Book: The Attack on Literature and Other Essays
Author: René Wellek
Reviewer’s Instagram: antilibrarian
Photo Credit: antilibrarian
Original Book Review
René Wellek, The Attack on Literature (1982)
:
11 essays by Wellek. Essays like “The Attack on Literature,” “Literature, Fiction, and Literariness,” “Poetics, Interpretations, and Criticism,” and “Criticism as Evaluation,” and “The Fall of Literary History” bring into perspective the debates in literary criticism and theory in the 1960s and 70s.
In the essays, Wellek points out uninformed biases that go into the political, linguistic, and aesthetic attack of literature. If literature is the conserving power of interests for the ruling classes then the gradual turn to kitsch or subliterature (comics, cartoons, video games, television) poses a threat to the conserving ideology of literature.
The second problem goes into facticity vs representation. How do we understand a work of art if what is represented falls beyond the scope of representation? Wellek turns to Mallarmé, Adorno, and Blanchot. The anti-aesthetic attack was an attack on art for art sake: Wilde & the aesthetic education project through literature (Schiller, Kant, Burke, Hegel).
Wellek also addresses the threat of hot and cold media in McLuhan’s works and the tendency to archetypical criticism and mythmaking in Frye’s Anatomy! Wellek cites Croce a lot here to distinguish litteratura (civilizing function) from poesia (imaginative literature outside history).
Wellek’s other essays tackle the ideas of poetics (theory), the fall of poetics and the rise of literary history, I.A. Richards’ role in bridging poetics and hermenuetics, reception theory, and criticism as judgment—objective character of literature that is open for inspection where the adequacy of interpretation leads to the correctness of judgment. Not to forget that Kant said meaning is inseparable from value in an aesthetic appreciation!! In short, Wellek rips off the bandaid in his contemporary criticism steeped in scientism, presentism, anachronism, antiquarianism, and atomistic factualism to claim that criticism is the judgement of the judgment pronounced by a work of art, as there can be no literature or aesthetic experience without adequate criticism.
