a meaning subtly different
from that which they have when one studies them in the light both of Young's
total thought and of the peculiar climate of opinion in which they took form"
(PQ, 9 [April 1930], p. 294). The methodological principles defended by Crane are
empirical and inductive, just as they would be later on when the object of study
had shifted from the history of ideas to individual poems or to the formal prin-
ciples of literary genres. Arnold's famous pre-Kantian definition of the purpose
of criticism, "to see the object as in itself it really is," remained normative for
Crane from the beginning to the end of his career.
11 R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto,

Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953), pp. 63-64 (hdreafter cited as LC).
12 See, for example, LC, p. xvi.
209
13 Crane's constant refrain in opposition to what he termed the "Coleridgean" or-
thodoxy of modern literary criticism was that it was a metaphysics of poetry,
rather than a poetics: see his Prefatory Note to "Two Essays in Practical
Criticism," University Review, 8 (1942), 199-202. On the differentiation of poetics
from the function of poetry in political discourse on the one hand and from
rhetoric on the other, see LC, pp. 41 and 49, respectively.
14 See Kenneth A. Telford, Aristotle's Poetics (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1961), p. 1;

Richard McKeon, Introduction to The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1941), pp. xxix-xxxii; and Elder Olson, "The Poetic Method of Aristo-
tle: Its Powers and Limitations," in Olson, ed., Aristotle's "Poetics" and English
Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 175-91.
15 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ.

Press 1972), p. 82. Jameson's label "neo-Aristotelian" has nothing to do with
the Poetics, of course, which is an exemplary formalist text.
16 W. K. Wimsatt, "The Chicago Critics: The Fallacy of the Neoclassic Species,"

in Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press,
1954), p. 60. With respect to the work of Wayne Booth, the point hardly requires
demonstration. His first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1961), is a sustained defense of intentionalism and affectivism tout court
(as well as an attack on modern fiction for abdicating the responsibility of the
artist to keep his intentions clear). Booth himself has noted the affectivism of
A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974): see his Critical
Understanding (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 78. Affectivism in
Sacks's work is treated in detail by Ralph W. Rader in "The Literary Theoretical
Contribution of Sheldon Sacks," Critical Inquiry, 6 (Winter 1979), 183-92. Rader's
essay also usefully traces the genealogy of some of the recent work in Chicago
criticism by students of Booth and Sacks, as well as work by sympathetic
colleagues like Rader himself. The "rhetorical shift" among second-generation
Chicago critics (in my view, already present as a moment in Crane's discourse)
is examined in detail in David H. Richter, "The Second Flight of the Phoenix:
Neo-Aristotelianism since Crane," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation, 23 (Winter 1982), 27-48. To give a complete account of what
Edward Said would call the "affiliative" structure of the discourse of Chicago
criticism is not possible here. Booth's essay on Crane, "Ronald Crane and the
Pluralism of Discrete Modes," in Critical Understanding, pp. 37-97, provides
useful additional information, as does his talk, "Between Two Generations: The
Heritage of the Chicago School," published in Profession 82 (New York: MLA,
1982), pp. 19-26. The problem with all of these accounts of the origin and
genealogy of Chicago critics is that they give the history of the research program
from inside. They are written exclusively by Chicago critics and focus entirely
on the work of the Chicagoans themselves. An alternative method of research,
in my view more useful because it avoids the tendency toward "Whiggish"
versions of the "progress of science" characteristic of much historiography of
academic disciplines, would be to read through the issues of Modern Philology
in the 1950s and 1960s and trace the history of the theory in this way. For recent
developments, Critical Inquiry would probably be a more reliable source.
17 Richter, "Second Flight of the Phoenix," p. 39. My understanding of Crane's

interpretation of Aristotle, as well as my sense of the different tendencies within
the criticism of the Chicago School, is heavily indebted to Robert Wess. See
the methodological introduction to his unpublished dissertation, "Fictional
Modes in Henry Fielding and Jane Austen," (University of Chicago, 1970). For
a more rigorously "poetic" reading of the Poetics than Crane's, see Telford,
Aristotle's Poetics, especially the discussion of the Aristotelian concept of plot
as functional organization, pp. 78-88.
18 See Ralph W. Rader, "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation," Critical Inquiry,
1 (December 1974), 245-72.
210
19 Olson, "Poetic Method of Aristotle," pp. 188-90.
20 Telford, Aristotle's Poetics, p. 79.
21 See Paul de Man, "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism," in Blindness
and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 20-35.
22 Philosophy, too, since its constitution as a professional discipline at the end

of the eighteenth century, has aspired to a similar self-image: see Richard Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979),
and Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982).
23 Consider, for example, the following passage on tradition from "Critical and
Historical Principles of Literary History": "That there is a peculiar causal force
in tradition will scarcely be doubted by any one who has been a member for
a decade or more of two universities, or for that matter two well-established insti-
tutions of any kind, and has reflected on the different fates which generally befall
the same proposals for change, in no matter what aspect of their life, in the one
as compared with the other. Each has its own 'spirit,' hard enough even for those
most sensitive to its differentiating effects to formulate and nearly impossible
to explain to outsiders, constantly undergoing subtle alteration as new things
are done or as new men replace the old yet always exerting, for good or ill, a
certain compulsive force on individual and collective choices so that these tend
to fall into a general pattern which does not greatly vary, despite external events,
from that determined for the institution by its founders" (IH, 2: 152-53).
24 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971),
p. 393.
25 A nearly identical moment to Crane's dismissal of materialism occurs in

