Guide to Week 6: Thursday

        In the web page hyperlinked to this week's reading in Hirsch's article, I have abstracted key terms and theoretical principles that are important to his revision of New Critical theory and its interpretive methods.  After you have read Hirsch, review the terms and principles, and make sure you understand them.  The first portion of our discussion will be a review of Hirsch, and then we will look at some broader issues like those below.

        Hirsch's restatement and adjustment of some of New Criticism's central theories also constitutes an important re-assertion of its critical methods' importance, and it sets out the form in which many "Neo-New Critics" still practice the craft of literary interpretation today.  Hirsch gains the most ground on the author's side, taking up Wimsatt and Beardsley's three types of evidence and looking more closely at what knowledge of what the author and the author's contemporaries knew as a measure of what the literature's language might most accurately mean.  He addresses the readers' experience of the work as part of his method of estimating era-specific and sub-culture-specific word use.  Does his article ever address emotional affect?  Can you see a place where it could have done so?  Can you accept Hirsch's version of New Criticism as part of your theory of interpretation, and can you use some or all of his methods when you interpret this week's "Working With" assignment?  Or will you stick to the concepts proposed by Wimsatt, Beardsley, and the theory and methods in Tyson's summary of Empson, Brooks, Blackmur and Richards?

        You should consider carefully Hirsch's employment of the philosophical notion of a "horizon" of linguistic awareness or meaning.  When we are reading literature from any but our own time and culture, how are we to determine what the authors' linguistic horizons were for the purpose of determining their words' probable meaning?  (Note: this Hirschian determinate "meaning" does not preclude many kinds of "significance," most of which probably would arise from our own interaction with the text with our own "linguistic horizons.")  The best test available would be to have read all or most of the literature of the era, and to have read all of the author's works, so that your own horizon merged with hers/his.  Since this takes years to accomplish, undergraduate students frequently use the Oxford English Dictionary as a short-cut. The OED arranges its definitions chronologically, from the oldest recorded use of the word to the most recent.  Find the usages which date from the year in which the work in question was written, and you have a fairly good basis for believing you know the author's likely sense of what the word means.  It would be cumbersome to perform this search for every word in a work, but wise students know which specific words in the text are central to their theses, and they make sure they look up those words before trusting their Modern English dialect to interpret their meanings.  The OED is available from the Julia Rogers Library's web site via the "Quick Links" menu, "Databases A-Z."

        Click here for a short list of important journals founded in the period before the New Criticism.

        Click here for a short list of New Criticism's journals.

        Click here for an important comparison of the verb Wimsatt and Beardsley use to describe criticism ("to explicate") and the verb Hirsch uses to describe the first and most important stage of criticism ("to construe").

        Click here to test your skills as a New Critic.