Chicago school (literary criticism)

The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts of plot, character and genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity and a strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago School is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.

Ronald Salmon Crane (1886–1967) is considered the founder of the Chicago Aristotelians. He began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1924, was made a professor in 1925, and chaired the English department there from 1935–1947. In 1935, he wrote “History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature” (published in English Journal 24 [1935]:645-67), in which he defined literary criticism as “simply the disciplined consideration, at once analytical and evaluative, of literary works as works of art.” Crane was greatly influenced by Richard McKeon, a professor of philosophy at the University, who stressed Aristotle’s idea of "pluralism," which says that many systems of criticism are necessary to completely understand literature, specifically poetry, or in the case of philosophy, the world. Crane said that “the only rational ground for adhering to one [form of criticism] rather than to any of the others is its superior capacity to give us the special kind of understanding and evaluation of literature we want to get, at least for the time being.”

The question for the Chicago School (as it was for Aristotle) was always what the purpose of the theory of criticism was, what hypotheses were brought to bear by the theory about the nature of literature (for instance, whether it consisted of the words alone, or whether it was to be thought of as part of a larger context such as an era or an artist's life), and the definitions of words (such as the definition of tragedy or comedy).

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