Murray Krieger

Murray Krieger (November 27, 1923 - August 5, 2000) was an American literary critic and theorist. He was a professor at the University of Iowa from 1963, and then the University of California, Irvine.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He studied at the University of Chicago, and Ohio State University as a doctoral student.

Biography

Murray Krieger was born on November 27, 1923, in Newark, N.J. He attended public schools there and enrolled in Rutgers University in 1940. He left Rutgers in 1942 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and he served two years in India before his discharge in 1946. Fifty years later, he still recalled with horror witnessing the Bengal famine of 1943-44, and he claimed that the experience inspired in him an interest in the political dimension of art and literature that led him to graduate school at the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, however, Krieger developed an interest in the formal properties of literary language that turned his attention from the political use of art to the analysis of linguistic tropes and the nature of aesthetic illusion. That in turn led him to the study of literary theory that would preoccupy him for the next fifty years.

After obtaining his M.A. from Chicago in 1948, Krieger pursued his graduate work at Ohio State University, where he received the Ph.D. in 1952. Four years later, he published The New Apologists for Poetry, a theoretical study of the American New Critics. The New Critics had transformed the study of literature in the U.S. in the 1940s and early '50s by rejecting historical and biographical scholarship in favor of close textual analysis of literary forms. This shift in focus mirrored the change in Krieger's own thinking while at Chicago, but his study of the New Critics introduced a degree of philosophical sophistication and theoretical self-consciousness to formalist criticism that was rare among literary critics in the U.S. This interest in the methods and assumptions underlying the way we read was developed further in Krieger's first book-length study of literature, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (1960).

Krieger's first two books helped create literary theory and criticism as an academic discipline in the U.S., and he was instrumental in establishing that field within the English departments of several universities. Before coming to Irvine, he taught at the University of Minnesota (1952-58), the University of Illinois (1958-63), and then at the University of Iowa, where he was the M.F. Carpenter Professor of Literary Criticism (1963-66). Krieger's appointment at Iowa marked the first time a literary department in the U.S. had defined a position in terms of a theoretical approach to criticism, rather than according to the usual biographical or historical categories, and that shift in the institutional definition of literary study quickly became a defining characteristic of the new department at Irvine after Krieger arrived.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Krieger published five more major books, including two works that systematized his theoretical claims and measured them against competing theories that had emerged during those decades: Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (1976), and Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory (1979). In the 1970s, literary study in the U.S. had been heavily influenced by French poststructuralism, which claimed that many of the most fundamental beliefs and values of Western humanism were nothing more than idealist fantasies sustained by the symbolic forms or structures in which those beliefs were expressed. Hence, the movement was often praised—or condemned—as “anti-humanism.” What its proponents advocated as philosophical rigor was denounced by its opponents as pointless nihilism, and battle-lines were drawn in many literary departments between the continental theorists and the Anglo-American humanism with which Krieger was associated.

One of the beliefs attacked as an idealist illusion by the poststructuralists was the very notion that any form or structure can ever attain the closure or immediate presence that had been celebrated as the defining attribute of literary texts by the American New Critics. This attack actually resembled Krieger's own critique of the metaphysical assumptions behind much of the New Criticism, but the poststructuralists went on to argue that because all truth-claims are essentially metaphorical, literature does not differ in any significant way from other discursive systems. Krieger, however, insisted that literature is different from other kinds of discourse because it never claims its fictional forms are anything other than illusions. Krieger argued that literary illusion, as illusion, offers society a critical perspective on the ideological systems by which beliefs are nourished and enforced as “true,” and he included among those systems any theoretical method that discounts the special status of literary forms. Consequently, in an ironic reversal of the revolution he had helped bring about, Krieger spent the last two decades of his career arguing for the importance of literature to the study of theory, rather than vice versa.

While Krieger was waging war in print against the theoretical challenge to the primacy of literature, he was also actively working to make sure a wider range of students and scholars could learn first-hand from combatants on both sides of that debate. In 1976, the School of Criticism and Theory began at UCI under Krieger's direction with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The product of extensive collaborations among leading theorists in France, Germany, and the U.S., the SCT offered a series of seminars in the summer that were open to Ph.D.s and advanced graduate students. The faculty was as eclectic as it was distinguished, drawing as heavily from European poststructuralists as it did from other theoretical movements and perspectives, and the spirit of vigorous debate and intense intellectual engagement that marked Krieger's written work infused all of the classes. The SCT quickly became an international forum that brought many of the best teachers and students of theory to Irvine every year, and that tradition continues at Cornell, where the SCT is now housed.

Shortly before the SCT began, Krieger had been named University Professor (1974), and until 1982 he held a joint-appointment at UCI and UCLA. His service to the whole University at that time was exemplified most dramatically in his leadership of the University of California Humanities Initiative, a funding program sponsored by the UC Office of the President. The Humanities Initiative led to the formation of a systemwide UC Humanities Research Institute, which was located on the Irvine campus in 1987 with Krieger as the founding Director. From 1994-2000, Krieger worked with Wolfgang Iser as the principal investigators for the International Conference in Humanistic Discourses, a five-year project sponsored by UCI and the Humboldt Foundation that convened an international group of scholars to reflect on the future of the humanities. During these same years, Krieger also continued to teach and to publish prolifically, including several books of essays and an expansive history of literary theory that had its origins in his early essays of the 1960s: Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992).

In the course of his long career, Krieger was the subject of two collections of essays and innumerable articles, and his books have been translated into Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, German, Japanese, and Chinese. He received major grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, the ACLS. He held visiting professorships at several universities in the U.S. and Germany. And he received a long list of awards and honors, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983), the Humboldt Prize from the Republic of Germany (1985), the UCI Medal (1990), and the Daniel G. Aldrich Award for Distinguished University Service (1993). Following his retirement in 1994, he was appointed University Research Professor, and in that capacity he continued to write, teach, and lecture around the world until his death six years later. His papers have been donated to the Critical Theory Archive, a fitting home for them considering how effective he had been in getting other eminent theorists to donate their own work to that collection. When Murray Krieger died in 2000, he was survived by his family—his wife Joan Krieger (who died in 2002), their children Catherine and Eliot, and their grandchildren Adam and Seth.

Works

• The New Apologists for Poetry (1956)
• The Tragic Vision (1960).
• The Problems of Aesthetics: A Book of Readings (1963) with Eliseo Vivas
• A Window to Criticism (1964)
• Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (1966) editor
• Play and Place of Criticism (1967)
• The Classic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity in Modern Literature (1971)
• Literature and History (1974) with Ralph Cohen
• Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (1976)
• Directions for Criticism: Structuralism & its Alternatives (1977) editor with L. S. Dembo
• Poetic Presence & Illusion: Essays in Critical History & Theory (1979)
• Arts on the Level (1981)
• Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism & the Literary Text (1988)
• A Reopening of Closure (1989)
• Ekphrasis (1992)
• Aims of Representation: Subject, Text, History (1993) editor
• The Institution of Theory (1994)

References

• Murray Krieger and Contemporary Critical Theory (1986) edited by Bruce Henricksen

Persondata
Name	Krieger, Murray
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Date of birth	November 27, 1923
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Date of death	August 5, 2000
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