The Play and Place of Criticism

• Author: Krieger, Murray, 1923-
• Place / Publishing House: Baltimore, : Johns Hopkins Press, [1967]; ©[1967]
• Year of Publication: 2019; 1967
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiv, 256 p.)

Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

Table of Contents

The play and place of criticism.--The play of criticism: The innocent insinuations of wit: the strategy of language in Shakespeare's sonnets. The dark generations of Richard III. The frail china jar and the rude hand of chaos. Dover beach and the tragic sense of eternal recurrence. The Marble faun and the international theme. From Youth to Lord Jim: the formal-thematic use of Marlow. The ekphrastic principle and the still movement of poetry.--The place of criticism: The disciplines of literary criticism. Joseph Warren Beach's modest appraisal. Contextualism was ambitious. Contextualism and the relegation of rhetoric. Critical dogma and the new critical historians. Platonism, Manichaeism, and the resolution of tension. Northrop Frye and contemporary criticism: Ariel and the spirit of gravity. The existential basis of contextual criticism.