A Study Of Cleanth Brooks’s Textual Criticism Theory

As one of the most important representatives of the New Criticism,the famous American scholar Cleanth Brooks has great attainments in the study of poetry theory and the practice of literary criticism.On the one hand,Brooks put forward the structural principle of "irony" and the "paradox" view of poetic language,and published the monographs Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn which brought him great reputation as a New Critic.On the other hand,Brooks was a co-author,with others,of the literary criticism textbooks Understanding Poetry,Understanding Novel and Understanding Drama,which have become the practical examples of the Close Reading method,leading a new generation of academic criticism based on detailed analysis of text language forms.However,it is also for this reason that he has long been regarded as a text centrist and formalist critic.Some recent achievements in the Chinese academic circle indicate that this is a serious misreading of the New Critic Brooks,and one important reason for the misreading is that Brooks’ s literary theory language mostly absorbed and evolved from the concepts and terms of other New Critics and he failed to build a rigorous theoretical system.Based on this,the paper takes Brooks’ s criticism theory of poetry,fiction and drama as the main study objects which are generalized as the textual criticism theory,and explores the important issues such as the generative context,construction process,practical examples,theoretical value and reflection of Brooks’ s textual criticism theory through intensively reading the five original works as listed above with the greatest relevance to the seleted topic of this paper,so as to present Brooks’ s textual criticism theory systematically and then rationally view the so-called "misreading" phenomenon.The paper is specifically divided into the following four parts:The first part of the paper introduces the background and theoretical origins of Brooks’ s textual criticism theory.The crisis of the Victorian criticism tradition and the subsequent flood of the aestheticism trend prompted Eliot,Richards and Ransom,who later became the pioneers of the New Criticism,to turn to thinking about the textual language forms.Their contemporary Brooks accepted some of the ideas in their literary criticism thoughts and thus indirectly inherited the resources of German classical philosophy and romanticism’s ideas from which they borrowed.In addition,Brooks and Ransom’s ideas of the New Criticism were also deeply influenced by the cultural view of American physiocratism,and recommending highly the "text" in their theoretical system also implies the purpose of restoring the western literary tradition.The second part of the paper restores the dynamic construction process of Brooks’ s text criticism theory by clarifying its construction strategy and internal and external dimensions.Firstly,Brooks’ s criticism theory based on the text was generated from his practice of poetry criticism and extended to the fields of fiction and drama criticism,and the Deployment of his criticism practice was based on his pedagogical asking thinking.In the selection of literary criticism standards,Brooks adheres to an absolutist criticism stance,and his criticism terms and core concepts are mostly inherited from other new critics,with his constantly adjusting their usages and ultimately forming a relatively stable connotation.This is the construction strategy of Brooks’ s textual criticism theory.Secondly,Brooks has long explored the universal structure inside the works which is unified by various textual elements’ s passing through dramatic means such as paradox,irony,metaphor,and symbol,establishing a criticism guiding ideology of an organic holistic text view and constructing a structural dimension of text criticism theory.Finally,Brooks’ s textual criticism theory also has a distinct experiential dimension.The ultimate goal of understanding poetry(novel or drama)is to experience the work itself as a unified entity of human experience,while the overall structure of the text points to the external world,fully reflecting the author’s efforts to explore the meaning of life inside the work.The third part interprets the criticism examples of Brooks’ s text criticism theory applied to three literary genres: poetry,novel,and drama.By specifically analyzing Brooks’ s classic criticism texts,the close-reading keynotes and criticism paths of different literary forms are revealed,and the consistency and generative nature of its text reading practice for textual criticism theory is ultimately verified.These criticism practices include: exploring the mythological world constructed by Eliot’s The Waste Land from the perspectives of symboy and irony,demonstrating the verification process of whether a novel has a "unified theme" by dissecting Hemingway’s classic novel The killers,and the re-exploration to dramatic nature of the textual structure in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.The fourth part evaluates and reflects on Brooks’ s textual criticism theory.This paper aims to present the original appearance of Brooks’ s textual criticism theory,which is an attempt to theorize his close-reading criticism and also reveals the development and revision of his criticism theory in the ontology of New Criticism.In essence,Brooks’ s textual criticism theory is an elitist literary evaluation system.He believes that the real literary models can be established by formulating a set of absolute literary criticism standards,and thus to countered the relativism and individualism prevailing in the culture at that time.Its theoretical rationality cannot be denied.However,this theory also has obvious limitations such as mixed use of criticism terms and narrow theoretical applicability,and he has long withstanded a critique of formalist criticism with other New Critics.Today,when criticism is marginalized,it is undoubtedly of enlightenment and referential value for the theoretical construction and practice of contemporary literary criticism in China to return this criticism theory that emphasizes the value of culture and the model of literature.