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Essay on Importance Of The Social In Discussing Art
Criticism is the interpretation and evaluation of literature and the arts. It exists in a variety of literary forms. There are several categories of criticism: theoretical, practical, textual, judicial, biographical, and impressionistic.
However, as the American critic M. H. Abrams has pointed out in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), all criticism, no matter what its form, type, or provenance, emphasizes one of four relationships: the mimetic, the work's connection to reality; the pragmatic, its effect on the audience; the expressive, its connection to the author; and the objective, the work as an independent, self-sufficient creation. (Howarth 26)
M. H. Abrams has famously remarked that Coleridge's writings are a veritable "jungle" of organicism; the plant is everywhere the ideal metaphor for the idea of aesthetic form (The Mirror and the Lamp 169). Like the lamp or the wind-harp that M.H. Abrams discusses as analogues of the poetic mind in The Mirror and the Lamp, the bell as metaphor for poetic imagination figures the reciprocation of internal and external.
Indeed, the bell, with its clapper surrounded by a resonant dome, gives shape to the relation of inside to outside, of the intimate with the cosmic. According to him in poetry, the bell represents poetic voice as resonant, confident and unified, even in its multiplicity. As an echo of God's voice, the poet's voice is assured of its central place in the universe and the poem-as-bell remains the sign of such certainty.
The four-fold taxonomy that Meyer Abrams had developed in his
The Mirror and the Lamp, classifies literary theory as:
- mimetic theory (assuming art to be an imitation of nature)
- pragmatic theory (focusing on the practical value of a work of art--or what a work of art should do for the reader)
- expressive theory (viewing art as the product of some inner wonderful creative process)....