Shklovski's Theory of Prose. It encountered a similar line of objection to th
developed here by Bakhtin who wrote in response to Shklovski: " 'My researc
in literary theory is concerned with the intrinsic laws of language. To draw
industrial parallel, I am not interested in the state of the world cotton market,
nor in the politics of trusts, but only in the thread count and the methods of
weaving' [Shklovski]. It is hardly necessary to prove that the intrinsic laws o
this or that phenomenon cannot be explained without being related to the genera
laws of social development. The methods for the preparation of thread are
conditioned by the level of technical development and the laws of the market
P. N. Medvedev/M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans
Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 70.
26 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster
(London: New Left Books, 1970), pp. 122-24.
27 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 140. The existence of this concept
of the subject of history (the subject as a transhistorically dynamic cognitive
power) in Chicago criticism is made explicit in Richter, "Second Flight of the
Phoenix," pp. 43-45, where the connection to cognitive psychology, in particular
to Chomsky, is noted apropos of the work of Sacks.
28 See Sheldon S. Wolin, "Higher Education and the Politics of Knowledge,"

democracy, 1 (April 1981), 38-52; and Richard Ohmann, English in America (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), chapters 11 and 12.
29 Hence Crane's location of the ideal environment for humanistic inquiry in the
period of the Enlightenment, noted by Booth in Critical Understanding, pp. 96-97.
The same nostalgia for a relatively homogeneous class of readers is visible in
Booth's own work and has been usefully analyzed by Fredric Jameson in Marxism
and Form, pp. 355-59. As I've remarked previously, similar regressive tendencies
were constitutive for the historical projections of the New Critics and the
Scrutiny group. The agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand (1930), is an especially
211
clear instance of the nostalgic (and objectively false) concept of the past that
motivated the literary ideology of some key figures among the New Critics. In
the context of the present argument, it is pertinent to recall Warren's suggestion
(ultimately rejected) for the volume's title: "Tracts Against Communism."
30 Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in Blindness and Insight,
p. 165.
212

Chicago Criticism

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Chicago Criticism

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What is Living and What is Dead in Chicago Criticism

Author(s): Michael Sprinker

There seems to be a general feeling abroad among historians

the work of theorists often seems to imply that a

The passage recalls a famous moment in the history of literary criticism

The remedy I propose is nothing less than a thorough-

Crane's "principles of its kind" designate the same entity as Culler's

The basis of the whole work [of theory], indeed, is

Two things should seem remarkable in this passage, which e

The criticism of poetry... is, on this view, primarily

For Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians, everything in

The pleasurable catharsis-the setting of the soul into

for the very same incidents proceeding from the affair

Why, it may be asked, this patent contradiction between Crane's claim

For a plot, in the enlarged sense here given to the term,

Nor is this affective power dependent purely on the formal qualities

What distinguishes all the more developed forms of

The "pervasively comic form" (CC, p. 632) of Tom Jones is determined

For history by [Aristotle's] problematic method is simp-

The statement accords with the well-known assertion in the Poetics

The principles of method, it is true, are the internal

Crane effectively reverses the vector of causality familiar in certain in-

But what are the aspects of human experience

The humanities become, on this view, the repository of resistance to

every science of a historical object... applies to a

The point of this theoretial demarche, as is clear from Crane's ess

To become good literary historians, we must remember

SUNY at Stony Brook

3 R. S. Crane, "History versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature,"

4 Consider, for example, the opening sentences of Paul de Man's Allegories of

7 Several of the contributions to Critics and Criticism first appeared in Modern

11 R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto,

12 See, for example, LC, p. xvi.

14 See Kenneth A. Telford, Aristotle's Poetics (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1961), p. 1;

15 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ.

16 W. K. Wimsatt, "The Chicago Critics: The Fallacy of the Neoclassic Species,"

17 Richter, "Second Flight of the Phoenix," p. 39. My understanding of Crane's

20 Telford, Aristotle's Poetics, p. 79.

22 Philosophy, too, since its constitution as a professional discipline at the end

25 A nearly identical moment to Crane's dismissal of materialism occurs in

28 See Sheldon S. Wolin, "Higher Education and the Politics of Knowledge,"

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