Page 233 - WhyAsInY

toWarD a unifieD fielD tHeory
looking at language, the world, and the way in which we experience it, philosophy was unlike anything that I had studied directly. Although the philosophies of Hume and Wittgenstein had undoubtedly heavily influenced the core courses of the freshman curriculum, I had had no direct experience with empiricism or logical positivism per se, and I wished to know more about a field so powerfully connected to language and the world.
I had performed well in my first philosophy course, and, in retro- spect, I might have been better off pursuing that field, but, as I said, Professor Cole turned my head. (In fact, before I graduated, I would take at least four other courses offered by the Philosophy Department.) In subsequent conversations, Professor Cole convinced me that I had the talent to do well in a department that, in Amherst, was a prized and very difficult one in which to succeed. The department was heavily influenced by, and a major contributor to, the “New Criticism,” which emphasized close reading to discover how a text worked as a self-con- tained aesthetic object. The focus was solely on the structure and the meaning of the language, which were intimately connected. The practi- tioners of the New Criticism, which was the philosophy that was at the heart of English 1–2, disparaged historical analysis and the search for the author’s intentions. (A question such as “How do you think Eliza- beth and Mr. Darcy fared after they married at the end of Pride and Prejudice?” which was asked of the class by the teacher in a course that I took a few years after I retired, would never had been asked at Amherst.) The most extreme example of the New Criticism was set by Professor Theodore Baird, the father of English 1–2, who refused to allow anyone to use such words as plot, character, motive, etc., when he taught Shake- speare, which he would speak of only as poetry.
I had loved English 1–2 and felt that the way of thinking that drove it, one that I was comfortable with, would also drive the courses that would lie ahead. Cole felt that I had demonstrated that I had grasped and incorporated the New Criticism’s perspective and had the talent for becoming a successful English major. Thus, I elected to follow his
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