t imothy A ubry The Discipline of Feeling: The New Critics and the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy When critics argue that literature is capable of performing a therapeutic function, they invariably try to dignify the idea by attributing it to Aristotle. The latter, after all, famously suggests that tragedy inspires catharsis in its spectators, allowing them to experience and purge dangerous feelings (Aristotle 61). Thus, as New Critic John Crowe Ransom attempts to articulate what he regards as the value of literature, he pauses, midway through his 1938 book The World’s Body, to discredit, as strenuously as he can, Aristotle’s notion. Ransom observes: On the one hand, the name of Aristotle behind this remark is revered beyond any earthly name that Europe knows how to spell. On the other hand, there could not well be the occasion for a cathartic without there being a nasty and toxic excrement somewhere, and a state of disease resulting from its presence within the system; nor can the joy of art be anything but the pleasure that attends an act of elimination; and all the fine notions which Europeans have entertained so easily about their arts and artists must be dissipated. By this view poetry is not a pretty business; the best that can be said is that it takes the place of something worse. (176) Aristotle’s claim is a sign, Ransom contends, not of his reverence, but rather of his disdain for literature and the feelings it is thought to inspire - as the generally under-emphasized scatological meanings of his metaphor reveal. In order for citizens to be “dutiful and effective” (186), they must find an outlet for their “ungovernable propensities” (184), and thus tragic theater functions as a benign release valve or laxative. Literature is not valuable in itself; it simply allows spectators to dispose in a sanitary fashion of their otherwise dangerous impulses, so they can return to what Aristotle regards as truly valuable: the “public life as citizen, scientist, worker or whatever career was sober and desirable” (210). Aristotle cannot recognize the true significance of literature because he is, according to Ransom, a scientist - a member, in other words, of that esteemed profession bent on destroying all possibility of aesthetic cultivation and appreciation (181). It is, to be sure, a somewhat ill-fitting if not anachronistic designation, but having observed, with horrified fascination, the stunning growth of science’s influence in the twentieth century, Ransom has developed a knack for spotting its signature tendencies practically everywhere 128 t imothy A ubry he looks. 1 While the attack on Aristotle is necessary to prevent his name from conferring a kind of timeless validity upon the idea that literature might serve primarily as a form of therapy, the more elaborate version of this argument propounded by the scientifically oriented critic I.A. Richards is of even greater concern to Ransom. Thus in several essays, he attempts to disentangle the New Critical approach from Richards’s - to translate a psychological description of the reader’s experience into a purportedly objective description of the text, in order to ascribe an absolute value to the literary work, independent of any effect it might have on a potential reader, and thereby reject any equation between the value of literature and its therapeutic capacity. The language of literature, Richards argues in both Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, is emotive not referential; its function is not to offer knowledge or truths about the world but to inspire particular attitudes. Moreover, the function of literature is not merely to elicit our feelings, but to manage or order them. Most individuals’ minds are poorly organized; their impulses interfere with each other, so that the satisfaction of one urge will prevent the satisfaction of others. “In order to keep any steadiness and clarity in his attitudes the ordinary man is under the necessity on most occasions of suppressing the greater part of the impulses which the situation might arouse. He is incapable of organizing them; therefore they have to be left out” (Principles 184). The poet, by contrast, is able to reconcile his seemingly opposed impulses through a finer, more comprehensive mental organization, and he transmits this mental organization to the reader through the work of literature. “It is in terms of attitudes,” writes Richards, “the resolution, interanimation, and balancing of impulses - Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy is an instance - that all the most valuable effects of poetry must be described” (Principles 113). “The equilibrium of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be the ground-plan of the most valuable aesthetic responses, brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion” (251). The attitudes that literature provokes, according to Richards, also help to produce a more durable mental organization in the individual, making him or her a healthier, more effective, more satisfied human being. Over the years, numerous critics, as Gerald Graff notes, “have rejected Richards’ openly therapeutic approach to poetics as cheapening” (Poetic Statement 12). That anyone might be struck by a critic’s “openly therapeutic approach” suggests that this mode of reading is, however widespread, embarrassing. Why might that be? Ransom offers one possible answer, contending that an excessive concern for mental health of the kind that marks Richards’s work could easily be thought to imply a lack thereof in the serious critic. 