Let's Hear It For New Criticism

New Criticism, a movement that dominated American intellectual analysis of literature in the middle part of the 20th century, emphasized a close reading of text independent of the historical, philosophical or sociopolitical circumstances in which it was written. And more important in the current context, advocates of this approach believed the biographical circumstances of authors should be ignored during the process of divining the meaning or aesthetic beauty of writing.

Major figures associated with this approach were John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and, to a certain extent, T.S. Eliot.

I mention this because I read a piece in Literary Hub in which a couple of female authors were described as being upset that readers and/or critics seemed more interested in their personal lives than in what they had written, or, rather, in how their writing illuminated their personal lives.

In the piece, two women, Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett, discuss Lucy, a recent novel by Jamaica Kincaid.

In it (the transcript of a Podcast), Ms Winchester says at one point: "I interviewed Meena Kandasamy earlier this year about The Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife, and she talked about her experience with autofiction [fictionalized autobiography] and saying that she wanted to separate, you know, the art and the artist. And she didn’t want people looking into her own personal life to find out what was “real” and what wasn’t real. And I am reading up on the research for this episode. There a similar conversation with Jamaica Kincaid that, yes, a lot of her work is based on some of her experience, like loosely inspired by. But she didn’t want people to think that she was writing like word-for-word or experience-by-experience upon her own life. And she wanted that separation as well. And I find that interesting that so many women are just having to have this conversation like over and over. It’s like people are just so obsessed with women writers, like what is real from their life and what is fiction."

In other words, these women would that what they have written stand on its own terms.

This preference, it is fair to say, is then largely ignored by Ms Winchester and Ms Privett during their discussion of Lucy.

Early in the piece, for instance, Ms Winchester says: "So I thought we could talk a little bit about her and her background and where she comes from because a lot of her own personal life has informed her writing in a lot of ways."

And on it goes from there.

Well, people are fundamentally voyeurs and perhaps that's what the listeners to the "Reading Women" podcast really want to hear.