3 - Out of Space, Out of Time: From Early Formalism to Deconstruction

Summary

Textual analysis, by punctuation, word, phrase, line, paragraph, and by total effect, with the eye undeviatingly upon the object, but with reference to collateral and comparative data, has become the standard method with many important American critics. A rigorous exclusion of generalization and a minimizing of tangential observations, characterize the return to a view of critical method which Poe would have applauded.

— George Snell, 1945

BY THE 1920S, literary scholars were trying to move away from the “character issue” that had been central to commentary on Poe up to that time. As we have seen, psychoanalytic critics of this period would announce that they had come not to judge Poe's character but to explain it, and yet they fueled readers' lurid interest in Poe's substance abuse and sex life (or lack thereof). Other academic critics, particularly those associated with the New Criticism, sought to shelve biographical and historical concerns and focus on The Text. But as William Elton pointed out in 1948, “The Revolution of the Text was accomplished by men of no single creed; strictly speaking, there was no ‘New Criticism,’ as its enemies supposed, but several new criticisms mingled with several old ones” (4), a point that is particularly important to keep in mind when surveying their responses to Poe. Not only did the rubric of New Criticism cover a range of beliefs about literature's function, but its interpretive methods spilled over into what textbooks typically label mythological and archetypal approaches, as well as readings focused more on ethical and philosophical traditions.