"Of the Standard of Taste", Allen Tate, Austrian Economics, Austrian Economics and Literature, Berkeley, Bloomsbury, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, Cleanth Brooks, David Hume, De Quincey, Diderot, Dwight Macdonald, E. Phillips Oppenheim, e.e. cummings, Economics in One Lesson, Ezra Pound, Foucault, Fredric Jameson, George Santayana, Gertrude Stein, H. L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, Harold Bloom, Henry Hazlitt, Hobbes, Hume, I.A. Richards, Irving Babbitt, James Joyce, Jeffrey Tucker, John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke, Landor, Lenin, Lionel Trilling, Marianne Moore, Martin Heidegger, Marxists, Monroe Beardsley, New Criticism, New Humanists, Northrop Frye, On Being Creative, Paul Elmer More, Plato, Robert Frost, Roman Jakobson, Russell Kirk, Russian Formalism, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Temple Bailey, Terry Eagleton, The American Mercury, The Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Idea, The Nation, Time Will Run Back, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Voltaire, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, William Hazlitt, William James, William K. Wimsatt, Wittgenstein, Yuri Tynyanov
In American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Creative Writing, Creativity, Economics, Essays, Ethics, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on March 20, 2012 at 9:05 am
The following appeared here at Prometheus Unbound and here at Mises.org.
Remembered mostly for his contributions to economics, including his pithy and still-timely classic Economics in One Lesson (1946), Henry Hazlitt was a man who wore many hats. He was a public intellectual and the author or editor of some 28 books, one of which was a novel, The Great Idea (1961) — published in Britain and later republished in the United States as Time Will Run Back (1966) — and another of which, The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), was a trialogue on literary criticism. (Hazlitt’s book came out 24 years before Northrop Frye published a book of criticism under the same title.) Great-great-grandnephew to British essayist William Hazlitt, the boy Henry wanted to become like the eminent pragmatist and philosopher-psychologist William James, who was known for his charming turns of phrase and literary sparkle. Relative poverty would prevent Hazlitt’s becoming the next James. But the man Hazlitt forged his own path, one that established his reputation as an influential man of letters.
In part because of his longstanding support for free-market economics, scholars of literature have overlooked Hazlitt’s literary criticism; and Austrian economists — perhaps for lack of interest, perhaps for other reasons — have done little to restore Hazlitt’s place among the pantheon of 20th century literary critics. Yet Hazlitt deserves that honor.
He may not have been a Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, or Kenneth Burke, but Hazlitt’s criticism is valuable in negative terms: he offers a corrective to much that is wrong with literary criticism, both then and now. His positive contributions to literary criticism seem slight when compared to those of the figures named in the previous sentence. But Hazlitt is striking in his ability to anticipate problems with contemporary criticism, especially the tendency to judge authors by their identity. Hazlitt’s contributions to literary criticism were not many, but they were entertaining and erudite, rivaling as they did the literary fashions of the day and packing as much material into a few works as other critics packed into their entire oeuvres. Read the rest of this entry »
aesthetics, Allen Tate, Communism, Conservatism, George Santayana, God, imagination, Intellectuals, James Seaton, Joan Richardson, John Lachs, Marianne Moore, Pragmatism, Progressivism, Robert Frost, Roger Kimball, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Southern Agrarians, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred M. McClay, William James, Yvor Winters
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Communism, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Imagination, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Western Civilization, Writing on May 4, 2011 at 10:54 pm
This post first appeared here at themendenhall.
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It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism. But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.” The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were, many of them, social and political conservatives. This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge alternative and complicating visions of the world in general and of modernism in particular. In the wake of the radical 1960s, many intellectuals simply ignored the contributions of the conservative imagination to literature, preferring to will away such unpalatable phenomena by pretending they do not exist. However well-meaning, these intellectuals either assume without much hesitation or qualification that all modernist theories and practices were progressive, or they brush under the rug any conservative tendencies among writers they admire. American modernism was progressive in its adaptation of forms, but it does not follow that avant-garde aesthetics necessarily entails progressive political programs. Nevertheless, under Frankfurt School and Marxist auspices, among other things, the literati and others in the academy have rewritten the history and thought of modernist American poetry to purge it of all conservative influence. George Santayana, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore—these individuals, according to progressive mantras, were intellectually challenging and therefore, the argument goes, politically leftist. Such revisionism will not do. Read the rest of this entry »
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