| The dissertation deals with R. S. Crane's formalistic literary criticism as a major development of the family of Anglo-American formalism, having Aristotelian plot-architectonics as its main distinguishing feature. The theory of plot propounded by Crane, following its source in the Poetics of Aristotle, represents an attempt to view the literary object as a product, and consequently as a construction by the poet who writes by first seizing on or intuiting an emotional form--or force. This force then directs or gives shape to the arrangement of incidents, the establishment of character, thought, and so on, ultimately shaping diction, that part of the Aristotelian qualitative hierarchy which the reader encounters first. The dissertation takes special note of Crane's system of causality, or end-means relationships, by tracing its roots throughout the major works of Aristotle, its manipulation in Renaissance and neoclassical poetics, and the careful redefinition of it--in terms of modern literature--in Crane's own critical theory.;Second, the theory of plot Crane sets forth is historically important in that it represents a now defunct literary philosophy, an objectivist, analytical one based on classical formalism and intellectual assumptions that have become replaced by modern structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. The focus, however, is on the evolutionary aspects of this shift, rather than on the revolutionary aspects of it. Consequently, Crane's theory and method is treated as a still useful and often necessary element in the complete act of literary judgment.;Emphasis is on Crane's theory rather than his practical criticism for two reasons. First, this work is important because it sets forth a poetics of descriptive objectivism, the first and most elementary step, Crane claims, towards adequate criticism of poetry. Consequently, the view is taken throughout that complete treatment of any text includes not only description and evaluation (that is, Crane's poetics and various methods of literary interpretation), but treatment in precisely that order: generic isolation and description of a text first, evaluation second. |
