When we speak of “literary criticism” today, two approaches usually come to mind. Each is embodied in a distinct type. The first is the “sensitive” critic, who writes primarily about his or her own emotional responses to literary works. In this view, criticism is not a rigorously intellectual activity, comparable to a science, but a form of literary creation in its own right. This approach is commonly known as “impressionistic criticism”. One of its most influential formulations – focused on the reader’s subjective aesthetic response rather than on the objective structure of the work – appears in this well-known passage by the nineteenth-century French critic Jules Lemaître on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:
The last sixty pages of Madame Bovary are so strangely painful that I scarcely dare to reread them. Do you not feel that Flaubert loves the poor Emma? Vicious and foolish, yet so naïve at heart, so unhappy! Oh, the returns in the carriage! Oh, the bawdy song of the blind man that drowns out the prayers of the dead!1
The second approach, apparently opposed to the first, seeks to develop a “theory” of the literary object in the modern sense. It aims to define literature as an autonomous domain of knowledge, governed by its own concepts and methods, and to analyze literary works through the systematic application of those concepts. The founders of this approach were the Russian theorists of literature. Although they are traditionally known as “Formalists,” it may be more accurate to describe them as “materialists,” insofar as they treat the literary work primarily as a linguistic phenomenon, defined by the material properties of language. The most influential heir to this tradition is Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin offers a systematic account of the intelligible properties of novelistic form. Because of its scientific ambitions, this approach acquired considerable prestige in literary departments in Europe and North America, before being disseminated more broadly through academic institutions.
Despite their apparent opposition, these two approaches can be understood as products of a single historical process. This process is better described through historical narrative than through a strictly theoretical concept, and its origins can plausibly be traced to the European Renaissance. To understand why Renaissance thought proved historically transformative, it is first necessary to grasp the intellectual framework against which it arose.
Medieval Scholastic philosophy had developed a view of reason as a unified and hierarchical faculty. Within this framework, knowledge formed an ordered whole. In the Proemium to his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Thomas Aquinas compares discursive reason to a living organism, whose various operations unfold according to their proper acts. Poetry, although less certain than demonstrative knowledge, nonetheless remained an undisputed mode of rational cognition. Aquinas writes:
At other times a mere fancy inclines one to one side of a contradiction because of some representation, much as a man turns in disgust from certain food if it is described to him in terms of something disgusting. And to this is ordained the Poetics. For the poet’s task is to lead us to something virtuous by some excellent description. And all these pertain to the philosophy of reason, for it belongs to reason to pass from one thing to another. (Expositio Posteriorum, Proemium)2.
This conception rested not only on a unified account of reason, but also on a unified account of the human being. During the Renaissance, this unity began to fracture. A decisive moment in this process was the series of scientific revolutions associated with figures such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. To deny that the sun revolves around the earth, to argue that planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular, or to demonstrate that the speed of a falling body is not proportional to its weight were not merely technical corrections to earlier cosmological models. They also suggested that the structure of the external world does not mirror the structure of human experience.
This growing gap between objective knowledge and subjective experience was later formalized by Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities – such as number, extension, and motion – belong to objects themselves. Secondary qualities – such as color, taste, and smell – exist only in perception. René Descartes transformed this epistemological distinction into an ontological one by dividing reality into thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa). rom this point onward, the unity of knowledge gave way to a fragmented conception of human existence. On the one hand, there emerged a subject increasingly detached from the world. On the other, a world emptied of interiority. This division lies at the heart of modern experience, as Pascal famously expressed when he wrote: « Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie ».
From this tension arose two major cultural responses. Enlightenment thought placed its confidence in scientific reason as the engine of historical progress. Romanticism, by contrast, reacted against this view by affirming the expressive and prophetic role of the poet in a world perceived as spiritually impoverished. The opposition between subject and object, inner experience and external reality, thus became a defining dynamic of modern culture.
The opposition between impressionistic criticism and “scientific” literary theory can be understood as a particular manifestation of this broader division. Impressionistic criticism privileges subjective response without claiming access to an objective structure, while theory seeks impersonal objectivity, often at the expense of lived experience. Rather than accepting this opposition as inevitable, it is possible to look for an alternative model. Such a model can be found in the classical tradition of philosophy, particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas, which aimed at a hierarchical integration of the sciences as a reflection of the integrated structure of the human person. In the domain of literature, this alternative is articulated most clearly in Aristotle’s Poetics. Although largely unknown in the Western Middle Ages and rediscovered only during Early modernity, the Poetics offers a conception of literature that resists modern dichotomies.
To grasp this conception, it is essential to recognize that Aristotle regarded the Poetics3 as part of his philosophical system. First, it presupposes a philosophy of language, an account of how language functions and how different modes of signification operate. Aristotle’s remarks on the modes of mimesis4 are so fundamental that their influence can still be traced in modern theories of language, including that of Karl Bühler5. Second, the Poetics presupposes an aesthetics. Aristotle’s reflections on beauty, magnitude, and proportion6 helped shape the classical understanding of beauty as order and harmony within sensible experience. Third, it presupposes a philosophical anthropology, including a structured account of the emotions. Human beings are the subjects of aesthetic experience, and in literary art Aristotle treats emotional purification7 as an essential feature of the aesthetic process. Finally, it presupposes a theory of art as a rational form of human making, a technē that employs specific means to achieve specific ends8.
Taken together, these four elements – a philosophy of language, an aesthetics, a philosophical anthropology of the emotions, and a rational theory of artistic creation- provide a foundation for an approach to literary criticism that integrates interiority with objectivity. On this basis, it becomes possible to incorporate many of the methods developed in twentieth-century literary studies – most notably those found in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) – without inheriting all of their underlying theoretical assumptions9.
I am convinced that genuine intellectual work reveals itself in efforts at integration. A literary criticism grounded in a classical conception of philosophy as an ordered hierarchy of knowledge allows for the evaluation of literary works according to their aesthetic value, while avoiding the modern opposition between subjective impressionism and impersonal objectivism. In this sense, literary criticism can become a privileged site where the unity of the sensible and the intelligible, the particular and the universal, and the ethical and the aesthetic once again becomes visible.
1 “Les soixante dernières pages de Madame Bovary sont si étrangement douloureuses que j’ose à peine les relire. Est-ce que vous ne sentez pas que Flaubert aime la pauvre Emma? Vicieuse et sotte, mais si naïve au fond, et si malheureuse! Oh! les retours dans la diligence! Oh! la chanson grivoise de l’aveugle qui couvre les prières des morts!”. Jules Lemaître, Les Contemporains, 5ème Série (1884).. (Author’s free translation).
2 Translated by Fabian R. Larcher, O.P.
3 All further quotations from Aristotle are from S. H. Butcher’s translation and edition.
4 “There is still a third difference – the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.” (Poetics, 1448a19–24).
5 BÜHLER, Karl. Theory of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990.
6 “Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long. As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory.” (Poetics, 1450b34 – 1451a15)
7 “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” (Poetics, 1449b24–28).
8 “For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of colour and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony,’ either singly or combined.” (Poetics, 1447a13–16).
9 While I. A. Richards’s methodological contributions to literary criticism are formidable, his theoretical assumptions, materialistic and utilitarian in character, rest on principles drawn from what was once called the “Mental and Moral Sciences,” a domain of knowledge now largely outdated. Cf. Terry Eagleton, Critical Revolutionaries (2024), ch. 2.