First Things RSS Feed - R. V. Young https://www.firstthings.com/author/r-v-young en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:56:54 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/r-v-young 60 The Bard, the Black, the Jew https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/03/the-bard-the-black-the-jew https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/03/the-bard-the-black-the-jew Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500 More than any other writer, Shakespeare embodies the distinctive principles of Western Civilization. Men and women of the West are drawn to Shakespeare because his plays and poems continue to express their aspirations, to articulate their concerns, and to confront the tensions and contradictions in the Western vision itself. He is admired not as an uncritical encomiast of his own culture and society, but rather as an exemplum of the spirit”both critical and conservative”that is among the West’s most enduring legacies to the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that academic literary critics, who owe their very existence to Shakespeare and other great writers, have cast doubt upon Shakespeare’s exalted position at exactly the moment in history when the societies of the West have become most anxious about their own integrity and probity.

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]]> Before Foucault https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/04/before-foucault https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/04/before-foucault Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500 Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism
By Mark Royden Winchell.
University Press of Virginia, 510 pages, $34.95.

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]]> The Old New Criticism and its Critics https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/08/the-old-new-criticism-and-its-critics https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/08/the-old-new-criticism-and-its-critics Sun, 01 Aug 1993 00:00:00 -0400 Among the pugnacious practitioners of academic literary studies, who agree among themselves on almost nothing, there is one consensus: the New Criticism—that is, the old New Criticism associated with the names of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks— that New Criticism is over, finished, defunct. What is more, this shift in critical fashion is widely perceived not merely as a routine scholarly development, but as a great liberation, the lifting of an onerous burden—as if literature professors had somehow been bearing the entire weight of The World’s Body upon their shoulders, or as if textbooks like Understanding Poetry and Sound and Sense constituted a form of bondage or a grand imposition on the credulity of college English teachers. Never again, they seem to proclaim in the smug tone of someone conscious of having recovered righteousness, will we submit to that unhistorical formalism or subject our students to the cultural elitism of canonical works. Everywhere the atmosphere of classrooms and library bookstack carrels thickens with an almost palpable fog of sanctimony.

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