Text as Tabernacle

This thesis argues that the institutionalization of literary studies in post-War American universities began as a constructive theological response to a religious crisis centered in the southeastern United States. Starting with a brief sketch of the distinct academic, literary, and religious scenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essay explores the formation and propagation of the New Criticism through an attention to key figures' previously ignored religious motivations. Dissatisfied with the literary and religious scenes within the region, a close-knit group of Nashville aesthetes set about constructing an alternative to the narrow-minded historicism with which one was forced to study both sacred and secular texts. Following failed engagements of fundamentalism and politics, the leaders of John Crowe Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." created an academic field that transformed formalist aesthetics into a workable prosthesis for a Protestant hermeneutic rendered obsolete by the previous century's historicism. In this movement the religious and political concerns of Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Cleanth Brooks were not so much abandoned as transferred. By turns explicit and concealed, Ransom's claim that "art is the only true religion and no other is needed" comes to bear upon the institutional roles of literary criticism and university English departments, as well as the curious interplay of religion and aesthetics in American cultural history. Emerging from this study is a reflection on the ambiguous secularity of aesthetic criticism in the United States.