Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 1994"

New Literary History and European Theory

Abstract: ment of literary studies? In his History of Literary Criticism, Rene Wellek assigns journals no significant role in the history of American literary criticism, asserting that "individual initiative rather than collective trends matters in criticism."' Can this be true, or has Wellek's notion of criticism as an individual act of judgment blinded him to the way criticism actually evolves? Certainly one could make a case for the importance of journals in the past half-century, a period marked by the decline of public, nonacademic criticism and the emergence of interpretive criticism as the major form of writing about literature. The New Criticism, for example, originated as an argument about the nature of poetry in T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920), but also as a challenge to the historical scholarship in several new quarterlies, particularly The Southern Review and The Kenyon Review. Explicitly devoted to innovation, eschewing footnotes and bibliographies, thejournals adopted an anti-academic stance, though they were themselves part of the academic world. The Southern Review, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren from 1935-42, was financed, lavishly at first, by Louisiana State University, which Governor Huey Long wished to make a great university. The Kenyon Review, edited byJohn Crowe Ransom from