Background
Krieger, Murray was born on November 27, 1923 in Newark. Son of Isidore and Jennie (Glinn) Krieger.
( The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 19...)
The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The author's purpose is to clear the ground for a systematic aesthetics of poetry consistent with the insights of our most influential contemporary literary critics. The book is concerned with those of the so-called "new critics" who are trying to answer the need, forced on them by historical and cultural pressures, to justify poetry by securing for it a unique function for which modern "scientism" cannot find a substitute. This volume provides intensive analyses of work by critics of several persuasions: T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, and, for purposes of contrast, D. G. James, R. S. Crane, Elder Olson, and Max Eastman. Allen Tate, the poet and critic, writes: "Mr. Krieger's book is the most searching in scholarship and the most profound in critical analysis of the existing books in this field." Robert B. Heilman, critic and teacher, comments: "The author's knowledge of a complex field and his mastery of the analytical techniques which he is applying to a chosen set of critical positions are very impressive. He not only clarifies the positions of various contemporary critics by examining them in the light of the same set of general principles, but also provides some helpful, at times brilliant, insights into the works of various critics from the Greeks up to the present. He traces the history of concepts and thus establishes relationships among individual critics and critical schools."
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("Professor Krieger's ...thesis is an original one, and th...)
"Professor Krieger's ...thesis is an original one, and the means by which he supports it demonstrates a thorough familiarity not only with literary technique and method but also with philosophic and aesthetic rationale".-"Christian Century".
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(Krieger's classic study strips the cloak of empirical ser...)
Krieger's classic study strips the cloak of empirical seriousness from the practice of literary criticism, emphasizing the critic's (and readers') engagement with the texts at hand.
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( "Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphras...)
"Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphrasis, or the literary depiction of visual art, Krieger has been wrestling with the larger implications of the genre for a theory of how it manifests itself. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, he forcefully grapples with the ancient paradox that words in time can seem to create images in space....This work of abundant intelligence patiently unfolds the many puzzles and contradictions of ekphrasis, from the shield of Achilles to post-modernism."--Virginia Quarterly Review. What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words--can words--represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? After decades of reading and thinking about the nature and function of literary representation, Murray Krieger here develops his most systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the 2,000-year tradition they claim to culminate. Krieger focuses on ekphrasis--the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary--a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. Heargues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."
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( In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the trag...)
In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the tragic vision as the confrontation with extremity―the writer's commitment to a master metaphor even as he acknowledges the incompleteness of that metaphor. The term "classic" is used here to indicate "the sense of restraint, of acceptance, of coming to terms with limitations self-imposed―as well as the awareness of the alternative one rejects in turning away from self-indulgence." The writer is thus viewed as one who accepts the common use of language while he endeavors to defy it through metaphor, one who accepts classically the common lot of man whereas his tragic impulse would lead him to reject it. Professor Krieger begins with the Renaissance lyric, which for him represents both the last moment of union and the first moment of collision between the classic and tragic visions in literature. He then moves through poems, novels, and a play, ranging in time from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and delineates four kinds of retreat from extremity. In the works of Pope and Samuel Johnson he finds retreat through the worship of bloodless abstractions. The second form of retreat is the embrace of the natural human community, and the focus is on Wordsworth, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Anthony Trollope. Through analyses of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and works by Swift, Professor Krieger demonstrates retreat through acceptance of the "human barnyard." The final form of retreat, through an alternative to sainthood, is shown in Faulkner's Light in August and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. In each case, Professor Krieger finds, by analyzing the pervading metaphor one is confronted with a counter-metaphor that mysteriously asserts itself: "The metaphors may have been unmetaphored, but they remain forms of imagination that constitute a reality, though it is now seen as imperfect. As such forms, the metaphors sustain us still. And that is perhaps the most classic notion of all."
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( During at least the past decade, violent controversy in...)
During at least the past decade, violent controversy in what has become known as the "human sciences" has been generated, as perhaps never before, by the increasingly aggressive role played by theory. Murray Krieger was one of those largely instrumental in moving theory into that role. In The Institution of Theory, he examines, at once sympathetically and critically, the process by which theory has become institutionalized in the American academy and the consequences of theory as an academic institution. He traces the transformation of literary theory into critical theory and relates it to changes in the place of literature within questions about discourse at large. And he faces the costs as well as the gains of the recent denial of privilege to the literary. What, he asks, is the future of the languages of the humanities now that criticism, no longer just one of several literary activities, makes its all-encompassing claims as an imperializing institution? To support his view of the issues at stake in current theoreticaldebate, Krieger surveys both the history of American criticism and the general history of theory in the West. He sees divisions in each of them that foreshadow the current debates: in the first a conflict between the social and the aesthetic functions of literature, and in the second a conflict between the treatment of literature as a reflection of a culture's ideology and the treatment of literature as a subversion of that ideology. To what extent, he asks, are our debates new and to what extent are they merely refashioned versions of those we have always had with us? Recent years have seen an ugly polarization of almost all discourse concerning the humanities, as even moderate statements have been charged with being representative of one extreme or the other. Despite this risk, Krieger has added his own moderate voice, in hopes of attracting a balanced response that would encourage the expansion of the range of texts for study, together with an expansion into the political of our ways of studying them, while still recognizing and responding to the special powers of the literary to open our culture to such expansions.
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educator writer English language educator
Krieger, Murray was born on November 27, 1923 in Newark. Son of Isidore and Jennie (Glinn) Krieger.
Student, Rutgers University, 1942; Master of Arts, University Chicago, 1948; Doctor of Philosophy (University fellow), Ohio State University, 1952.
Instructor English Kenyon College, 1948-1949, Ohio State University, 1951-1952. Assistant professor, then associate professor University Minnesota, 1952-1958. Professor English University Illinois, 1958-1963.
M.F. Carpenter professor literature criticism University Iowa, 1963-1966. Professor English, director program in criticism University California at Irvine, 1966-1985. Professor English University of California at Los Angeles, 1973-1982.
University professor University California, 1974-1994. University research professor, from 1994. Co-director School Criticism and Theory University California, 1975-1977, director, 1977-1981, honorary senior fellow, from 1981.
Associate member Center Advanced Study, University Illinois, 1961-1962. Director University California Humanities Research Institute, 1987-1989. Member advisory board International School Theory in Humanities, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, since 1997.
( "Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphras...)
( In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the trag...)
( During at least the past decade, violent controversy in...)
(Krieger's classic study strips the cloak of empirical ser...)
( The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 19...)
(Book by Krieger, Professor Murray)
("Professor Krieger's ...thesis is an original one, and th...)
Author: The New Apologists for Poetry, 1956, The Tragic Vision, 1960, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics, 1964, The Play and Place of Criticism, 1967, The Classic Vision, 1971, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System, 1976, Poetic Presence and Illusion, 1979, Arts on the Level, 1981, Words About Words About Words: Theory, Criticism and the Literary Text, 1988, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself, 1989, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, 1992, The Ideological Imperative: Repression and Resistance in Recent American Theory, 1993, The Institution of Theory, 1994. Editor: (with Eliseo Vivas) The Problems of Aesthetics, 1953, Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 1966, (with Library Science Dembo) Directions for Criticism: Structuralism and its Alternatives, 1977, The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, 1987.
Served with Army of the United States, 1942-1946. Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences (council and executive committee 1987-1988), member Modern Language Association, International Association University Professors English, Academy Literature Studies.
Married Joan Alice Stone, June 15, 1947. Children: Catherine Leona, Eliot Franklin.