Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Minds of the New South) - Hardcover

Winchell, Mark Royden

  • 3.62 out of 5 stars
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9780813916477: Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Minds of the New South)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 081391647X ISBN 13: 9780813916477
Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1996

Synopsis

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century.
Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America.
More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.

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From the Back Cover

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994.

From the Inside Flap

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.

Reviews

Readers over age 40 may recall the New Criticism from college English. To oversimplify, New Criticism was a modernist approach that viewed and interpreted a work of art (most commonly a poem) as a self-contained artifact, focusing on a close analysis that revealed the interior life of the poem-its language, metaphors, ambiguity, irony-without regard for the author's biography or other external circumstances. Winchell gives a masterful, meticulously researched, richly textured biography of one of the approach's founders and leading practitioners. A staunch Southerner and a 1928 graduate of Vanderbilt, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) taught in the 1930s at LSU, where, among other things, he was cofounder and coeditor of the Southern Review. In 1947, he went to Yale and published his best-known work, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), on 10 English poems. But more than an account of one life and career, this is a broad chronicle of the origins, ascendancy and subsequent decline of one school of criticism and an examination of how such schools forms evolve and clash with antithetical approaches. Winchell vividly renders a milieu (one that included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate) and an approach to literature that has largely-and, he argues, unfairly-been dismissed. In a style both courtly and digressive, he casts a wide and tightly woven net, drawing in intellectual and social relationships among a panoply of poets, prose writers, critics and their acquaintances and relations. This is an essential addition to the history of 20th-century American poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fortunately for 20th-century letters, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren kept running into each other: as undergraduates at Vanderbilt, as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and as faculty at Louisiana State University, where they founded The Southern Review. There, as one observer noted, they moved the center of literary criticism in the West "from the left bank of the Seine to the left bank of the Mississippi." Both ended up at Yale, and though their work has been challenged by other critical approaches, their New Critical method of reading poems closely is the one preferred today by the majority of college teachers. Winchell's (Neoconservative Criticism, LJ 12/98) is a model study that examines Brooks's exemplary intellectual life within the context of heady times; his book is also remarkable for the excitable eccentrics who people its pages, from Robert Lowell and Katharine Anne Porter to Huey Long and the young doctor who shot him. For academic literary collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Publisher
University of Virginia Press
Publication date
1996
Language
English
ISBN 10 
081391647X
ISBN 13 
9780813916477
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
538
Rating
  • 3.62 out of 5 stars
    16 ratings by Goodreads