2 But the growth of the therapeutic professions during the middle of the 1 Chicago formalist R.S. Crane accused the New Critics of harboring a “morbid obsession with the problem of justifying and preserving poetry in an age of science” (“Critical Monism” 105). 2 When we eschew Richards’s emphasis upon the emotional effects of poetry, according to Ransom, we avoid “the ignominy of concerning ourselves about our mental ‘health,’ when we are occupied healthily and naturally with our external concerns.” The Discipline of Feeling 129 twentieth century, the increasing numbers of high-functioning individuals who were in treatment, and the sense among intellectuals that certain forms of emotional repression and nervous disorders were ubiquitous especially within the urban populations of the United States and Europe had all served to destigmatize therapy, making it a fairly commonplace practice. 3 Moreover, such an explanation does not indicate why serious critics might view a therapeutic approach to literature as “cheapening.” In our current literary culture, we tend to associate such an approach with middlebrow readers and middlebrow novels, with the Oprah Book Club and the naïve, narcissistic, interpretive responses that the show purportedly encouraged. But therapeutic styles of reading were not burdened with those negative connotations in the 1930s and 40s. Indeed, Richards, the champion of such modes, despised mass market and middlebrow literature. “With the increase of population the problem presented by the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely more serious and appears likely to become threatening in the near future” (Principles 36). Nor did he approve of readers who sought to discover a connection between works of literature and their own life experiences: “These are misleading effects,” he remarked, in Practical Criticism “of the reader’s being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emotional reverberations from a past which may have nothing to do with the poem” (13). The kind of therapeutic experience that Richards believed serious literature could offer was distinct from readerly identification with the protagonist or unadulterated sentiment; what he imagined was a rigorous mode of therapy, a strangely impersonal experience that involved harmonizing rather than indulging one’s feelings. Despite Richards’s hopes, serious intellectuals and scholars did come, as Graff’s comment suggests, to regard any kind of therapeutic approach to literature as a sign of bad, uncritical reading. But such views were not inevitable, and they emerged, arguably, as a result of the way the New Critics defined literature, in opposition to Richards. If the New Critics ultimately rejected the therapeutic approach to literature, it was partially owing to the institutional challenges they faced as they sought to turn literary criticism into a legitimate academic discipline. Disciplining Criticism In the early part of the twentieth century, the majority of faculty in English departments across the United States were scholars, not critics; they produced historical or philological research. They traced the text’s allusions to earlier works or the genealogy of its terms and phrases, or they sought to He continues: “Something like this consideration was in Mr. Eliot’s mind when he referred respectfully to Mr. Richards’ studies but declined to discuss them because he felt that the preoccupations of psychologists were ‘morbid’” (The New Criticism 26). 3 See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology. 130 t imothy A ubry describe the historical context or the biography of the author. 4 According to the New Critics, traditional scholars were so focused on cataloguing facts about the literary work’s historical context that they tended to ignore the work itself. They made no attempt to articulate why particular texts might be worth reading in the first place - a question that the masses of first generation students who were entering the university during the 1920s and 1930s desperately needed answered. These students and the even larger numbers that followed them after World War II as a result of the G.I. Bill generally lacked the historical and linguistic knowledge necessary to appreciate the scholars’ erudition. The method of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, which sought to explain the meaning and value of literary works by analyzing short passages removed from any broader biographical or historical context, did not require any previous knowledge and was thus more attractive to these students. 5 But in order to introduce it as a central component of the university curriculum, the New Critics needed to differentiate their approach from other prevailing forms of criticism practiced primarily by journalists and trade authors. These, Ransom and his colleagues feared, were too subjective and impressionistic to qualify as a serious intellectual enterprise worthy of inclusion within English departments. 