After the New Criticism

by Frank Lentricchia

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene--Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom--and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one.
Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Theory

398 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 1980

Reviews

[A L]

A breathtakingly great survey from Frye to Bloom, with American phenomenology and French structuralism in between, and formalism as the basis of continuity; high caliber writing and scholarship.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a plausible addition to a course syllabus, for a survey of literary theory developments in the US from the 1950s through 1980. It covers some of the same ground as Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, walking through the basics of structuralism, phenomenology, reception, and post-structuralism. He has focused chapters on de Man, Bloom, Hirsch, and Krieger. Witty, pugnacious, committed to some sort of historicism that mostly stays subdued. It came out before the revelations about the extent of NSDAP collaboration of de Man and Heidegger, so that sort of commentary is absent. The critique of these figures is thus refreshingly not ad hominem. Derrida and Foucault are pushed mostly positively. I'm good with that.

[Greg_en · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading in literary history.