[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to follow up last week’s on scholarly books I’ve loved with a handful of scholarly ideas I don’t. Leading up to a perennial favorite crowd-sourced post, a collective airing of grievances of all types!]
On two famous “fallacies” I don’t agree with, and one lesser-known one I definitely do.
I’ll always have a soft spot for the mid-20th century literary scholars who became known as the New Critics, as one of their founding members was my man Robert Penn Warren; that soft spot has only softened further now that my older son Aidan is at Vanderbilt, home to many in this group. But the New Critics identified a couple “fallacies” that literary scholars should avoid at all costs, and I find both limited at best and blatantly inaccurate at worst. One was the “Intentional Fallacy,” which suggested that scholars can never consider an author’s intentions in how they read and analyze a text. I agree that we shouldn’t be bound or our analyses circumscribed by such information (if and when we have access to it at all), as texts always can and usually do go beyond their origins as they develop, move into the world, and so on. But those texts are also quite definitely the creations of their authors, and being aware of why, how, when, where, etc. those authors did their work is thus an important analytical tool for framing and engaging with what is in that work itself.
The other famous fallacy on which the New Critics focused their ire was the “Affective Fallacy,” which suggested that scholars should likewise avoid allowing their analyses to be influenced by how audiences might read and respond to a text. Of course an audience’s responses aren’t the same as the text itself (a point that I know certain extreme reader-response theorists would argue, but I can’t get there), so fair enough as far as that goes. But again, I’m a big fan of adding tools to our analytical toolbox, and one thing I’ve learned across my 25+ years of college teaching is that students’ responses to our class texts make for phenomenal starting points for developing analyses. That doesn’t mean that in those cases students shouldn’t then turn their attention more fully to the texts themselves, but it suggests (as I hope I did with the first fallacy above as well) that these “fallacies” are actually instead layers of analysis that can be connected, rather than contrasting or competing perspectives that have to be chosen between.
While those are the two best-known “fallacies” identified by the New Critics, there is a third lesser-known but to my mind more convincing one: the “heresy of paraphrase.” Defined by founding New Critic Cleanth Brooks in a chapter of the same name in his groundbreaking book The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), this is the idea that if we try to paraphrase a literary text, we lose many of the formal elements that make the work what it is. In the Introduction to my first book I approvingly quoted Phillip Barrish’s argument that we must remain attentive to the “wrinkles and folds” that all literary texts feature, and despite a scholarly career that I know has taken me to many other kinds of work than just literary close readings, I remain committed to the importance of such textual analyses as the core of what we do. To my mind, every time we paraphrase we are over-simplifying the works—and while that might sometimes be necessary for space or time or whatnot, we at least should acknowledge that we’re doing it, and try even in those instances to feature some evidence from the texts themselves alongside our own takes. That’s a New Critical concept I can fully get behind.
Next non-favorite idea tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Scholarly ideas you’re not a fan of? Other things that gripe your cookies? Share for the weekend post!
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