6 While Ransom worried that the expansion of scientific forms of thought within the twentieth century would entail a corresponding marginalization of literature, he also recognized that criticism would need to appropriate scientific protocols in order to achieve academic legitimacy. “Criticism,” he maintains, “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons - which means that its proper seat is in the universities” (The World’s Body 329). Thus during the 1920s and 1930s, Ransom and his fellow New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and W.K. Wimsatt, devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism. In particular, Wimsatt’s famous admonition against the “intentional” and the “affective” fallacies attempted to sequester the feelings and thoughts of the author and 4 As MLA president Douglas Bush argues in his defense of traditional methods, the historical focus of scholars represents an “attempt to see a piece of writing through the minds of its author and its contemporaries” (13). Cleanth Brook’s characterization of scholarly work is less generous; he concludes, quoting Browning, that efforts to ascertain “What porridge had John Keats,” did nothing to illuminate his poetry. (The Well- Wrought Urn, 141.) Ransom summarizes the reasons for the New Critics’ dissatisfaction with literary scholarship somewhat more carefully in “Criticism, Inc.” See The World’s Body, 327-50. See also See Richard Ohmann, “Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology,” 145; Richard Foster, The New Romantics, 194; Rene Wellek, “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,” 614; Vincent Leitch, American Literary Criticism, 27. 5 Numerous observers have recognized how well-suited New Criticism was for the pedagogical demands of the moment. See for instance Graff, Professing Literature, 173; Bush, “The New Criticism,” 13; “American Scholar Forum: The New Criticism,” 88. 6 See Ransom, The World’s Body, 329-342; Brooks, “The New Criticism,” 593; Mark Royden Winchell, 409; Graff, Literature Against Itself, 140-1; Leitch, American Literary Criticism, 53. The Discipline of Feeling 131 the reader from the act of criticism, in order, like any scientific practice, to isolate the object under investigation from all extraneous phenomena and to reduce the influence of the investigator’s own bias. 7 Richards of course also aimed to make criticism more scientific, and in Practical Criticism he even issued surveys and gathered empirical data about readers, but in his research he stripped from poetry all of the intellectual powers that he invested in the critic: to employ logic, to issue propositions, and to produce knowledge. Thus Ransom worried that no matter how scientific Richards’s procedures were, he could still be accused of investigating what was merely a form of emotional calisthenics entirely cut off from any real-world knowledge. “The theory of poetry as agitation,” writes Ransom, “gives us a muscular or gymnastic view of poetry: the poem resembles a gymnasium with plenty of dumb-bells and parallel bars for all the member interests; and what the member interests obtain from it is pure or abstract exercise, which does not pretend to have any relation to affairs.” But “to be interested,” Ransom continues, “is to try to obtain a cognition, to do what Mr. Richards wickedly denies to poetic experience and grants exclusively to science: to seek the truth” (The World’s Body 154-55). To deny poetry “any relation to affairs,” is, ostensibly, to presume that it is incapable of serving any worldly purpose. At times Ransom seems concerned that Richards’s definition will relegate the reading of literature to the leisure hours, placing it on the wrong side of a series of invidious oppositions, between work and play, between seriousness and triviality, and less obviously between masculinity and femininity. Parodying Richards’s account, Ransom writes: “Poetry is needed as a complement to science because it is prepared to give to the emotions, and through them to the attitudes, their daily work-out; science intends to suppress them in order to map the objective world without distraction. Science is for use in our overt or gross practical enterprises, but poetry ministers directly to the delicate needs of the organism” (New Criticism 22). Describing what he sees as a similar attempt to trivialize various forms of art in Aristotle, Ransom observes, “He has a sort of addiction to the drama, and is like some sober modern thinker, a scientist, let us say, who permits himself one single indulgence for relaxation, namely, the reading of detective stories, but while he is about it makes himself an authority on the subject, knowing all the good murder novels and the tricks of all the authors” (The World’s Body 185). In determining whether drama and music belong within the category of work or play, according to Ransom, Aristotle “stops as if to say that here the violence [of Phrygian music and tragedy] hardly consists with mere pastime, but the violence may as well be conceded as indicating the existence of dangerous passion, and the arts in question will pass it off during the play-period, and leave the citizen ready for his business” (188). 7 See “The Intentional Fallacy,” 5-28, and “The Affective Fallacy” 21-39, in W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon. As Christopher Herbert has noted in discussing these principles, “Only the limitless prestige of the scientific could possibly have rendered acceptable so drastic an insult to the natural interplay of readers’ personalities and literary texts” (198). 