The New Critics

Ooh. I been slacking and laid-backing. 

My nerves are bad.  Lot going on.

Anyhoo, this week, we're reading critical theory essays by T.S. Elliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Martin Heidegger. I haven't finished Heidegger yet, mostly because he was a Nazi and I figured I was about due a break when I got to that little tidbit.

But this Ransom cat. Wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay in 1937 called "Criticism, Inc." He said we should study the text and not the text's history or effect on an audience and certainly not its moral value. He and his road dawgs (Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, etc.) were called The New Critics. New Criticism was kind of a response to The New Humanists, who believed the classics were the only worthwhile art. Irving Babbitt, a Harvard professor, was the chief proponent of New Humanism and kind of a prig.

Sinclair Lewis was down with The New Critics.  So much so, that when he wrote his famous satire of American middle class life, he named the lead character Babbitt  —completely obscuring Irving's contributions to the critical theory and forever linking him to his buffoonish literary namesake.  

Sinclair Lewis is hella zany.