Таълим вазирлиги бухоро давлат университети филология факультети

The influence of science

What separates modern criticism from earlier work is its catholicity of scope and method, its borrowing of procedures from the social sciences, and its unprecedented attention to detail. As literature’s place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as humanistic education has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of professionals serving as one another’s judges, criticism has evolved into a complex discipline, increasingly refined in its procedures but often lacking a sense of contact with the general social will. Major modern critics, to be sure, have not allowed their “close reading” to distract them from certain perennial questions about poetic truth, the nature of literary satisfaction, and literature’s social utility, but even these matters have sometimes been cast in “value-free” empirical terms.
Recourse to scientific authority and method, then, is the outstanding trait of 20th-century criticism. The sociology of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythological investigations of Sir James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism, and the psychological models proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung have all found their way into criticism. The result has been not simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespread belief that literature’s governing principles can be located outside literature. Jungian “archetypal” criticism, for example, regularly identifies literary power with the presence of certain themes that are alleged to inhabit the myths and beliefs of all cultures, while psychoanalytic exegetes interpret poems in exactly the manner that Freud interpreted dreams. Such procedures may encourage the critic, wisely or unwisely, to discount traditional boundaries between genres, national literatures, and levels of culture; the critical enterprise begins to seem continuous with a general study of man. The impetus toward universalism can be discerned even in those critics who are most skeptical of it, the so-called historical relativists who attempt to reconstruct each epoch’s outlook and to understand works as they appeared to their first readers. Historical relativism does undermine cross-cultural notions of beauty, but it reduces the record of any given period to data from which inferences can be systematically drawn. Here, too, in other words, uniform methodology tends to replace the intuitive connoisseurship that formerly typified the critic’s sense of his role.