132 t imothy A ubry The Delicate Needs of the Organization Man It is odd to find Ransom accusing Richards of refusing literature a role within the world of “affairs.” The former, after all, is famous for denying any relationship between literature’s value and its perceived usefulness within society; and it is the latter, Richards, who attributes a practical, therapeutic function to literature. Indeed, a focus on the emotional, psychological services that literature renders does not, one could argue, relegate it to the leisure realm; after all, such services are perfectly commensurate with the forms of white collar work, the modes of immaterial labor, that become increasingly prevalent in the postwar period. As C. Wright Mills observes, in his seminal 1951 study, White Collar, “fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols” (65). And: “In the great shift from manual skills to the art of ‘handling,’ selling, and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of the employee are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become of commercial relevance, become commodities in the labor market” (182). As corporations expanded, and means of production grew more efficient, more Americans became involved in administrative tasks and selling material goods to consumers rather than producing them. By the 1950s, ministering to the “delicate needs of the organism” had turned into an extremely profitable industry. While Ransom worried that associations between poetry and feelings would assign the former to the leisure realm, sociologists and journalists such as David Riesman and William Whyte were describing the erosion of any clear distinction between labor and leisure, work and play: both featured patterns of compulsive sociability centered around the need to fit in and get along; both rewarded those individuals capable of placating, charming, and influencing the people around them. 8 Though Richards does not explicitly acknowledge any resemblance between the tasks that he assigns to poetry and the forms of emotional labor that are coming to dominate the white collar sphere, the language he uses in certain moments to describe the purpose of poetry bears an uncanny resemblance to the discourse of business administration - the kind of language that one might find in book like Peter Drucker’s classic manual, The Practice of Management. A primary goal of the affective organization that poetry produces is, for Richards, efficiency. “The belief that - on the whole and accidents apart - finer, subtler, more appropriate responses are more efficient, economical, and advantageous than crude ones, is the best ground for a moderate optimism that the world-picture presents” (Practical Criticism 240). Often Richards sounds like he is describing the operations not of a work of literature or an individual mind, but of a corporation, offering strategies for running it effectively. “[Tragedy] can take anything into its organization, modifying it so that it finds a place” (Principles 247). Or: “That organization which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best” (Principles 52). The 8 See Whyte, Organization Man, 150; Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 158-159. The Discipline of Feeling 133 values that Richards identifies: efficiency, the elimination of waste, the capacity to put everything in its proper place, the maximization of human potential - are the ones that generally dictate the decisions of corporate managers. Moreover, the relationship between good literature and effective executive management need not be merely metaphorical. If reading literature is the best means of organizing the individual’s impulses, it also appears to be ideal training for a future manager, preparing him to organize the competing impulses of his employees. Harmonious mental organizations are, after all, as Richards suggests, entirely transmittable. The poet has attained an extraordinary balance between his various affective impulses, but he is able to impart this balance to the reader; and one can imagine that a good manager, trained by a serious study of literature, would be able to do the same for his workers, making them happier and more efficient. That studying literature might serve as a useful form of preparation for business managers was not as unorthodox a view as one might think. Executive training programs in the humanities proliferated during the 1950s; AT&T annually offered several dozen employees a 10-month leave of absence so they could immerse themselves in the liberal arts. 9 Ransom’s fears that Richards’s arguments would serve to marginalize literature might seem based, then, on a misunderstanding of the nature of modern work - particularly the kind of work that a central constituent of his target audience, i.e. college students, hope to perform. And yet it is important to note that Ransom was not alone in his disdain for those efforts to tend to the “delicate needs of the organism.” His assumption that such work would necessarily be viewed as unimportant echoed the widely shared sense that the tasks performed by white collar workers were, due to their intangible character, trivial, unmasculine, and even superfluous. 10 And one means of combatting such perceptions, in keeping with the tendency identified by Ransom to value the exercise of reason over the cultivation of feeling, was the rise of a scientific approach to corporate management: one that sought to systematize its method and quantitatively measure its results, so as to draw clearer connections between white collar managerial work and actual concrete consequences, in the form of profits or losses, within the free market. While a majority of the initiatives designed to make literary study a central component of training for managers, including AT&T’s Institute of Humanistic Studies, were discontinued within a decade, business schools, increasingly dedicated to promulgating a scientific approach to management, experienced dramatic growth. 11 9 See Mark D. Bowles, “The Organization Man Goes to College”; Timothy Aubry, Humanities, Inc. 10 Mills, Whyte, and Riesman all describe, and in some moments, reproduce this anxiety. 11 Robert R. Locke discusses the embrace of scientific paradigm within business schools after World War II. He also notes the extraordinary growth of these programs during this period. The percentage of students majoring in business in the U.S. grew from 3.