Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1976. Representing years of critical reflection, The Theory of Criticism attempts to construct a poetics of presence. Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often dramatic, he looks at the multidimensionality of the poetic world through the lens of Western poetics. His work clearly addresses itself to postNew Critical questions: how to preserve the literary object as a thing to be perceived, valued, and enjoyed and yet to account for its presence in, and interaction with, our culture as a whole, always in danger of being dissolved into man's language-making and -forming activity in general. Our awareness of the poem as object must be modified by our awareness that it is an intentional object. Krieger develops his balanced vision in three parts. Part 1 defines the problem and defends the very activity of theorizing both in its own terms and in terms of the critic's function
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I. The Problem: The Limits and Capacities of Critical Theory
Chapter 1. The Vanity of Theory and Its Value
Chapter 2. Preliminary Questions and Suggested Answers
Chapter 3. The Critic as Person and Persona
Part II. The Humanistic Theoretical Tradition
Chapter 4. The Deceptive Opposition Between Mimetic and Expressive Theories
Chapter 5. Form and the Humanistic Aesthetic
Chapter 6. Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality: The Hourglass and the Sands of Time
Part III. A Systematic Extension
Chapter 7. The Aesthetic as the Anthropological: The Breath of the Word and the Weight of the World
Chapter 8. Poetics Reconstructed: The Presence of the Poem
Index
