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Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

English literature --- Criticism. --- History and criticism. --- Criticism --- Evaluation of literature --- Literary criticism --- Literature --- Rhetoric --- Aesthetics --- Technique --- Evaluation --- Literary theory

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Originally published in 1994. In The Institution of Theory, Murray Krieger 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. To support his view of the issues at stake in current theoretical debates, Krieger surveys both the history of American criticism and the general history of literary 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?

Literaturtheorie. --- Literaturkritik. --- Literaturtheorie --- Literaturkritik --- Literatuurwetenschap. --- Criticism. --- Literature --- Criticism --- Evaluation of literature --- Literary criticism --- Rhetoric --- Aesthetics --- Technique --- Evaluation

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Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero."

Tragik --- Literatur --- Tragic, The. --- Fiction. --- Fiction --- History and criticism. --- Geschichte 1850-1950. --- Metafiction --- Novellas (Short novels) --- Novels --- Stories --- Literature --- Novelists --- Philosophy --- Literary theory

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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. He argues 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." "What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words. . We may see it as the poem's miracle, and that seeing is our mirage. This peculiar--and paradoxical--jointly produced experience of ekphrasis allows it to function as the consummate example of the verbal art, the ultimate shield beyond shields."

Ekphrasis. --- Ekfrasis. --- Ekphrasis --- Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics) --- Poetry. --- Ut pictura poesis [Aesthetics]. --- Poetry --- History and criticism. --- Criticism --- Aesthetics --- Art and literature --- Humanism in art --- Poems --- Verses (Poetry) --- Literature --- Ecphrasis --- Art in literature --- Description (Rhetoric) --- Philosophy