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 1920 to 17 percent in 1950, and enrollments in graduate programs doubled between 1953 and 1963 and tripled in the following decade. (161-2). 134 t imothy A ubry Though Richards argues that reading poetry can be profoundly useful in many areas of life, he admits: The organisation and systematization of which I have been speaking in this chapter are not primarily an affair of conscious planning or arrangement, as this is understood for example by a great business house or by a railway. We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organised state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of other minds. Literature and arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused. (Principles 57) What literature does bears no resemblance to the modes of conscious planning required by a “great business house.” The way texts influence readers, the kind of changes they produce, and the concrete results of these changes are, in Richards’s description, unsystematic and resistant to exact measurement or description. Even if many companies provide intangible services and rely upon affective labor, this does not necessarily dictate a commensurately intangible, unscientific approach of the kind that poetry might offer. The operation of corporations demanded, according to most executives and business school professors, rational, scientific methods. While it is unlikely that Ransom paid much attention to the growth of scientific models of management within business education programs, this phenomenon does lend support to his larger argument: that scientific modes of thought were increasingly dominating all variety of spheres, monopolizing knowledge production about subjects both concrete and immaterial, assuming mastery over areas that might have otherwise lent themselves to a traditional humanistic approach. And thus as long as critics like Richards insisted on defining literature merely as a means of producing or organizing emotions, rather than a rational form of cognition, like science, then they would, Ransom suggested, inevitably trivialize the very thing whose importance they were seeking to defend. Poetry vs. Science In their attempt to legitimize academic criticism, Ransom and his fellow New Critics sought to present literature as a source of knowledge about the world, but in doing so they necessarily confronted the question of how to position literature in relationship to the sciences. They knew of course that criticism could never compete with science on its own terms, since nobody, after all, was going to read Shakespeare to learn about anatomy or Donne to learn about astronomy, and thus they presented literature as a fundamentally different kind of knowledge, one that was, at least by certain measures, preferable to science. Scientific accounts of reality, Ransom argues, are “its reduced, emasculated, and docile versions. Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories. By this supposition it is a kind of knowledge which is radically or ontologically distinct” (New Criticism 281). Science approaches the individuals objects that it seeks to describe as instances of universal The Discipline of Feeling 135 laws, as examples of broader taxonomic categories, thus translating concrete objects into abstract concepts, under which various particulars can be subsumed. “The work of science,” concludes Ransom, “is a work of classification in terms of universals, not a work of imitation in terms of particulars” (The World’s Body 199). Literature, by contrast, according to the New Critics, seeks to represent objects in their wholeness and their particularity. Because of its texture, its rhythms, its incongruous connotations, its metaphors, and its capacity to yoke together contradictory qualities, poetry is able to offer an ontologically richer sense of reality: “The density or connotativeness of poetic language reflects the world’s density” (The New Criticism 79). While Richards had argued that the capacity of poetry to balance contradictory impulses allows it to meet the emotional needs of readers, Ransom maintains that this capacity actually reflects the complex and contradictory nature of reality. But how exactly can one verify or defend the grandiose claim that poetry offers a more complete form of knowledge than science? How exactly can the truth of poetry be assessed? The New Critics respond to this challenge by rejecting scientific truth criteria as a means of judging the knowledge that poetry offers. Science searches for tendencies that recur in various circumstances; it aims to abstract from a particular situation rules or principles for predicting the behavior of larger categories of phenomena, and the scientific community deems propositions true only after the tendencies it identifies are shown to be repeatable in multiple experiments. Poetry, by contrast, emphasizes “incessant particularity” (The New Criticism 25), in which each moment is an entirely new and unprecedented event, focusing on elements that are particular to a given situation, thus refusing the broad patterns or rules that science equates with truth. Poetry, in other words, represents phenomena that are by definition non-repeatable and thereby produces a kind of knowledge resistant to verification via scientific measures. While the New Critics often assert the superiority of poetic knowledge to scientific knowledge, they never seek to disprove or invalidate particular scientific theories. Their rhetoric is best read as a strategic response to an intractable institutional reality. The scientific disciplines had earned for themselves a position of hegemony as a form of knowledge within American universities, and the New Critics were content merely to carve out a space for the study of poetry alongside science - in part by borrowing some of its rigor for their own discipline. Aware of their own institutional disadvantage, they pragmatically rejected positivistic assumptions that require an either/ or decision between poetry and science, refusing the premise that reality lends itself to a single description, the truth of which entails the negation of other descriptions. 