Understanding William Faulkner

By |2020-09-25T16:33:48-05:00September 24th, 2020|Categories: Books, Cleanth Brooks, Imagination, John Crowe Ransom, Literature, South|

In the forties and fifties, the most influential literary quarterlies in America featured “new criticism,” a brand of formalism that never succumbed to the absolute relativism of the deconstructionists. One of their foremost practitioners was Cleanth Brooks, who devoted himself to interpreting and popularizing the work of one of America’s greatest but most difficult novelists, [...]

Means and Ends: Education and Poetry in a Secular Age

By |2015-05-27T13:22:41-05:00March 26th, 2012|Categories: Cleanth Brooks, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning|Tags: |

The serious writer of today lives in a very much secularized world, a world of measurable objects, a world of space and time considerations, a world that must be studied not only rationally, but scientifically. Now, this situation did not suddenly come about in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has been developing since [...]

The Christianity of Modernism by Cleanth Brooks

By |2016-05-25T10:05:49-05:00February 2nd, 2012|Categories: Christianity, Cleanth Brooks, Culture|

Though he came out of the Southern Agrarian school, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) is now mostly remembered as the father of the literary “New Criticism.” Brooks studied at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford (at the latter, with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), and he spent the majority of his teaching career at Louisiana State and Yale. In [...]

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