ABSTRACT
The rise of science in the eighteenth century led David Hume, William Richardson, and others like them to ponder ways in which literature and literary criticism were, or could be, vehicles for the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. A century later, the aim was more likely to be to think of literature in musical terms. When Pater asserts that poetry aspires to “the condition of music,” he implies that poetry increases in value in proportion to its appositeness to music. To put that point another way, Pater assumes that music is more valuable than poetry, and so that the prestige of poetry increases with its capacity to mimic the effects of music. Likewise, when one describes a piece of music as a “tone poem,” the rhetorical aim is to appropriate value in the opposite direction, toward “programmatic” music, “Pastoral” symphonies, and “Pictures at an Exhibition.” In the twentieth century, literary critics were more inclined to emulate the social scientists; presumably, their method and vocabulary were more telling, more important, than those of literary studies. In this context, it was convenient to admire literature in proportion to the way in which it refl ected sympathy with one or another social cause or political movement. As partisan zeal increased, this kind of literary criticism became, in Harold Bloom’s lively characterization, the academic equivalent of “cheerleading” for paladins of the “six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians” (Bloom 1994, 527).
