Toward a History of Critical Reading
Toward a History of Critical Reading

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes the plan of an alternative history of literary criticism, which should be able to avoid both the mere succession of theories and methods in the traditional historiography and the simple registration of the succession of representations of the works and authors, considered by the ‘aesthetics of reception’. For this purpose, we advance the hypothesis that, between the ‘pure’ theory and the ‘applied’ commentary, there is an intermediate level, the level of the categories that govern the interpretation and the valuation of works during a certain period. Our hypothesis is then checked by the analysis of the readings dedicated to the Romanian writers Ion Creangă, Mihail Sadoveanu and George Bacovia, whose reception was carried out, throughout the 20th century, along the ‘natural’ – ‘artistic’ (‘artificial’) – ‘bookish’ (‘livresque’) axis. The conclusion of this paper is that such a history of critical reading provides us with the opportunity of considering in a unified manner the literary paradigm shifts and, thus, to reintegrate better the history of literary criticism in the history of literature as a whole.

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