Comments on: Literary Criticism http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/07/12/literary-criticism/ A First Things Blog Mon, 20 May 2013 14:58:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: hershel Parker http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/07/12/literary-criticism/comment-page-1/#comment-66871 hershel Parker Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:02:08 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/?p=45087#comment-66871 It’s a lovely tribute to Mike, but may I point out that I spell my name without a c and that I am at last report alive? See these paragraphs:
Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Herschel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.

Of that pioneering generation, there is only one major figure still living: M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.

]]> By: Michael P. Walsh, MM http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/07/12/literary-criticism/comment-page-1/#comment-66861 Michael P. Walsh, MM Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:50:28 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/?p=45087#comment-66861 T. E. Hulme’s essay “Romanticism and Classicism” sufficed for me, and his succinct observation that “Romanticism is spilt religion” only confirmed what I had come to realize as an undergrad. But as you suggest, Romanticism is a persistent vice, and not only in literature. As for “modernity [being] a devolved form of Christianity that, taken as a whole, competes for control over our spiritual imaginations” I have long thought Eric Voegelin’s work covered that pretty completely. But I shall happily read Abrams for another take.

]]>