Reading about New Criticism this week provided me with a poignant and sentimental stroll down memory lane. Back in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate majoring in English/Literature, New Criticism was literature studies. For those of you who came into literature studies after this period (and that’s pretty much everyone in our class), I can tell you that those were glorious days. We felt we could tackle any piece of literature armed with a trusty set of skills, a literary vocabulary, an enthusiasm for close readings, and our sheer wits.Imagine what it was like for me to return to formal literature studies in the late 1990s when I decided to pursue my master’s degree in English/Literature here at Mason. I was a stranger in a strange new land. Now, theory reigned. Feminists had things to say. Marx somehow had crept into the picture. Historical constructs mattered. And, new voices were included in the literary canon, voices previously marginalized and entirely off my radar screen. The “world” of “world literature” got a whole lot larger in my 25-year hiatus from the academy. Dead white guys now would have a lot of company on my bookshelf and close readings would no longer cut it as the be all, end all of literature studies.
I am Rip Van Winkle. I fell asleep and woke up to a new reality. But why? What happened to my beloved field? What made the tides turn as they did?
Actually, those tides turned long before even I got into the mix. There was a time – before New Criticism – when literature studies meant something entirely different. Students studied classics, and I’m not talking about Herman Melville here. They read the writers of antiquity and they had to know Latin to do so. Memorization was king. The idea of reading more contemporary works and discussing them was unthinkable in the academy. That wasn’t literature studies.
New Criticism was born after World War I but came into its heyday after World War II. Suddenly, thanks to the G.I. bill, we had an influx of college students the likes of which our academies had never seen before. These weren’t the privileged, well-prepared students of the past; they were servicemen. Now literature professors were confronted with students who had no clue about Latin and never heard of Ovid. What were they going to do with them? The answer was to teach them skills and vocabulary and set them loose on English language texts. New Criticism was the perfect solution to the practical challenge at hand. Now, anyone who could read and who was smart could be taught to study literature – no years of upper crust preparatory school education needed.
Reader Response Criticism speaks of its time, too. It would have been pretty difficult for us to have feminist readings of literature before we had feminists. Pop culture and social politics were fertile ground for baby boomer English professors who cut their teeth in the 1960s. The academy once again kept pace with what was going on in the world.
So where are we headed next? I have a prediction. I believe that the next wave – the one students will read about in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism in the year 2050 or so – will be what I’ll call Technology Criticism.
We’ve been up to this point wed to the notion that literature is linear; we start to read a text with the first word and end the text with the last word. But take a careful look at the Johns Hopkins entries we read this week and you’ll see that text need no longer be linear. Hot links can take us on a hypertext superhighway anywhere the author wants to send us and where we want to go. That means that each of us is free to experience hypertext in our own unique and nonlinear way.
Literature, inevitably, will harness this technology and the creative freedom it offers. Authors growing up right now will think in hypertext. They’ll write poems, novels, short stories, personal essays – our future literature — without the limitations of linear text. Sound, animation, images – all of that will become part of their texts, embedded in them, giving birth to new genres. The production and consumption of literature as we know it will change, as it always does. And, the academy will follow suit, as it always does, too.
Am I crazy? Maybe. Time will tell. Let’s just see where we are 25 years from now. This time, though, I promise you that Rip Van Winkle won’t be taking any hiatus from the academy. From now on, I’m staying wide, wide awake. – Laura Hills
Yes, technology can be almost like one of those choose your own adventure books. =)
Are you suggesting that people will essentially be creating movies rather than written works? We’ll see.
As for hyperlinks, I tend to ignore them. When I’m on the Internet, I want to writer to condense that information for me. Then again, my class was shocked today that I don’t use text messaging. They literally asked me “How do you survive?”. Maybe I’m just out of it.
I like how you historicize New Criticism in America against the backdrop of the GI Bill and an influx of non-classically trained college students — a crucial point that should have been included in the Johns Hopkins sketch on New Criticism.