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Philosophy of Science and Theory of Literary Criticism: Some Common Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Walter Creed
Walter Creed*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Extract

Almost since the theories of Einstein and the quantum physicists came into being, a small but significant number of novelists, poets, and playwrights have turned to them for everything from casual metaphors to justification for the philosophies underlying their works. Until fairly recently, however, literary critics have tended to avoid the new physics, finding it uncongenial if not irrelevant. But over the last twenty-five years an increasing number of them, especially critical theorists, have turned to physics and even philosophy of science in the belief that these disciplines offer epistemological and methodological models applicable, to the problems of literary criticism.

The primary reason for this increased interest in philosophy of science is the rise of critical formalisms, particularly structuralism and its variants. Structuralism usually regards Russian formalism as its most significant precursor, but Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) must also be seen as an important forerunner, since it provided formal criticism with a rationale.

Type
Part V. Literature and the Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 130 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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