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Paper #102587 :: Cleanth Brooks and the Essence of Poetic Expression
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An overview of the work and ideas of Cleanth Brooks.

Written in 2007; 1,537 words; 7 sources; MLA; $ 50.95

Paper Summary:

This paper describes the work of Cleanth Brooks who was a figure in the founding of the formalist school of "New Criticism". The author of this paper provides several examples of texts that Brooks claimed should be freed from authorial, historical, and socio-political associations, to create a space in which the text is able to speak for itself.

From the Paper:

"Cleanth Brooks' methodological approach to literary criticism seeks to locate the essential experiential voice of a text through an authentic interaction with the text as experience itself. Brooks was an instrumental figure in the founding of the formalist school of "New Criticism", which called for a freeing of the text from its historical and authorial intentions in order to focus upon the critical indications of the text itself. These indicated vectors of interpretation would be revealed by a close reading of the structural interplay of the textural elements, which could then be used to generate a normative evaluation of the work. Such strategies axiomatically located a meaning that transcended the formal indications of language to express 'concrete universal' truths of the human existential experience. The fact that these 'universals' are assumed on faith problemitizes such a methodology by essentially placing limits upon human comprehension even as it seeks to express that which is beyond it. Brooks, however, held that it was in this space of wonder that literature did its work by interacting with the 'real' world.
Brooks asserts that the study of literary texts must begin with a freeing of the text from its authorial, historical, and socio-political associations, to create a space in which the text is able to speak for itself. It is in this space that the critic performs a close reading of the text, from which the multitudes of associations emerge. The first of his interestingly termed "articles of faith" is "[t]hat literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its object". This assertion was intended to direct the focus of literary study away from the bibliographic and historical approach that dominated the discourse prior to the emergence of Formalism. The meaning and significance of the text was derived from its position in history and the assumed intentions of the author. Brooks was instrumental in the development of a new perspective that posited the text itself as the primary object of critical investigation. While a strict formalist approach would render the textural object wholly disassociated from anything but itself, Brooks' holds the belief that there is a value and meaning in literary objects that can be accessed through a thorough consideration of the structural unity created by the content of a text. From these assumptions, Brooks does not disregard extrinsic evidence, as amply demonstrated in his Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry; rather, the text itself must dictate the necessity of such support."

Tags: structure meaning text

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