Rene Wellek

The New Criticism: Pro and Contra

Historique du mouvement. Refutation des accusations de formalisme, de scientisme portees contre la New Criticism. La seule critique valable portee contre ce groupe serait leur incapacite a faire de la critique comparee.

Leo Spitzer (1887-1960)

LEO SPITZER died suddenly of a heart attack on September 16, 1960 at Forte dei Marmi, north of Viareggio. At the Congress of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures at Liege early in the same month, he had read a paper on the study of style and received a prolonged ovation, which moved and cheered but also slightly puzzled him. It need not have done so. With Spitzer the last of the quartet of great German literary scholars in Romance philology-the peer of Vossler, Curtius, and Auerbachis gone. Spitzer was born in Vienna on February 7, 1887. He studied Romance philology with the great master, W. Meyer-Liibke, received his Dr. Phil. in 1910, and became Privatdosent at the University of his native city in 1913. His career was interrupted by the First World War, which he spent in part in the Austrian Censorship Office where he collected materials for his studies of Italian circumlocutions for

A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950

Part 1 German criticism 1900-1950: Thomas Mann German symbolism - Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Bertram, Max Kommerell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Kassner, Rudolf Borchart, Hermann Broch the journalist critics - Alfred Kerr, Friedrich Sieberg, Kasimir Edschmid and expressionism, three thinkers, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav, Jung, Martin Heidegger the scholar-critics in the Romance literatures - Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer literature - Oskar, Josef Nadler, Wolfgang Kayser, Emil Staiger the Marxist critics - Alfred Doblin, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukacs. Part 2 Russian criticism 1900-1950: a backward glance - Nikolay Mikhailovsky, Konstantin Leontiev, Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov futurism the poets - Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Andre Bely, Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam the marxists, literary criticism under Lenin and Stalin - Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Maxim Gorky, Leon Trotsky, Valerian Pereverzev literary history - writing Russian Formalism - Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, D.S. Mirsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson. Part 3 Eastern European criticism 1900-1950: Poland - Roman Ingarden, Czechoslovakia - modern Czech criticism and literary scholarship, Jan Mukarovsky - the literary theory and aesthetics of the Prague School.

Concepts of Criticism

14 essays cover literary theory, criticism, and history, concepts of form and structure, the Baroque, Romanticism, realism, positivism, comparative literature, and American and twentieth-century criticism.