The Rise of English

Synopsis:

In this chapter Eagleton starts the history of English Literature from the 18 th century. In that century, the
definition of Literature was quite different and it had to do with ideology of a particular social class.

After the bloody civil war, the aristocracy used literature as a tool to preserve their taste and upper class
culture by inculcating it into middle class by setting ideological institutions. The definition of Literature
did not advance unless the arrival of Romantic Period. Literature became synonymous with imagination
but paradoxically literature became literally untrue by that time. With the emergence of romantic
poetry, prose was started to be considered as dull and uninspiring because it did not tell what did not
exist but poetry did.

But when England started to emerge as an industrial nation, it turned every entity into commodity on
the open market and aired revolutions. Then poetry was used as a tool from the side of ruling power to
turn the resistance silent. After this, England turned into a society, these writers and poets got no place
and remained in their solitariness of their creative mind. This alienation gave birth to the theory ‘Art for
Art Sake’ and literature was considered purposeless.

At first religious ideologies was running like blood in the veins of society but when it failed, English
studies emerged as a new ideology. Apparently, English literature worked as a suitable replacement.
English became a subject used to cultivate the middle class and infuse them with some values of the
remaining aristocracy, thus English literature became the new way to pacify the middle classes.
Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the people from their present commitments and
conditions. It was also a way to experience things or events that were not possible to experience in an
individuals life. English as an academic subject was nothing more than the poor man’s Classics. In
addition, English became the new vehicle for transferring the moral law, which was no longer taken
from religion. Because English was not exactly considered a ‘Real’ subject, it was often given to the
ladies of higher learning institutions. However, as the century drew on, English took on more of a
masculine aspect. It still took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally English
literature came into power, mostly because of wartime nationalism. The new subject was created by the
offspring of the bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.

Now the study of English was in trend, and people may have wondered how it had ever been otherwise.
Deep and intense questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny. Literature was also perhaps
the only place where creative language was allowed to flourish. Moreover, those were studying felt that
they were a part of a larger movement that was moving civilization back to the way it should have been,
as in the seventeenth century.

“Scrutiny” did not seek to change society in any way, rather their goal was to withstand it. Teaching
children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of making them memorize
pointless passages of literature. Eagleton said that the Scrutiny project was “hair-raisingly radical and
really rather absurd.” In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of the elitists. The ‘organic’ society
needed by Scrutiny could not be gained, nothing more than a lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of
the past. Some types of English were considered more English than others, which ironically reminds one
of the types of arguments given by the upper class before. When T.S. Eliot came to England, he
upgraded the status of the poets and dramatists while toppling Milton and the Romantics. Literature
was considered to more attached to tradition; Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in
light of the war, and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in poetry that would speak to
a person’s senses rather than their intellect

Practical criticism meant a method that was unafraid to take a text apart, but also assumed that you
could judge literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from their cultural
contexts. Close reading also mean detailed analytic interpretation, but also seemed to imply that
former methods of criticism read only three words per line. Also assumed that any literary work could
be understood in isolation from its context.

Richards, an advocate of modern science, felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as
‘what?’ or ‘why?’ were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such pseudo-questions, society
would fall apart. Poetry’s role is to supply such answers.

American New Criticism was deeply marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human
impulses more effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too dissimilar from the
old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will ensure the survival of the upper ones). New
Criticism was not too different from Scrutiny: it reinvented in literature what it couldn’t find in reality.
They came up with something called the Great Man theory of literature, which says that even if the
author’s intentions in writing were recovered, they were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or
her text. At the same time, neither could the emotional responses of readers be confused with the
poem’s true meaning. Ultimately, reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to
nothing, a rejection of anything in particular.