12 If we read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” correctly, avers Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn, “we shall not feel that the 12 Brooks writes: “The poet attempts to fuse the conflicting elements in a harmonious whole. And here one may suggest a definition of wit. Wit is not merely an acute perception of analogies; it is a lively awareness of the fact that the obvious attitude toward a given situation is not the only possible attitude. Because wit, for us, is still associated with levity, it may be well to state it in its most serious terms. The witty poet’s glancing 136 t imothy A ubry generalization,” i.e. the final sentence of the poem, “is meant to march out of its context to compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world” (The Well-Wrought Urn 151). The New Critics’ philosophical premises allowed them to avoid any direct confrontation with science and to deny any empirical test through which their views about the deep ontological truth of poetry might be examined or discredited. The Importance of Being Useless One reason literature is able to offer such a robust and complex picture of the world, according to Ransom, is that its representations do not aim to serve any purpose other than knowledge itself. “Art exists for knowledge, but nature is an object both to knowledge and to use; the latter disposition of nature includes that knowledge of it which is peculiarly scientific, and sometimes it is so imperious as to pre-empt all possibility of the former” (The World’s Body 197). Science, in a majority of cases, seeks to make use of nature, and this sometimes precludes its capacity to know or understand nature. Literature, by contrast, suffers from no such conflict of interest. Its knowledge is untainted by any concern for the purposes it can make nature serve. Ironically, however, this ideal, disinterested knowledge, is one to which science, notwithstanding its corrupted form within the modern society, also subscribes. “We may define a chemical,” Ransom suggests, “as something which can effect a certain cure, but that is not its meaning to the chemist” (343). While Ransom generally positions literature in direct opposition to science, in certain moments he seems to suggest that literature merely pursues a purer version of what science, in its true essence, also pursues - as if literature were somehow science’s better half, better at performing what science would also seek to perform, if only it could avoid getting ensnared in utilitarian calculations. Ransom’s argument, astonishingly enough, is not merely that literature aims to offer knowledge without regard for the short or long term utility of that knowledge; rather the very sign of literature’s superiority as a form of knowledge is its uselessness. If poetry is doomed to prove itself inferior to the scientific disciplines when it comes to all practical and worldly measures, then Ransom has identified a criterion of rigor according to which literature and literary criticism are absolutely unrivalled. When it comes to manifest uselessness, absolute impracticality, no other discipline can compete with literature. But this also means that to appreciate the importance of reading literature, no search for the immediate or long-term consequences that it might yield is necessary; its value is not displaced onto a scene of action external to its own being; literature, as a form of pure knowledge, is its own justification. In some moments, Ransom’s refusal of any instrumental function to literature entails some fairly extreme conclusions, among them, that at other attitudes is not necessarily merely “play” - an attempt to puzzle us or to show off his acuteness of perception; it is possible to describe it as merely his refusal to blind himself to a multiplicity which exists” (Modern Poetry 46). The Discipline of Feeling 137 literature’s value has nothing to do with the impact it produces on readers’ minds: “When you think of a thing as the cause of something else, you waive interest in it for itself” (New Criticism 15). While such an impractical conception might seem like a futile attempt to push back against the utilitarian tides that had overtaken the United States, the New Critics were actually motivated in part by pragmatic considerations. To determine literature’s value on the basis of its perceived usefulness, its ability to satisfy people’s practical or emotional needs, as Richards had attempted, was to defer to a standard rooted in the marketplace, in a modern industrial society that turned all objects into instruments or means of producing profits. But judged by that standard, especially in comparison to other commercially or vocationally oriented disciplines whose popularity was steadily growing during the middle of the twentieth century, literary criticism would never stand a chance. Thus Ransom appealed to a different standard altogether, seeking to protect literary study from the ruthless logic of the market, by securing permanent institutional support for it in the