"I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things"
About this Quote
Geertz is doing something sly: he’s praising a school of literary rigor while also letting you hear the faint, embarrassing music it was meant to silence. Trained in the 1950s as a New Critic, he positions himself inside a mid-century professionalization project: literature as an object you can handle with clean instruments. Close reading, irony, structure, internal tension - the poem as a self-contained machine. Against that, his punchline lands on “Shelley’s soul,” a deliberately quaint phrase that conjures the old lecture-hall habit of treating authors as saints and poems as windows into private essence.
The intent isn’t just to sneer at biographical gossip or Romantic mysticism. It’s to signal an epistemic shift: from talky moral uplift to disciplined analysis, from personality to form, from “what the author felt” to “what the text does.” That’s why the quote works: it compresses an institutional battle into one crisp memory of people literally “standing up” and performing reverence, as if criticism were a kind of séance.
The subtext, especially coming from an anthropologist often treated as a humanist-friendly scientist, is more complicated than New Criticism triumphalism. Geertz knows that method can become a badge of seriousness, a way to disqualify certain kinds of meaning as unserious. His little “and such things” is doing double duty: it mocks the mush, but it also hints at what gets lost when you purge the soulful vocabulary. In a field obsessed with interpretation, he’s reminding you that interpretive fashions don’t just change readings; they change what counts as legitimate talk.
The intent isn’t just to sneer at biographical gossip or Romantic mysticism. It’s to signal an epistemic shift: from talky moral uplift to disciplined analysis, from personality to form, from “what the author felt” to “what the text does.” That’s why the quote works: it compresses an institutional battle into one crisp memory of people literally “standing up” and performing reverence, as if criticism were a kind of séance.
The subtext, especially coming from an anthropologist often treated as a humanist-friendly scientist, is more complicated than New Criticism triumphalism. Geertz knows that method can become a badge of seriousness, a way to disqualify certain kinds of meaning as unserious. His little “and such things” is doing double duty: it mocks the mush, but it also hints at what gets lost when you purge the soulful vocabulary. In a field obsessed with interpretation, he’s reminding you that interpretive fashions don’t just change readings; they change what counts as legitimate talk.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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