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[goyanamasu]

Abuse of the Term 'New' in Literary Criticism

Lately my reading, especially critiques of poetry and poets, has been in books published in the 1960s. I don't think there were more titles then with the word 'New' used to describe schools and trends. But I wonder.

I'm going to post in this thread what I find to be (at least today, probably then) abuses of the notion that some trend in writing is New, with a cap 'n'.

From Oxford Press (1967) Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets, American and British Poetry since World War II.

Every one of the poets who interested me, the ones I bought the book to read about, are now dead.

Do editors never think of posterity when putting titles on books? When will writers wake up to the short shelf life of everything new as they write the word?
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[al-Qa'bong]

I take it you're not a fan of Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom or I. A. Richards?
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[skdadl]

Ha. Yes. "The New Criticism," in the C20, meant a certain kind of (modernist) reading of literary texts, beginning in England after WWI and in the U.S. by the 1940s. Most students of literature my age or older were trained in the New Criticism to some degree or other.

As a technique for reading, the New Criticism is invaluable, I think. As a theory of literature, it has the usual limitations of modernism and formalism.

"Modernism" - there's another one. Very precise meaning in the C20, bound to fade soon, though. It had a different sort of precise meaning in the early C18, eg.

[goyanamasu]

"New" (used in titles) equates on one plane with New Journalism and New Criticism and even the name of one university, the New School of Social Research (NYUs New School). An ambition for looking at the cultural consequences of the word 'new' in names and titles could drive a researcher insane.

I've skimmed some (just a few) titles of poetry anthologies and thought about a few reviews. A unique approach was followed by the review The Fifties, which changed its name to The Sixties when the decade clicked over. It stays new for 10 years. It was predicted they would go on ad infinitum, but I think went out of print.

My guess is that the term 'new' came in as a reaction to the ambitious anthologies that tried to write a canon of 'the best' in stone. In No Amer particularly, I'm thinking of Louis Untermeyer' " . . Treasury of Great Poems" and that genre. Such collections are too expensive for most publishers, who, since Doubleday, etc., compete with more titles.

Some titles are shooting poetry in the foot (if not in the head) by either dating it or making what is old appear new again. In Québec I see 'Le temps des poètes' which implies that, after whatever period reviewed, poetry died.

You might (like I did) think that Oxford would run like mad away from 'new' on the cover of books, anthologies. But I see they stuck it on 'The New Oxford Book of Candian Verse in English,' the 1982 ed. which Margaret Atwood 'chose' for.
(She did a good job IMHO.)

But this (if anyone cared) will lead to critics stating that the 'old' is better than the 'new' and becomes ridiculous.

If one book and one title in crit-lit or actual prose and poetry is so definitive it reigns nearly supreme, does the title force those coming after to react with these 'new' or 'post' or just completely different titles in order to claim a territory? Poetry of This Age: 1908 - 1965, J. M. Cohen: so another critic for 1965 -2006 invents the Next Age of poetry. Scribner Poetry just reverts to the boosterism of the '20s and tosses out anthologies entitled 'The Best of the Best', again reacting to the over-use of the word 'new' but by being egomaniac about it.

I'm leafing through 'Poems of Our Moment', another 'New' transformed for the worse. A majority of the work in it was written at least 15 if not 25 years before the copyright; J. Hollander did find a few more recent poems for his 'Our Moment' thing. These were still 5 years old as the anthology went to press. (This makes the book nearly useless for understanding 1970 as a 'moment' in poetry.)

Now I'm going to stop complaining about 'new' in titles. What publishers came up with to sidestep the word manages to expand and bloat their intent: try to appear NEW, and the alternative wording becomes even worse.

Butling and Rudy's recent collection of crit-lit, which focusses on a small clan of Vancouver poets and Toronto friends (and highlights them being together in the 1960s) covers the 1970s and 80s and quarter century since with merely descriptive short publication credits. So what do they entitle this folio-pastiche of monographs about their poetic monoculture? It becomes grandiloquently "Writing in Our Time" (The 'our' means 'their' and 'time' means 'then'.) The subtitle is even worse: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003); Wilfred Laurier U.P., 2005). By not calling it 'New VanCanTor', the authors (who I'll bet consider themselves post-modern and post-colonial) attempt to colonise the other provinces plus an entire canon of Canadian radicals writing poetry (not just one p but poetries) for half a century henceforth from when they were all in the same small poetry class, editing a little lit review.

Trying to avoid 'new', the publishers and authors keep jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
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[al-Qa'bong]

[goyanamasu]

al-Qa'bong - You forgot the word combo 'bio-degradable. New and Improved Because it is Bio-Degradable.

With anthologies like that the word 'new' could start to do some work 'cuz the book would just disappear after a year or so.

To be fair to Oxford, it had been a quarter century since the first O. Book of Canadian Verse (1960; AJM Smith), so 'new' modifies the entire title. Not so with another anthol. ed. by Dennis Lee. The ones he chose become 'The New Canadian Poets' 1970-1985. I'll bet 2/3rds of the poets in the 2nd half of it are no longer even writing (though 2/3rds may be tenured).

What is lacking is a cultural theme around which lit-crit and text can be gathered. Yet every heyday (I think) has been iconoclastic for 150 years - and it shows in titles. Ed Sanders edits Fuck You - A Magazine of the Arts. It is a different zeitgeist from accepting an editor's milquetoast names. Which reminds me, Sanders did not stick 'new' on his school of poetry but he captured the zeitgeist of his moment and tried to latch onto the momentum behind New Journalism (maybe he pre-dated NJ). He called his school 'Investigative Poetry'.

sidebar
I once had two newts for pets. This proves I don't have Sanders' imagination. My first newt was Sir Isaac Newt; the partner I later found for Sir Isaac I called simply New Newt.
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[anne cameron]

I'm thinking of getting a miniature pig. I would call him Albert Ein Schwein.

[goyanamasu]

Anne Cameron: Which only proves that both of us are equally stupid when it comes to naming animals.

So I guess that's more important than the stupid titles editor's come up with for the titles they use?
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[anne cameron]

It isn't the stupid titles editors use...it's the stupid cover illustrations on which the publishers insist....