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Criticism and Creativity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1964

E. W. Mandel
E. W. Mandel
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

If any single controlling principle can be derived from what R. P. Blackmur has called the most sustained, eloquent, and original piece of literary criticism in existence, Henry James's Prefaces, it is that criticism is a creative act. This principle seems both sufficiently important and ambiguous to warrant a close examination of its meaning and consequences. In what follows, then, I propose to examine a theory of criticism as creativity, referring not only to James's remarks but also, and in particular, to an earlier and some ways more accessible version which we find in Robert Browning's work. Undoubtedly, in the great realm of speculation open to the critical theorist there are grander tasks which one could set oneself. Whether there are more difficult ones is another question. As it is, despite their peculiar particularity, both Browning and James are ambitious writers who refuse to be contained within narrow limits. Both demand an awareness of the context of critical theory, a sense of the problematical nature of criticism and the perplexities of the creative act. It is these latter considerations with which I propose to begin.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , March 1964 , pp. 377 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1964

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References

1 The Art of the Novel, ed. Blackmur, R. P. (New York, 1937), viii. All references to James's Prefaces are to this edition.Google Scholar

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9 Stuart Hampshire, “Henry James and Posterity” (April 26, 1963), 639.

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11 Ibid., 32.

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20 Ibid.

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32 Abrams, 310. “To Coleridge the threat of science to poetry lay … in the mistaken and unbounded metaphysical pretensions of atomism and mechanism—in Coleridge's view, a useful working hypothesis for physical research which had been illicitly converted first into fact, and then into a total worldview.” But Abrams adds too that Coleridge proposes “not the disjunctive, ‘Either poetry or science’, but the conjunctive, ‘Both poetry and science’”.

33 The Ring and the Book, I, 464.

34 Ibid., 771-72.

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38 Ibid., 120.

39 “Preface to The Portrait of a Lady”, 46.

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41 “Preface to The Spoils of Poynton”, 121.