Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The institutionalization of critical and cultural theory as a field within the field of literary studies has taken place through a series of phases and developments. Prior to the 1960s the field saw very little in the way of critical and cultural theory, for a couple of reasons. First, New Criticism was the dominant approach in literary studies in the United States, and its governing precept – that the literary text is a self – contained entity not requiring recourse to any “extraneous” disciplines for its understanding – militated against approaches which hinged on such “extraneous” disciplines as the sociology of knowledge, hermeneutics, the history of ideas, cultural history, and so on. New Criticism's demise coincided with the ascendency of critical and cultural theory in the field of literary studies, and while it would be too facile to suggest that the rise of one was somehow causally connected with the fall of the other, it nonetheless remains true that the circumstances underlying this rise and fall were not a matter of pure happenstance. Second, the dominant paradigm for the American version of comparative literature until the 1960s required the comparison of texts from two or more western European national literatures (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish primarily), with interpretive tools derived from philology serving as the primary basis for such comparisons. ... log in or subscribe to read full text