Christopher Ricks - Principles Against Theory

Principles Against Theory

Ricks has distinguished himself as a vigorous upholder of traditional principles of reading based on practical criticism. He has opposed the theory-driven hermeneutics of the post-structuralist and postmodernist. This places him outside the post-New Critical literary theory, to which he prefers the Johnsonian principle.

In an important essay, he contrasts principles derived empirically from a close parsing of texts, a tradition whose great exemplar was Dr. Johnson, to the fashionable mode for philosophical critique that deconstructs the 'rhetorical' figures of a text and, in doing so, unwittingly disposes of the values and principles underlying the art of criticism itself. 'Literature', he argues, 'is, among other things, principled rhetoric'. The intellectualist bias of professional theorists cannot but make their strenuously philosophical readings of literary texts discontinuous with the subject matter.

Practical criticism is attuned to both the text and the reader's own sensibility, and thus engages in a nuanced dialogue between the complex discursive resonances of words in any literary work and the reader's correlative sentiments as they have been informed by a long experience of the self within both the world and literature. In this subtle negotiation between the value-thick sensibility of the reader and the intertextual resonances of a literary work lies the tactful attunement of all great criticism. This school of criticism must remain leery of critical practices that come to the text brandishing categorical, schematic assumptions, any panoply of tacitly assumed precepts external to the practical nature of literary creativity. Otherwise, the risk is one of a theoretical hybris, of a specious detachment that assumes a certain critical superiority to the text and its author. Those theory-saturated critics who engage with texts that, by their nature, are compact of social and political judgements (and much more), assert covertly a privileged innocence, an innocence denied to the text under scrutiny, whose rhetorical biases, and epistemological fault-lines are relentlessly subjected to ostensible 'exposure'.