The issue is not whether we should or should not reduce the facts of literature to those of some other order or to make it causally dependent on such things as history, religion, or philosophy. These are the phantoms of forty years. Nor is the issue whether a contextualist can be flexible enough to do other kinds of criticism. Empson was a poor contextualist and an atrocious Freudian; and if the man was the same, the activites were not. One can (...) do both in turns and doing both tells us nothing about the flexibility of contextualism. Empson was indefatiable in multiplying ambiguities and notoriously indifferent to contexts, a fact that is drawing some attention and admiration today from some structuralists. Nor is the issue whether or not contextualism has been vindicated by other schools of criticism because it held that poetic language was ambivalent. The evidence that is brought forth from psychoanalysis to support this point undermines it. If Freudianism holds that poetic language is ambivalent - and it does - then it does not vindicate the contribution of contextualism, since it antedates contextualism by many years. And as a matter of fact, poetic ambivalence has been held by many critics and aestheticians - Croce is an example - long before New Criticism and contextualism. Nor is the issue, finally, wheher or not literature defamiliarizes usual or habituated language. I suppose it does, but this does not tell us very much. The term was used by the Russian Formalists to describe the process by which new literary forms come into being as they separate themselves from "conventionalized" or "canonized" forms. The Russian ostranenie could be translated as "deconventionalizing," just as well as the more usual "making strange," and the less usual "defamiliarization" that Mr. Hyman has taken from Lemon and Reis. The Formalists quickly abandoned the term because it was too vague and general to account for the increasingly complex process that was involved in the interchange of literary forms. The term was not used to describe the relationship of literary language to nonliterary language, as Mr. Hyman uses it. This is a New Critical reflex, which tends always to see the literary context as something opposed to something outside itself. But Mr. Hyman's misuse is also the right use because his misunderstanding and misapplication of the term takes us to the real issue, one that he has been unwilling or unable to face despite all the grace and complaisance of his argument. (shrink)

With the publication of Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Northrop Frye had already recognized that some egress had to be found from the theoretical impasse of insisting on an autonomy that cut literature off from more and more. Whereas American New Criticism saw the structure of the individual work as unique and self-sufficient, Frye insisted that there were structures that overrode the specific contexts of individual works. The structures of individual works were not worlds unto themselves, but were conditioned by (...) contexts and structures broader than they. Works were not made ex nihilo; they were made out of literature, and Frye seemed to imply what T.S. Eliot had stated some thirty years before him: that there was an order of works that affected and was affected by the individual work.1 Unlike the American New Critics who insisted - at least in their extreme period - that the individual poem had an induplicable context, Frye insisted on the duplicable context, and on the fact that certain images and basic structures are repeated throughout Western literature. · 1. Frye actually pays high tribute to Eliot’s The Function of Criticism and his concept of literature as an ideal order of works and not simply the collection of writings of individuals. He says, "This is criticism and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to annotate it" . Edward Wasiolek, is author of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction and editor of the five-volume edition of Dostoevsky's notebooks for which he received the Gordon J. Laing Prize. He is Avalon Foundation Professor and chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. (shrink)