The Quest for the One True Meaning

Abstract

Gerald Graff suggests 1937–41 as ‘the turning-point for the consolidation of criticism’ in the American university system — the point, that is, at which the proponents of the old Gradgrindian ‘scholarship’ had effectively lost their long battle to exclude criticism from the academy, thus enabling the emerging New Critics to reinforce their position.’ Fifteen years later, it was as if the old battles had never been fought, whereas in England, there had never been quite the same intensity of conflict between scholars and critics; literary criticism was gradually, if grudgingly, accepted into the academy, without, until the rise of I. A. Richards and the Cambridge school in the 1920s, any serious internal challenge to its predominantly amateur ethos. By the late 1930s, the diverse histories had begun to converge: close reading had become a primary tool of advanced professional criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. But it was in the United States, where the research imperative was already well-established, and the demand for coherent theories and methodologies far more pressing, that the problems of institutionalisation first became apparent.

Six Hours a-Day the young Students were employed in this Labour; and the Professor shewed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together; and out of these rich materials to give the World a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences…

Swift, ‘A Voyage to Laputa’

I always said no good would come of poetry.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1913)