Objective Literary Criticism: Theory, History, and Race

Theory of Criticism

He believes that criticism should be descriptive (tries to describe), interpretative (tries to give the meaning), and objective. A criticism that engages the text directly without personal or historical influences, trying not to add anything of your own personality.

If I form the subject, it will be subjective. So it has to form itself. The critic has not to form the judgment, but it can’t form itself. So knowing that the critic, at the end, is the one able to form the judgment, he has to do it objectively, giving the appearance that it was formed itself.

The critic should “communicate first knowledge and let his own judgment pass along with it”. He assumes it is impossible that your judgment is not yours, but don’t express your own opinions. Try to hide them.

“I wish to decide nothing as of my own authority; the great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and let humanity decide”. First sentence, a proclamation of his objectiveness. To eliminate personal criticism, based on objectivity. To make the critic get out of the way, the personality of the critic should not be an obstacle with a direct contact with the text, and it should be interpersonal.

Historical Criteria

He defends that the value of a literary work has nothing to do with the period in which it was composed. A literary work preserves its value outside the period when it was written, because historical estimate is useless. At the time he was writing, it was the historiographical era. That means that the value of poems was relative to the period in which they were written.

We can consider Matthew Arnold a historical critic because he works with a very clear schema in his mind. He is peculiar in the sense that he is not a historical critic as we think they are. He understands it as “adequacy”, that is to say, a modern poem is modern because it reflects perfectly the period in which it was written, whether it was 25 centuries ago or yesterday. In that sense, he is a historical critic.

Race

He formed a bizarre relation between literary and racial. He finds 3 races in Europe (Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Celtic), and each of these has a different way of writing literature: He said Celtic literature has a term for style, melancholy, for natural magic, but no sense of form (a mess of a poetry/disorganized).

He has a fundamental catchphrase; he says that “poetry is criticism of life”. The statement conveys a strong didactic view of poetry. That is to say, to understand poetry as an instrument for identifying what is wrong with life. Only in that way can poetry criticize life.