university. Presenting poetry as a mode of pure knowledge and criticism as a form of disinterested inquiry, Ransom invoked ideals that universities and specifically liberal arts departments were, at least in theory, designed to foster. Uselessness was a mark of poetry’s peculiar prestige and a means of justifying its need for protection inside the academy. As Louis Menand has argued, ever since the BA programs were instituted as a prerequisite rather than an alternative to professional schools in the late nineteenth century, undergraduate education, though offered as a general form of preparation for future life, has been organized around the ideal of cultivating knowledge for its own sake (49). Richards’s notion of poetry, which emphasizes its utility and denies its capacity to offer knowledge about the world, Ransom fears, jeopardizes its standing within the one place where it might find safety: the academy. While academics in recent decades have obviously challenged New Critical doctrines and come to underscore the function that literature performs in larger social and political processes, they have, with a few exceptions, continued to disregard the more immediate everyday therapeutic uses that literature serves for its readers, of the kind described by Richards. 13 Moreover a majority have continued to accept the mutually exclusive opposition established by the New Critics between intrinsic aesthetic value and worldly or political usefulness. They have simply reversed without overturning the New Critical binary, now favoring politics to the exclusion of aesthetics. And in this regard, interestingly enough, they may have something to learn from the scientific disciplines. Were he alive today, Ransom would likely not be surprised by the increasing popularity and influence of scientific procedures within academic literary scholarship. While the most salient examples include computer driven 13 Good examples of scholarly work focused on the more practical and therapeutic functions of literature include Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs; Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books; Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature; and Beth Blum, “Ulysses as Self-Help Manual.” 138 t imothy A ubry data analysis, the digital mapping of literary trends, and neuroscientific approaches to the phenomenology of reading, literary scholars may have something slightly less technical to learn from the scientific disciplines about how to affirm the importance and legitimacy of what they do. Recall Ransom’s image of the chemist who investigates a chemical with medicinal powers, but who does not find meaning in its ability to “effect a particular cure.” This scientist is admirable to Ransom because she is interested in analyzing the chemical merely for the sake of producing knowledge, not because of the practical medical purposes that chemical might serve. But unlike the New Critic who fears that any consideration of the possible usefulness of the object they consider will somehow call into question the intrinsic value of that object, the scientist, in Ransom’s account, is explicitly investigating a kind of medicine, and is apparently untroubled and certainly unimpeded by the tendency to define the object of her study as “something which can effect a particular cure.” If scientists, generally speaking, are able to acknowledge the utility of their research without worrying that such concerns will somehow corrupt or undermine the significance of their work, the likely reason is that they hold the importance of the knowledge they are producing to be clear and incontestable regardless of the practical functions it may or may not subsequently serve. The fear evinced by Ransom that any concern for the potential utility of what one studies will somehow demonstrate a lack of conviction in the intrinsic value of the knowledge being sought actually betrays far greater insecurity regarding the importance of that knowledge than the more open, less defensive stance of the scientist. At least for the purposes of securing disciplinary legitimacy, the attitude of the scientist seems significantly more effective than that of the New Critic. Those literary scholars who want to proceed more like scientists, in other words, might recognize that it is possible to appreciate a literary text’s practical, political, or therapeutic functions without thereby forfeiting the ability to affirm its intrinsic value. But the converse is also true - a point that may be harder to accept for many politically oriented literary scholars working today. To appreciate or to explore the intrinsic aesthetic value of a literary work, just as scientists seek knowledge of the world for its own sake, in other words, need not entail a denial of that work’s potential social or political function. Following the example of the scientist means recognizing that formalist criticism does not necessarily entail a rejection or repudiation of more politically oriented modes of interpretation. Indeed the capacity to entertain both possibilities, both ways of valuing one’s discipline - in terms of intrinsic aesthetic value and extrinsic social or political utility - without the fear that one will undermine the other, may be the most important lesson that literary scholars have to learn from the scientific disciplines. The Discipline of Feeling 139 Works Cited Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics, Trans. Francis Fergusson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Aubry, Timothy. Humanities, Inc.. American Studies 53 (2014): 5-29. 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