Volume 14, Number 4 · February 26, 1970
Anaesthetic Criticism: I
By Frederick C. Crews
This essay is meant to introduce a book whose other chapters, written by five Berkeley graduate students, are critical studies of Shakespeare, Dickens, Pater, Melville, and Joyce.[1] Unlike most literary criticism, these essays refer overtly to hypotheses and rules of procedure that were neither derived from literature nor primarily meant to apply to literature. Such criticism can go wrong in several ways: by using weak hypotheses, by using strong and pertinent ones in too mechanical a fashion, or by warping literary evidence to meet presuppositions. The recourse to 'extraliterary' theory is not in itself, however, a methodological error. The simple fact that literature is made and enjoyed by human minds guarantees its accessibility to study according to broad principles of psychic and social functioning.
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