《Magnifying the Mirror and the Lamp》.pdfVIP

Magnifying the Mirror and the Lamp: A Critical Reconsideration of the Abramsian Poetical Model and its Contribution to the Research on Modern Dutch Literature Aukje van Rooden, University of Utrecht1 Abstract Ever since its publication in 1953, M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Ro- mantic Theory and the Critical Tradition has been one of the most influential stud- ies in the field of literary criticism and theory. The development of Dutch lit- erary studies in particular would be hardly understandable without Abrams’s account of critical theory and more specifically without his classification of literary theories into four main classes – that of the mimetic, pragmatic, ex- pressive and objective theories. This article seeks to critically consider both Abrams’s theses and their influence on the research in the field of Dutch litera- ture. It will do so by investigating the presuppositions motivating Abrams’s classification. The hypothesis will be that both Abrams himself and his fol- lowers wrongly emphasized the analytic philosophical neutrality of this poeti- cal model and mistakenly applied this model to post-romantic literature. It will be argued that this application fails because the shift, around 1800, from mi- metic to expressive theories highlighted by Abrams is followed by a more re- markable shift from an Aristotelian view of literature – to which the four classes of theories belong – to what one might call a hermeneutic one. In a nutshell, it could be said that the shift from an Aristotelian to a hermeneutic view entailed a shift from ‘truth’ to ‘meaning’. The latter was already taking shape in romanticism but was only fully realized subsequently. It is this shift that complicates or maybe even disqualifies the poetical model for contempo- rary criticism. Keywords: M.H. Abrams, Literary Theory,