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The Function of Criticism and Tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument ?
Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’ ?
‘His religious strengths (like his insistence that God is “a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object”—not a “fixed and rigid idea”) as well as his complacent, wholesale surrender of dogmatic tradition and metaphysical concepts points directly to present ferments.’
Again, how shall we formulate our uneasiness at the following suggestion ?
‘Dr Leavis may have been led into an undue disregard for conceptual thought as such, including the conceptual presuppositions of his own critical practice.’
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- Copyright © 1972 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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page 373 note 1 Norman Mailer once expressed the wish to see Lear acted by Ernest Hemingway.
page 373 note 2 Stein, p. 151.
page 374 note 1 Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, Poetical Works, Oxford, 1913, p. 187. From questioning the sense in which King Lear can be said to be a tragedy, we are led to ask just how many tragedies Shakespeare wrote; the word is used loosely by critics, but there is no reason to assume that all the plays conventionally called tragedies are so, in the full sense of the word‐they can still be about tragedy.
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page 378 note 2 Stein, p. 219.
page 378 note 3 Lawrence, D. H., Phoenix II, London, 1968Google Scholar, note to ‘The Crown’, p. 364.
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